Events marking publication of James Robertson's Lockerbie novel

The following events have been scheduled to mark the publication in June of James Robertson’s new novel The Professor of Truth:

Boswell Book Festival, Auchinleck: James Robertson in conversation with Tam Dalyell, Sunday 19 May. Link here for more info: http://www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk/index.php/programme/sunday-19-may/item/james-robertson

Hay on Wye: James Robertson, Jim Swire and Philippe Sands, 10am Friday 31 May. Link here for more info: http://www.hayfestival.com/p-6071-jim-swire-and-james-robertson-talk-to-philippe-sands.aspx

London Literature Festival: James Robertson, Jim Swire and Alan Little, 1pm Saturday 1 June. Link here: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/james-robertson-73931

Edinburgh: James Robertson book launch 7pm Thursday 6 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

Kirkcaldy: James Robertson event Saturday 8 June. Link here: http://www.fifedirect.org.uk/whatson/index.cfm?fuseaction=whatson.display&themeid=&id=659C55FD-BFFC-4A34-0A5FE68605CB982E

Dundee: James Robertson event Tuesday 11 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

Biggar: James Robertson event Thursday 13 June. Link here: http://www.atkinson-pryce.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=28494

Ayr: James Robertson event Wednesday 19 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

A review of the novel in The List by Kevin Scott can be read here.  Further reviews can be read here and here.]

Lockerbie is still unfinished business

[A long and perceptive review by Malcolm Forbes of James Robertson’s latest novel has just been published on the website of the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National.  The following are excerpts:]

"Scotland's a wee place," says one of James Robertson's characters in his 2010 magnum opus, And the Land Lay Still. Be that as it may, for each of his four novels Robertson has mined his native land and extracted enough rich and vital ore to do big things. As with Walter Scott, the subject of his doctoral study, Robertson is in many ways a historical writer. The Fanatic (2000) spliced modern-day Edinburgh with tales of 17th-century skulduggery including witchcraft and assassinations. Joseph Knight (2003) chronicled the search for a former slave in 19th-century Scotland. When Robertson doesn't plunge into the past, he allows it to encroach upon the present: from the wondrous, James Hogg-flavoured gothic fable, The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), the personal account of a "mad minister who met with the devil and lived to tell the tale", to the epic panoramic vision of modern Scotland on show in And the Land Lay Still.

Now, after a three-year hiatus, comes a fifth novel, The Professor of Truth. As it is set in the present but taps into the past - at times feeds hungrily from it - it clearly belongs to that second group of novels. (...)

The Professor of Truth is a scintillating read - part political thriller, part meditation on grief, truth and the internal struggle to speak out, be heard and right wrongs. (...)

The book is energised by tension, charged by Robertson's treatment of a man going it alone, out of his depth, prepared to risk all to obtain a final, critical reckoning. The drama unfolds through Tealing's intense and intimate first-person narration, which pulls the reader further in and places us firmly on Tealing's side. We sympathise with his plight and cheer his defiance. Like the faithless Gideon Mack, he is unable to find succour in God. He has been dismissed as an obstinate fool, a crank in thrall to conspiracy theories, rooting around for a smoking gun and an unpunished murderer, neither of which exists. His wife's parents sever the connection with him when he visits Khalil Khazar in prison, a man Tealing believes innocent of their daughter's murder. His sister urges him to move on. A lawyer mocks his idealism and thinks his perception of truth is naive: "It is not pure and separate. It is dirty and decayed and has frayed edges, and holes and tears in it. The last thing the truth does is gleam." Only his new partner, Carol, spurs him on.

Much is made of Tealing's grief. In a less skilled writer's hands we would be plodding through maudlin passages on the heels of a moping protagonist. But Robertson is too good for that, and eschews woe-is-me navel-gazing for heartfelt soul-searching and has his hero retrace his steps in pertinent, life-changing events rather than aimlessly wander down Memory Lane. Tealing's recollections of the crash and his day spent looking for wreckage are superbly managed, swinging powerfully, though unsettlingly, between unsparing recorded detail and creative reconstruction. (...)

