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A fictionalisation of Jim Swire's quest to absolve the Lockerbie bomber is too certain of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's innocence
There are essentially three ways of novelising reality. The most difficult is to stick to the facts, yet to flesh them out imaginatively; to get inside the minds of actual people, to turn them into characters and to achieve a truth through the dramatic constructions of fiction that straight history or journalism cannot. It's the form that reached its pinnacle in 1979 with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, about the murderer Gary Gilmore, which no novel of current affairs has bettered since.
The least demanding – and standard – way of turning real events into a novel is to create new, fictional narratives within known circumstances. Khaled Hosseini's family sagas set in war-torn Afghanistan are bestselling examples, in which the background is familiar and real, but where characters and stories are invented. Almost any novel with a real-world setting will perform some version of this function.
The third technique is the most ambivalent: to renarrate known events and actual characters, but to change names and circumstances just sufficiently to make them fictional. Call it "proxy fiction": in which the reader knows who a character is meant to be, while simultaneously being conscious of the fictional differences. This is what James Roberston has done with Jim Swire's quest to prove the innocence of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
In The Professor of Truth, Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, is recast as Alan Tealing, who, in Robertson's novel, is a literary academic (rather than a doctor) who loses not just his daughter, but also his wife when the plane explodes over Lockerbie. You know that Tealing is different from Swire but you'd have to be entirely ignorant of the Lockerbie story not to equate them as you read.
Megrahi is renamed Khalil Khazar. Libya is never directly mentioned and the events of Khazar's conviction and death are reported only indirectly, but he's otherwise pretty much the same as his template. The pivotal player in the novel, meanwhile, is a Maltese taxi driver, Martin Parroulet, a lightly caricatured version of the clothes shop owner, Tony Gauci– the only witness in the Lockerbie trial to link Megrahi directly with the bomb.
Such fictionalisation has a campaigning purpose. When Tealing eventually tracks down Parroulet in the midst of a cataclysmic bushfire in Australia, the book enters the realm of fantasy, but Robertson's aim is to establish what he clearly views as a fact: that Khazar – namely, Megrahi – was innocent.
There are other characters, including a shadowy CIA officer dying of cancer, who may or may not be based on real people, but it would take an investigation into the writing of the book, as well as events themselves, to be precise as to where Robertson is drawing the line between what he has uncovered in his research and what he has invented. And this would be beside the point. The work that a novel has to do – whether based on fact or not – is to convince its audience on its own terms.
The irony of Robertson's proxy technique is that the book sometimes feels most real at the points where it is clearly fictional and least real where it is trying to establish facts. Alan Tealing's grief, for example, is brilliantly captured. The dreams he has of his daughter after the disaster feel like genuine insights, providing the emotional substance of an obsessive mindset. A psychological quirk Robertson identifies – Tealing struggling to understand why he has intense dreams about his daughter, but not about his wife – cannot have been the same for the real Jim Swire, who didn't lose his wife. The dreams represent truths of fiction.
By contrast, the novel's denouement, in which Tealing tracks down Parroulet in Australia, is aimed at making a factual assertion: that Tony Gauci's testimony in the trial was not only unreliable, it was the result of bribery and therefore inadmissible. But because the fictional climax, in which Parroulet (Gauci) and Tealing (Swire) join forces to battle an Australian bushfire, feels so contrived, so too does the purported fact.
One wonders what the novel might have become if Robertson had not merely signed up to Jim Swire's real-life position, but had rather, in the Maileresque fashion, portrayed Swire's obsessive pursuit of truth as a developing conflict of character. There is a moment when Tealing is visited by the horrified possibility that he may be wrong, that Khazar may indeed have been the bomber. It's a dramatic opportunity that the book raises then abandons, settling instead for simple certainty.
Robertson is one of Scotland's leading novelists and the author of two especially ambitious works of fiction – And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack– that gain their effects through multiple perspectives and a peculiarly Scottish understanding of the unreliable narrator. This is a tradition that dates back to the obsessive protagonist of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the original sin – indeed, the condition of existence – is the inability to tell fact from fantasy.
The condition of not knowing is the psychological truth of the Lockerbie disaster: a state that almost everyone involved has endured, to varying degrees, since 1988. Robertson was potentially the ideal novelist for this job, but the urge to campaign has overcome the internal logic of his own proxy-fictional technique – which is to question a sense of reality. As a result, his real story remains only half-told: the tragedy of a man possessed by certainty.