Gillis is searching for a higher purpose. That’s why, at the age of 31, he has become the minister of a crumbling Scottish kirk with a nonexistent congregation in a sleepy coastal town. Also, he needs work. It was this or the supermarket. “It’s not a bad job,” the outgoing minister confides. “The wages aren’t much, but you get the manse guaranteed, and a motor, and you’ll have your mornings and evenings. Mostly, it’s just hospital, funeral, home by five.”
Not a bad deal. But Gillis, it seems, is destined for greater things. And in Phantom Limb, Chris Kohler’s wonderfully farcical and apocalyptic debut novel, we soon find him performing miracles and taking on the mantle of messiah. It is a story of failure and desperation that links Scotland’s past to its present in twinned narratives that alternate between Gillis’s doomed venture and the travails of an apprentice painter named Jan in pre-Reformation Scotland.