Robertson excels as much with what he says as what he withholds. The Professor of Truth, like Robertson's previous novels, delves into Scotland's past, and this time round his source is the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. However, Lockerbie is never mentioned. The bomb begins its journey from an unnamed island in the Mediterranean. Khalil Khazar and another suspect come from an undisclosed "hostile regime", a "rogue state". Even Tealing's university town is anonymous, given only as a place in Scotland that "positively groans under the accumulation of history". A dead body that may or may not be Nilsen is found in the snow. Al Megrahi becomes Khazar; the rest - Lockerbie and Libya, Qaddafi and Pan Am Flight 103 - all go unsaid and perhaps rightly so. Robertson has gone on record as saying that the true story of Lockerbie "is still unfinished business, and for some it always will be". His novel reflects and articulates this reality and, although it exhibits clear parallels, it offers no neat conclusions. Ambiguity reigns. Smoke and mirrors prevail at every turn to conceal that hard-sought-for truth.

Not every literary author is capable of changing gear and successfully pulling off a thriller, not least one that is thought-provoking instead of action-packed. Most end up like John Updike's belly-flop, Terrorist: tendentious efforts that preach, generalise, rationalise and aim to resolve. Robertson does the opposite and beguiles us with broken lives and loose ends. Rather than answer, his novel asks: What, if any, are the limits to the grieving process? How, if at all, do we achieve closure? Is truth everything? And how much of what we do is chance and how much choice?

In Julian Barnes' 2005 novel, Arthur & George, Arthur Conan Doyle is described by his sister, Connie, as "Scottish practicality streaked with sudden fire". The same can be said of James Robertson's incendiary fiction.

He may well have peaked with And the Land Lay Still, but that doesn't mean he can't continue to produce searing, sinuous, first-rate novels like The Professor of Truth. 

[Another serious and thought-provoking review is to be found here on the Scots Whay Hey! blog.]

Fact or fiction?: James Robertson and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a review in today’s edition of the Scottish Review by Andrew Hook, Bradley Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow from 1979 to 1998.  It reads in part:]

James Robertson's bold and extraordinary new novel – The Professor of Truth – has already sparked controversy. Hardly surprising given that its prime subject matter involves the most controversial episode in the modern history of Scottish justice: the conviction and imprisonment of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as the terrorist responsible for the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December, 1988.

Robertson sticks closely to the circumstances and characters involved in the Lockerbie tragedy and its aftermath, but what he has written remains a novel, a work of fiction. The book's central character is closely based on that of Jim Swire, the English doctor who lost his daughter on Flight 103, but who has subsequently become celebrated for his public and outspoken rejection of the validity of the trial and conviction of Megrahi. Dr Swire here becomes Alan Tealing, a lecturer – significantly not a professor – in the Stirling University department of English literature. He has lost his wife as well as his daughter in the disaster. Likewise Megrahi has become Khalil Khazar.

In the first section of the novel, entitled 'Ice', the setting remains a wintry Scotland, and Robertson creates a full and moving imaginative account of Tealing's response to the loss of his family and the existential freezing of his life and experience that follows. But in the book's second and final section – called 'Fire' – the scene shifts to a wholly imaginary experience of Australia where Tealing tracks down a Maltese character called Parroulet, clearly based on the real-life Maltese clothes shop owner, Tony Gauci, whose evidence was crucial in the trial and conviction of Megrahi.

Given this context, the novel inevitably raises a series of familiar quasi-philosophical questions: about the relationship between life as it is lived and how it is depicted in a work of art, about fiction and reality – not to mention others about how far the ideals of truth and justice actually operate in the practice of the law, and the validity of realistic or idealistic visions of human experience. So much so that one reviewer has referred to the Scottish section of the novel as a 'tutorial' on such issues. Perhaps there is a potential problem here for the novelist, but to my mind at least, the particulars of Alan Tealing's predicament, which we never lose sight of, prevent any descent into mere abstraction. Issues surrounding the meaning of truth and justice have come to define Tealing's life.

