The Witness

James Jauncey

Young Picador

0330447130

Aug 2007

Set in a none-too-distant future, the one-hundred-acre act has revolutionised land-ownership in Scotland inspiring riot and revolt. It is against this politicised backdrop that the novel opens with a tumultuous sense of drama and of pace. John witnesses carnage and inhumane destruction as he bids to make escape from one of presumed countless rural rebellions. Conscious of the danger that what he has seen has placed him in, he encounters Ninian a defenceless and seemingly traumatised child.
So begins a desperate plight to escape pursuers, to find sanctuary to seek assistance where available, but to be aware of the position and danger such a trust necessarily places himself and Ninian within.
Jauncey’s ending to the novel leaves the swathes of problems over the nature of land-ownership and possession open and poses the chilling question as to whether we are in fact now fighting for the political and philosophical space of childhood itself’