Where Scott Meets Dickens and Austen

St. Ronan's Well: The Works of Sir Walter Scott by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a deep cut.

Nobody reads this as their first Sir Walter Scott novel. But if you like his books, as I do, I expect you'll like this one. It stands out, though. It's odd in a way.

The most curious thing about St. Ronan's Well is that Scott set out to write a "watering hole" novel. Think Bath, as it appears in other authors' novels of manners. Or think Sanditon: a little resort, frequented by an odd assortment of well-off (fairly well-off, most of them) idlers enjoying the spa while it is still rather new. It feels like it's going to become popular, but right now it's still mostly the early adopters hanging out, annoying each other.

He mentions in his introduction the authors Burney, Austen (misspelled, though!), Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith, who have had success in this area, and refers to his own temerity at attempting to enter their field. I think he's done something interesting here, but it isn't quite the same thing as those authors. He still writes something closer to a romance than a novel of manners. The characters have Dickensian names like Bingo Banks, Lady Penelope, Dr. Quackleben, Captain MacTurk, Mr. Winterblossom, and the like, and their personalities are exaggerated in a typical 19th Century novel way. The plot through the middle of the novel feels like it's going to be mostly about the clash of personalities and small grievances, maybe even played for laughs, but it gets more serious.

In fact, it gets a little gothic, kinda, with the FMC being a bit off, maybe crazy, but super sweet, trying to quietly survive in a world that did her wrong, hiding away in a crumbling old house. Over time, we learn her secrets, along with those of her brother, her one-time lover, his rival, an eccentric clergyman, and a world-traveling visitor who gets in everyone's business. There are lies and tricks and wills with strange stipulations and fake marriages and every kind of intrigue you could imagine.

Forgive the spoiler--or skip ahead--but it doesn't end happily, and I was disappointed in that. I would have called this a 5-star read that I'd want to come back to if all the secrets had emerged one day sooner, and all the good guys ended up with HEA's. Okay, yeah, I still enjoyed it, but I didn't like the sour note at the end, and I doubt I'll ever read it again. Life's too short to get bummed out by a sad story.

(In fact, I *literally* don't understand why so many people sign up to read things they know are devastatingly sad. Share them with friends. Read them in groups. Read them twice. I don't get that. To me, it's like enjoying a meal--maybe it's pretty good, maybe it's up and down, but you're still enjoying it--and you're especially looking forward to the desert, but when you get to it, it's sawdust and broken glass. Sadness. Disappointed hopes. Lives ended too soon. Ack!)

(I might be overstating it some, but do you get me?)

Anyway.

That all said, I still enjoyed reading the book. It got heavier and darker toward the end, diverging from its novel of manners beginning, but it was still entertaining and weird and pretty fun.

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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.

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Where Constantinople Almost Gets Sacked

Count Robert of Paris: The Works of Sir Walter Scott by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I see others are more likely to give this a 3 or lower, but I almost gave it a 5. My most honest ranking, though, has to be 4. I'm a fan, so I like almost everything Sir Walter Scott writes; that's a given. And I liked this quite a lot. But it just misses for me, and it misses by more for a lot of readers.

[I am putting aside the intrusive racism of the time. Others may not be able to do that. The author makes it clear when it shows up in the story that the people of the time were prejudiced--using that very word--so he seems aware of the issues with racism, but it wasn't clear to me this time, as compared to his other books, that he didn't mostly agree with their sentiments. I hope not.]

It's a good setting--Constantinople at the time that Western European crusaders are on their way to Jerusalem. The Franks and their allies don't much understand the Greeks and their whole vibe, and vice versa. I found that very interesting. The empire is coming under attack on all sides, and they have to buy people off, like these crusaders, so that they don't get sacked. It's okay, though, because they've got the money. What they don't have is fighters.

But here's the other cool part--they do have Varangians. I had thought they were mostly Vikings out of Scandinavia and their relatives, the people of Kievan Rus. But here it's clear that many were Angl0-Saxons or Anglo-Danes fleeing from England after the Norman invasion. One of the main characters, named Hereward, is one of those men, a soldier serving in the emperor's Varangian guard, and he hates the Franks and the Normans who are coming through. Like the Franks, the Varangians (as they are portrayed here) are warlike in a way that is useful to a rich empire without a strong warrior class.

The novel has some great intrigue, with an ongoing conspiracy to take down the emperor that Hereward learns about. It becomes entangled with a separate intrigue between one of the conspirators and one of the leaders of the crusaders--Robert of Paris, who the novel is named for--when he kidnaps the man's wife. (She's awesome--I would have liked more of her. She's a strong warrior in her own right.) All of the intrigues are coming together in a joust between those two men at huge event that will be the beginning (and ending, theoretically) of the uprising.