Another reviewer – Alexander Linklater in The Observer – raises a more central issue. He argues that the book is at its best when it is most fictional: it 'feels most real at the points where it is clearly fictional'. I agree. Again and again James Robertson’s creative imagination provides the tiny, telling detail which confirms the human reality of what is being described. Over the years, Tealing's relations with his wife's family in America slowly deteriorate. They cannot understand his rejection of the court's verdict. Their phone calls become infrequent; they have less and less to say to each other. 'When we spoke', Tealing tells us, 'I pictured the ocean rolling between us, vast and grey and cold'. (...)

For Linklater, the problem stems from Robertson's over-commitment to the truth and accuracy of Swire's rejection of the Scottish court's verdict. In his view the novel would have been more satisfying had Tealing been less sure that, say, Parroulet's withdrawing or qualifying his original evidence would lead to 'Khazar's' acquittal. In fact, Tealing is frequently shown struggling with doubt over the usefulness and value of his total commitment over so many years to the pursuit of the truth behind what he calls 'The Case'. Like the governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, he is even ready to entertain – momentarily – the horror of his being entirely wrong.

What is actually in question here is a larger issue. Linklater's position (or preference) is very much a current, postmodern one. Contemporary art in all its forms prefers the uncertain, the problematic, the unresolved, the fragment. For the majority of today's artists there are no finalities, no absolutes, no firm or unchallengeable truths of any kind. But when in 1898 Emile Zola took on the French legal and political establishment with the publication of J'Accuse, a man – Alfred Dreyfus – was in prison for a crime he did not commit. A great wrong existed which could and should be righted. Eight years later, it was.

Writing The Professor of Truth, even if he chooses not to challenge the Scottish legal establishment head-on, James Robertson is clearly on Zola's side. Will the Lockerbie story be a different one eight years from now? 

[Because of popular demand, a second event involving James Robertson has been arranged at the 2013 Edinburgh International Book Festival. The programme states: "We are delighted to announce that James Robertson, one of Scotland’s foremost literary talents, will appear at a second event at the Book Festival.

"Tickets for his first event on 18 August sold out swiftly so anyone who was unable to secure tickets can now take the opportunity to see the novelist on Friday 23 August at 12 noon. Tickets are on sale now here on the website or you can ring our Box Office on 0845 373 5888."]

Review by Alan Taylor of The Professor of Truth

[The following are excerpts from a review by Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books, in today’s edition of The Herald:]

Conspicuous by its absence in James Robertson's fifth novel is any mention of Lockerbie.

This may strike some readers as odd because The Professor Of Truth is also concerned with the bombing of a plane bound for New York which falls from the sky onto a small Scottish town killing hundreds of people, including the wife and daughter of its narrator.

The omission is of course deliberate, for Robertson is a novelist and not an investigative reporter. As such he inhabits a world where concepts such as truth and justice and retribution require more subtle coloration than that offered by black and white. Nevertheless he has chosen as his protagonist a man who needs desperately to get to the bottom of things for his own peace of mind.

It's what is routinely described as closure, which others who have lost loved ones are often inclined to embrace even when they suspect the evidence is inadequate or planted. Alan Tealing, however, does not believe that Khahil Khazar, the man convicted of planting the bomb which killed Emily and Alice, is guilty. Hence his obsession with what he calls "The Case".

Alan is a lecturer in English Literature at a university which bears glib comparison to Stirling. He is – as he is at pains to stress – not really a professor. Rather he is "the PhD kind of doctor" and would otherwise have been content to melt into the crowd. But what makes him special, what makes him unusual, are the deaths of his wife and daughter. Thus where others of his ilk might inspire disdain, he receives "a hushed kind of reverence".

