'The Last King of Scotland' by Giles Foden

The Last King of Scotland, Giles Foden (3)

I really enjoyed the movie version of this book and wanted to get more of the back story by reading the book.  Of course, I believed there was a back story as I thought it was a non-fiction memoir.  When I got it home from the library, I noticed the small print under the title: ‘a novel’.  I was a little disappointed.  Now the scenes with Idi Amin were based on rumor and hearsay, not first person accounts.  This is the issue I have with historical fiction, you don’t know where reality ends and fiction begins.  The story is about a Scottish doctor who goes to Uganda to work in the countryside.  Due to an accident, he is ‘requested’ by the new head of the country, Idi Amin, to become his official doctor.  The rest of the story follows his personal witness to the atrocities of the time and his struggle with the charisma versus the horror that was Idi Amin.  Much of the novel is interesting as a Stockholm syndrome type story.  It’s always difficult to understand how anyone stays while terrible events happen around them.