Where Old Jacobites Take One More Shot

Redgauntlet by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is mostly a kidnapping story, but it is also the story (forgive the spoilers in a 200-year-old novel) of Jacobites hoping for one final chance at restoring the Stuart monarchy, a generation after the failure of 1745. Most of it is told from the perspective of two friends: Darsie Lattimer, a young man ignorant of his family background, and Alan Fairford, a lawyer just embarking on his career. Neither is a Jacobite, but they become caught up in affairs that they can't get out of.

It is an epistolary novel in the beginning, and I felt pretty successfully so. But later the narrator breaks in to catch us up to things not available in a letter, and that works fine in an old novel like this. Darsie is visiting the south of Scotland, meeting odd people, wasting time, though he's warned he should head back home and should under no circumstances travel across the border into England. No one will tell him why, and by the time he has a clue he has been taken into custody. He's not harmed, but he has no way to free himself, and doesn't understand why he's being held. (His captor is from the family Redgauntlet, accounting for the title.)

Much of the novel follows the pattern of such romances, though there is a big digression when Alan has to take on his first case and we get stuck on old Peter Peebles and his interminable lawsuit. This section has its charms, but we really want to get back to Darsie and the woman in green and the secrets at the border. When Alan at last realizes he has to go in search of his friend, we meet my favorite character in the story, the captain of a smuggling ship, Nanty Ewart. A dangerous man of some learning and a bitter past, he has a deeply philosophic conversations with Alan, and I found him entertaining and interesting. A few bad decisions led him down a disappointing road, and he regrets the harm left in his wake. It turns him into a drunk; his drink, he says, is his best friend.

"Here is no lack of my best friend,"--touching his case-bottle;--"but to tell you a secret, he and I have got so used to each other, I begin to think he is like a professed joker, that makes your sides sore with laughing, if you see him but now and then; but if you take up house with him, he can only make your head stupid. But I warrant the old fellow is doing the best he can for me, after all."

"And what may that be?" said Fairford.

"He is KILLING me," replied Nanty Ewart; "and I am only sorry he is so long about it."

Nanty is present at the conclusion, and has a nice arc; I could have used him in more of the novel.

There is an unexpected but satisfying conclusion, and the story is tied up with a sort of afterword where we learn what happens to a few of the characters later, which is likewise satisfying. The only thing really lacking, though, is any great action on the part of the main characters. They attempt things but don't accomplish very much. (A little; it's not nothing.) I suppose that's why it's called Redgauntlet; that character is much more central to the action, even if he's not the hero.

This relative lack of impact from the main characters is, to me, a flaw, one I've complained about in other novels, and it should probably impel me to a 3 or a 2 even out of 5. But the truth is I always enjoy Scott's novels--his prose, his characters, his history--and I enjoyed this quite a bit. Nevertheless, if I were writing the treatment for a movie, I'd give the main characters a lot more agency.

Oh, and the blind fiddler who communicates with Darsie via ballads and song titles played outside the place he was being held could have had a bigger role later in the novel. That bit was awesome. I wanted more.

Scott fans and people interested in Jacobite history should enjoy this novel the way I did. Others might not care as much.

View all my reviews