As Robertson demonstrated most recently in And The Land Lay Still, he is adept at creating and empathising with characters who are in some way damaged and having difficulty in coping with the hand they've been dealt. (...)

The Professor Of Truth is touted by its publisher as a thriller in the mode of Graham Greene or John le Carre, but neither of these writers came to mind as I read it. Rather it operates on another level. Alan is not in mortal danger but on a quest. What he thinks he wants is an answer to a simple question: who really planted the bomb which killed Emily and Alice? But what he discovers is that simplicity is as elusive as truth or justice.

To learn this he must travel to the other side of the globe. His informant is called Ted Nilsen, an erstwhile agent of the American government, who turns up on his doorstep and offers hope of resolution. "We didn't just want to solve the case," Nilsen tells Alan. "We needed to solve it. There's an investment. I'm not talking budgets here, I'm talking emotional capital, mental capital. The bigger the crime, the bigger the investment." Nilsen supplies the name of a place in Australia where Parroulet is now living, having been given two million dollars for identifying Khazar. What option does Alan have but to seek him out?

Thus The Professor Of Truth moves from Old World to New. I don't know whether Robertson visited Australia but his depiction of it is vivid and tangible, especially the blistering heat and the boorish nature of the antipodean male. What is likewise convincing is Alan's ineptitude as a sleuth. "I felt like a student outside his tutor's room, about to deliver an essay or have one returned," Alan recollects as he is about to meet Parroulet. What he wants to hear from him is a confession of his false witness, that he is sorry for implicating an innocent man who is now dead, like Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing.

It is a fascinating scenario and one which Robertson handles beautifully. "Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off. I mean, really alive?" asks Nilsen of Alan, who insists he was. It is a question that recurs and to which Alan's answer is never wholly convincing. He loved his wife and daughter but did he realise how much until they were killed? It's as if he's taken on The Case out of guilt. This is one of fiction's great strengths, the ability to question the motives even of those who are good. But it takes courage and talent and integrity to do so, of all of which James Robertson has an abundance.

James Robertson

Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

The Professor Of Truth

Conviction that the truth has yet to come out

[What follows is a review of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth published yesterday on the 1streading’s Blog:]

James Robertson also features on the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years list. Surprisingly, it is his 2003 novel Joseph Knight rather than his playful evocation of James Hogg, the more celebrated Testament of Gideon Mack. If that is Robertson’s stand out novel, however, it is only because he engages so nakedly with Scottish literature rather than Scottish history. Robertson is always an ambitious writer, no more so than in his previous novel,As the Land Lay Still, an attempt to describe Scotland’s twentieth century in fiction. Robertson’ latest, The Professor of Truth, while depicted on a smaller canvas, is just as urgently concerned with Scotland’s past.

Taking the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 as his starting point, he has created a fictional version of events from the conviction that the truth has yet to come out.

His central character is a university lecturer, Alan Tealing, who lost both his wife and daughter in the bombing. Twenty one years later, Tealing has not been able to let go, despite pleas from his own family and that of his dead wife. The novel begins with the death of Khalil Khazar –the fictional version of al Megrahi – but Tealing is certain Khazar was innocent:

“Everything is still as it was, we are no closer to finding out the truth about who really killed all those people twenty-one years ago, who killed my wife and daughter.”

Where the novel departs from reality is in the appearance of a shady American character, Nilsen, who arrives at Tealing’s door. Nilsen worked at the crash site creating the “narrative” of what happened. In a novel that is about facing death, Nilsen is dying of cancer and has come to tell Tealing (some of) what he knows. In particular, he gives him information on the whereabouts of the witness, Parroulet, that placed Khazar at the airport where it is claimed the bomb was loaded (“ingested”) onto the plane. Tealing has always believed that this witness was pressured to identify Khazar thus preventing any further investigation.

