THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

Giles Foden, US$11.62 on www.amazon.com

A confusing title but one which goes to the heart of this fictitious tale of a Scottish doctor’s time in Uganda under its famously mad and bad President Idi Amin. In early life, the dictator had served with the British King’s African Rifles regiment which was enough for him to declare himself the King of Scotland, at one point even threatening to fly from Uganda to Britain to prove the point.

Nicholas Garrigan is the doctor, young, impossibly naive. He flies out to Africa to escape his dour doctor father, and after a short period doing good in a small village he has a chance meeting with Amin, and his fate is sealed. Seduced by his charm and power, Garrigan accepts a position as his personal physician, and quickly becomes entrapped by the lavish lifestyle of the court. It comes at a terrible cost, of course, and mostly for the Ugandan people.

The novel is compelling because as with many traditional narratives, Garrigan comes of age during the action of the book, yet it is a modern narrative because of the extreme brutality taking place around him while he does so. It is also a brilliant recreation of the period by Giles Foden, who lived in Africa as a child and obviously researched the story. Now receiving a new lease of life with the award-winning film (of the same name) starring Forrest Whitaker in the role of Amin, it is time once again to revisit the novel. It seems we will always have a fascination for the dictators of this world – otherwise how else would we remember this man who ruled an African country for seven years in the 1970s?

Tom Otley