One curiosity remains: as Robert's fortunes wane, so does the physical presence of Gil-Martin. He seems closer to poor Henry Jekyll than ever, and our sympathy for him is at its height. He hires and fires staff without remembering any of it, and decides that 'either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious'. Despite shunning Gil-Martin, he is accused of killing both his mother and a young woman he had seduced.

Time has begun to fragment for him as he spends 'a season in utter oblivion'. When the Devil appears to Man, it is usually in some beguiling disguise.īy the close of the 'confession', however, there is precious little to smile about. Masquerading as a preacher, Auld Nick is unmasked when someone lifts his vestments to reveal cloven feet beneath. In Justified Sinner Hogg even includes a lengthy anecdote relating to the appearance of Satan in the Fife town of Auchtermuchty. Shape-changers belong to the world of folktales and ballads, and Spark was a great lover of Scottish ballads – just as Hogg avidly collected them for his friend Sir Walter Scott. The 'hero' of Spark's novel is called Dougal Douglas, and during an early scene the reader is told that 'he changed his shape and became a professor'. The reader is never entirely sure if he is merely mischievous or has the whiff of sulphur about him. He sports bumps on his forehead which he says are where his horns were sawn off, and causes all manner of devilment. This last seems to owe most to Hogg, featuring a young Scottish man in a London suburb. I'm reminded of a number of Muriel Spark novels where the same thing occurs – The Driver's Seat, The Public Image, The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It is a demanding read, and opaque with it – we are never entirely sure what transpired on Arthur's Seat, but must add our own layer of interpretation to the others in the story. This is one more reason why Confessions of a Justified Sinner burrows its way into the reader's consciousness like few other books.

The justified sinner