If this makes it all sound a little le Carré, Robertson also uses Nilsen’s visit to tell us about Tealing’s life. This is where, as a novelist, he can give the story a dimension that another book about Lockerbie couldn’t. One small but telling moment is when Tealing sees a father and daughter playing a game looking at the pictures in a newspaper on the bus. Not only does it bring home to him his own lost relationship but the girl’s innocence in the face of world disasters. (Her comment on an article about floods is, “Why are they swimming?”)

This first section of the novel takes place in snow and ice, presumably reflecting the way in which Tealing’s life, and also to some extent his emotions, have become frozen. In the second section the action moves to Australia as Tealing goes in search of Parroulet. Obviously to say much about this would rather spoil the thrilleresque elements of the novel, but Robertson’s decision to set this during a season of fierce bushfires is a stroke of genius. Not only does it balance the symbolism, expressing both the potential of cleansing or destruction, but it emphasises the wider themes of facing up to both death and life.

In his comments on his choice of Joseph Knight, Stuart Kelly talks about how the past in Robertson’s novels is “urgent, pressing and angry.” That is certainly true of The Professor of Truth. The novel’s success, however, lies in it not only working as a political expose, but as a moving character study of loss.

A permanent stain on Scottish justice

[At the Edinburgh International Book Festival today James Robertson featured at an event entitled What kind of Scotland do we imagine? The following are excerpts from a review on the Literature for Lads website:]

James Robertson was introduced by the Chair of the event and fellow author, Allan Massie as "a distinguished and versatile novelist having written about topics such as slavery, Calvinism and Scottish history… In addition in his latest novel The Professor of Truth he examines the question of truth and what is justice." Over the next hour Robertson gave his views on many of these topics whilst also engaging in interesting debate with both the Chair and members of the audience. 

Robertson opened proceedings by reading a section from The Professor of Truth which featured a discussion between two of the characters and their views on the justice system.  Following this Robertson shared with the audience his belief that the justice system is in many regards flawed.  He believes that in the past '...the truth is not always achieved. Justice has not always been done. This has implications for all of us as Law is fundamental to any society. If it's not working it is a problem for all of us'. Although both Allan Massie and Robertson were keen to point out that The Professor of Truth is a work of fiction it is clearly based on the Lockerbie bombing and the subsequent legal case.

Chair Massie questioned Robertson about the pending appeal in the case of the Lockerbie bomber. "If it's rejected what does it say about Scottish Law?" Robertson believes "there will be a great deal of unfinished business if the outcome is not challenged. Currently it's a permanent stain on Scottish justice. The system has a shadow hanging over it… it's crucial to lay to rest many of the severe doubts people have." (...)

Robertson is an outstanding novelist and respected cultural voice in the world of Scottish politics. Today he shared his views with an interested and animated audience who were keen to engage him in debate and discussion both on his novels and on the impending Scottish referendum. There is no doubt that whatever the outcome of next month's referendum he will continue to remain one of Scotland's leading novelists and cultural commentators.

Lockerbie is an existential nightmare

[My attention has just been drawn to a review by Mike Wade in The Times (behind the paywall) of James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth.  It reads in part:]

On December 21, 1988, a bomb aboard a flight from London to New York exploded 31,000ft above southern Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, and when the wreckage of Pan Am 103 hit the ground, 11 others perished in the village of Lockerbie. More died that evening than in any other terrorist attack in Britain.

For the bereaved, a long, dark journey had begun. They had to wait years for the lineaments of an inquiry to take shape and for suspects to be identified. When, in 2000, two Libyans came to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, one walked free. The other, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was identified by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

With al-Megrahi’s conviction, many of the bereaved found closure. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora had been killed, did not. Already well known as a spokesman for the relatives of the dead, he believed the convicted man had been framed, and embarked on a mission to exonerate him, and reveal, he hoped, the truth behind Flora’s murder. This much is fact, but in James Robertson’s latest fiction,The Professor of Truth, only some of the details and none of the names are precise. Lockerbie is never identified. Megrahi is renamed Khalil Khazar; Gauci becomes Martin Parroulet, a taxi driver; and Swire, a Worcestershire GP, is transformed into Alan Tealing, the academic referred to in the title of the book.

