JAMIE MACGILLIVRAY

A Scotsman on the wrong side of history is thrust into the New World.

The title hero of this baggy epic by filmmaker/novelist Sayles is a Jacobite on a futile quest to unseat King George II. After his cohort’s bloody defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, he’s captured by British soldiers, imprisoned, then shipped across the Atlantic and pressed into indentured servitude in Maryland. Meanwhile, Jenny, a farm girl with whom Jamie had a chance encounter during the battle, is similarly taken captive by a French regiment and sent to the island of Martinique. Sayles braids Jamie’s and Jenny’s storylines across more than a decade, culminating in their involvement in the French and Indian War. Along the way, Sayles is expert at describing the tactical elements of the battles (George Washington, then a Virginia regiment commander, plays a minor but key role) and deftly captures the dialects of his characters and the violence they’re subjected to. But Sayles’ chief interest is in how time, place, war, and imperialism at once do violence on bodies and identities. Jamie becomes embedded with the Lenape tribe seeking independence from colonizers, earning the name Long Knife; Jenny, for her part, becomes an eyewitness to the slave trade and seeks her own form of independence. Jamie, denied a sense of home on two continents, exemplifies the discontent that sparked the American Revolution, and Sayles underscores the Native Americans’ disenfranchisement as well. (“If we are not to live on this land…why would we die for it?” one tribal leader says.) Sayles’ style is immersive to a fault, often dragging readers into details of war tactics and walk-on characters, muffling the strength of the story’s two leads. But Sayles makes clear the kind of bigotry and greed they’re fighting against.

An admirably ambitious if overly upholstered historical yarn.