"For Gideon Mack, faithless minister, unfaithful husband and troubled soul, the existence of God, let alone the Devil, is no more credible than that of ghosts or fairies. Until the day he falls into a gorge and is rescued by someone who might just be Satan himself.Mack's testament - a compelling blend of memoir, legend, history, and, quite probably, madness - recounts one man's emotional crisis, disappearance, resurrection and death. It also transports you into an utterly mesmerising exploration of the very nature of belief."
A book which I kept reading because something interesting always seemed to be around the next page, but never sadly materialising.
Was Gideon Mack really mentally ill, or is that what any character (or reader) must think when confronted with his story of death and resurrection? Was he tricked by the devil to "stop playing games" and in so doing ruin his life? Was he really drinking as much as everyone thought, or is that another example of how people want to quarantine and water down those things that happen outside of the regular world?
Getting pulled into the Scots atmosphere of chill and resignation was interesting, but not everyone's cup of tea and I found myself skimming a lot of the book.
The most intriguing characters were unexplored, whilst the mundane ones were examined in tedious depth. The most exciting and anticipated section of the book, meeting the devil, was a let down. The moral of the story was rather insultingly spelt out in flashing lights by the author at the end without any lead up in the story.
The MC Gideon is in short a bit of a non-person, a man who carefully crafts a façade that hides the hollow place within. That does not make him fun to be around. Gideon Mack is a tedious, boring psychopath, not a scary one.
On the whole, the book is a deflating anti-climax. Even the devil is not the charismatic force that one might expect, and the entire story does not so much end as fizzle out into further tediousness.
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