In his disclaimer, Robertson insists that these characters are “products of the imagination”, though of course Swire would be most unlikely to sue even if they weren’t. The novel sets out to undermine the verdict of the real trial and is profoundly humane in its examination of Tealing’s remorseless obsession with “the case”. By the end, it is pity we feel for him, not admiration.

Robertson is a great storyteller. His earlier works won comparisons with Walter Scott and James Hogg; And The Land Lay Still, a sprawling Scottish nationalist epic, paradoxically evoked the work of J B Priestley. This time around there are shades of Graham Greene in the eerie sense of menace that surrounds his central character. It is a tense and gripping read.

Set in the present, the narrative takes place over little more than a week. It opens in winter, when, out of nowhere, Nilsen, a CIA agent, appears at Tealing’s home. The American is terminally ill, but before he dies he hopes to provide a piece of information to help the Englishman find peace. Tealing at first resents his visitor, but when circumstances force him to act on this new lead, he sets off in pursuit of Parroulet, the crucial witness.

Tealing’s back story is revealed in contemplation and reminiscence. He recalls the week spent around the village in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, imagining the fate of his wife and daughter, plummeting through the night. “They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.”

When at last he manages to break a police cordon around the disaster area, he rescues a plastic peg from the heather, the kind of rotating clip that secures a passenger’s table. It stays on his desk at home for the rest of his life, a memento of his family’s last moments.

These details are beautifully imagined. Others are all too real: Parroulet’s inconsistent evidence, the pressure brought to bear on him by the police and, finally, the reward he takes for helping to jail a terrorist, are all traced from Gauci’s life. In the real world of the bombing, it was confirmed in 2007 that a reward of $2 million (£1.3 million) had been promised to the shopkeeper for his testimony at Camp Zeist. The revelation was one of the six grounds cited by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for granting al-Megrahi leave to appeal.

The case was never heard. Within a year the Libyan had cancer diagnosed. His lawyers claim that he agreed to drop his appeal in return for his release on compassionate grounds; he later died in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Gauci, like Parroulet in the novel, has gone to ground with his money, in Australia. Swire maintains a website, www.lockerbietruth.com, to keep the case in the public eye.

Robertson’s fiction shows that, in fact, Lockerbie is an existential nightmare for the people it left behind. The horror is summed up by the cynical CIA agent, who has the measure of Tealing’s restless 25-year quest, asking: “Were you even alive before the bomb went off?”

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson; Hamish Hamilton, 257pp, £16.99; e-book £10.

Truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope

[What follows is a review by Hannah McGill of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth in yesterday’s edition of Scotland on Sunday:]

Should novelists and other makers of fictions be discouraged from drawing their inspiration from life? Some argue that novels and films drawn from real events muddy the ­factual waters, pollute collective memory with inaccuracies or even just display poor taste.

Clearly, to bar the practice would be impossible: most writers are drawing from something real most of the time, whether they’re up front about it or not. But objections can be more vociferous when the aspect of real life chosen is a controversial one. Say, one of the biggest crimes the UK has ever seen. Or one of the most significant miscarriages of justice.

James Robertson’s new novel doesn’t name as its subject the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, or the ensuing legal case against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, but the parallels are not so much clear as glaring. Robertson, indeed, is hardly ducking them: while his publishers are urging comparison with the thrillers of Graham Greene and John le Carré, he’s sharing promotional events with activists for a reopening of the Lockerbie case.

That’s not necessarily a contradiction. On one level, this is a fictional study of how ordinary people cope with embroilment in crimes and cover-ups perpetrated by states; on another, it’s a piece of campaigning literature, intended to publicise the overt problems with a case which the cross-party bulk of the British political establishment would dearly love to see closed for good. These functions aren’t mutually exclusive. But since some potential readers of a new novel by the author of The Testament of Gideon Mack and And the Land Lay Still may be put off by the prospect of being campaigned at, let’s deal with the first one first.

The Professor Of Truth is not a treatise in novel’s clothing, but a novel, and a very good one at that: at once powered by action and mystery, and profoundly invested in the emotional lives of its characters. The titular professor, an English literature academic named Alan Tealing, is a lovingly drawn and wholly believable creation: widely read, but secretly fearful of intellectual adequacy; private, but forced into a public role by the unsought drama of having lost his wife and daughter in the most high-profile manner imaginable. A slightly dull man who has been briefly transformed by his experience of love and fatherhood, Tealing is now an amateur sleuth, preoccupied day and night by “The Case” even two decades after its main event. His project is not just to bypass official obfuscation and find those really responsible for his loss: it is to replace the energy of his marriage, to keep alive a passion for something, to secure for himself a point to it all.

This is all wonderfully and sensitively evoked, as are Tealing’s encounters along the way with truth-seekers, secret-keepers and minor players alike. Robertson offers up some powerful philosophical asides on truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope, and the nature of romantic love; he also shows his mettle as an ­effortless evoker of atmospheres, particularly when Tealing’s quest takes him to Australia, and drunkenness, food poisoning, broiling heat and cultural alienation all mingle potently with his jet lag.

The plot can shift on in a slightly jerky manner, but that’s not too unusual within the political thriller genre, and Robertson’s way with character eases the transitions.

What, then, about the book’s relationship to the Lockerbie disaster itself? Well, it made me want to know more. I would guess that conversations took place between Robertson and his publishers about whether to include any material on the real case; and that the decision not to do so was down to a quite reasonable desire to give Robertson’s work a life as fiction.

However, I’d posit that since the proximity of “The Case” to its real-life counterpart is too extreme to be missed or disregarded – and since the author seems to wish for quite the ­reverse effect – it would have been useful to the reader to have included some information, even if it was just direction to authoritative factual sources.

Such an addition would both service the curiosity inevitably stimulated by Robertson’s ­story, and help to emphasise where his book diverges from the real events, in either their official or unofficial versions. For the record, I read a useful précis by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books (available online) of the issues raised by campaigners against Al-Megrahi’s conviction, and plentiful further information at Dr Jim Swire’s lockerbie­truth.com and Robert Black QC’s lockerbiecase.blogspot.com. (As for a credible defence of the official version – well, good luck sourcing one; many of the bereaved don’t feel that they have yet. This isn’t so much a case of unstable conspiracy theories, as one in which the theories stand strong while the official ­version falls apart if you breathe on it.) 

So should novelists keep their inky hands off real-life tragedies? One answer is that the word “should” has no business intruding on art. Another is that on this evidence, absolutely not: the mingling can produce work that’s both beautiful and important.

James Robertson's "Lockerbie novel" published in USA

James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth, published in the UK in June, is today published in the United States of America.  Publishers Weekly, which has selected it as one of its best new books of the week, also contains a review which reads as follows:

Big life-and-death questions lie at the center of Robertson’s contemplative new novel, but its premise is as commercial as that of a bestselling thriller, amped up by real-life roots. Still haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland more than 20 years ago [RB: the aircraft in the novel is not Pan Am 103], British literature professor Alan Tealing gets a surprise visit from a man named Ted Nilsen, who asks him provocative questions. After some verbal fencing, Nilsen explains that he’s a retired American intelligence officer with information that Tealing, who has made a second career of gathering information about the crash, will want to know. Like many others, Tealing believes that Khalil Khazar, the man convicted of the bombing, was not responsible. When Nilsen challenges him to deepen his investigation, the professor, conveniently on sabbatical at the time, accepts. The Scottish tragedy provides the framework for a deeper philosophical treatment of justice and loss and grief, all well served by Robertson’s measured, literary prose. Robertson (The Testament of Gideon Mack) makes a case for the messy complexity of truth.