Unfortunately, it gets tied up in bits and pieces after that, and we see less of the noble Hereward and more of the emperor gathering up the conspirators and deciding what to do with them. There's an old rival brought out of the dungeons who looks like he's gonna play a really cool part, but then he gets sorta written out. The joust goes forward, in a different form, but the uprising is pre-empted. Hereward ends up going with the crusaders for a very important reason (the only spoiler I'm not revealing). And that's cool. But we stop seeing any of the events from the eyes of the best characters, and I was disappointed.

It's still good. It just had too much of the drama siphoned off at the end. It's mostly a true story, so there are constraints, but I feel like Scott stumbled at the conclusion and made an amazing novel just good.

Well, that's good enough. I still enjoyed it. As is so often the case, it's only really recommended for those who already like Sir Walter Scott, or maybe those interested in the setting.

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Sir Walter Scott's First Album

Waverley by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Figure 8 was the first Elliott Smith album I bought, the first I was aware of, and I loved it. When I got a chance, I bought the one he made a couple years before that, XO, and it didn't strike me *quite* the same, but I liked it, and came around on it. I worked my way back, over time, to his self-titled album, which was the least like the first one of his I bought. It was a very different sound and I didn't take to it at first. It was like meeting him at his most mature, most creative, most capable, and walking back in time to his most raw. But I recognized in it a lot of the same things I loved about Figure 8 and the other albums and learned to hear it a different way.

That's how I feel about this novel.

Having read a number of his later novels, I found some of this less polished, more awkward, and I was put off a bit by it. But you can trace elements of the later novels back to this one, his first, and see how he evolved, how he was feeling his way forward, toward the author that he would be. Framed this way, a story I might not have cared (if it had been the first of his I opened) still works, still makes sense, and is entertaining.

It contains many of the same themes and motifs--the history of Scotland, the fortunes of great families, the contrast between highlanders and lowland Scots, acts of bravery, lives devoted to honor, the use of realistic dialect, and my favorite, the humanizing and ennobling of marginalized and handicapped individuals. (Davie Gellatley, the mentally handicapped servant boy, is one of several examples in the novel. Though unsuitable for some work, he's shrewd enough, in an amusing way, to fail at anything other than the work he enjoys, so that he's not pressed into jobs he doesn't like, but is good at the ones he does like. And he shows characteristics of a savant, recalling and being able to sing every verse of every song his older brother taught him, in a number of languages, which I found interesting in a 200-year-old novel. Because he likes delivering messages, he's entirely reliable when given that sort of errand, and carries some important messages. Not a big part, but memorable.) Set during the Jacobite Rebellion, the novel is a romantic action story for the most part, and pretty fun to read just on that level.

It's a bit weird, though. Scott usually has an intrusive (I mean that in a neutral way) narrator, the "Let me tell you, dear reader..." type of narrator. Here, though, it seems we get Scott himself as the narrator, and he tells us way too much. He basically walks us through the thinking he did when constructing the plot and devising the characters. It's almost like watching a movie that pauses the action and turns to the director who tells us how he framed the shot or explains why the character is doing what he's doing. That does something to the suspension of disbelief; I won't say it destroys it, but it does wash it out quite a bit. (Actually, it makes me think of Peter Falk in Princess Bride. But that worked in a different way.)

Despite the odd narrator, this first effort still impresses with its round characters. In Edward Waverley, we get a hero not unlike many of Scott's later heroes. In Baron Bradwardine, a family friend, who is both noble and ridiculous, always quoting Latin passages and bits of Scottish law, we get a preview of Lord Oldbuck in his 3rd novel, The Antiquary. And with Fergus Mac-Ivor and a few others, we see the noble character living outside the law. They're not just types, though; they're all original creations with their own style. Even in his first novel, he's already capable of that.

So it's rough, in a way, but it has its charm, and I'm grateful to the novel. Without it, we wouldn't have all the other novels. He almost didn't finish it, and when he did he published it anonymously, not wanting to diminish his career as a poet. But it sold very well and he went on to Rob Roy and Ivanhoe and the rest, so yay for Waverley.

In 2021, this is an enthusiast's book. Others should start with one of his later novels. But I recommend finding a lovely old hardcover somewhere and reading at least one of them!

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Where I Meet Some Irascible Old Guys--And Like Them Just Fine

The Antiquary by Sir Walter Scott, Fiction, Historical, Literary, Classics by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sir Walter Scott has a way with characters. That's what makes this novel worth looking into.

I know, Dickens is famous for his quirky characters, giving them to us by the hundreds. But Sir Walter Scott creates characters who are as odd and full of life as anybody, but they feel more genuine to me, more like a real human, than any I have found in literature of the era.

In this novel, we find Mr. Oldbuck, the educated old gentleman known as the antiquary. He's a bit of a buffoon, but not in the final analysis; a bit of a misanthrope, but not truly; a bit of a tyrant, but maybe not after all. The author gives us such a complete picture of this grumpy old man who wearies his visitors with stories about historical minutiae and makes unending complaints and demands that plainly put him in the wrong and needles and pesters others in a way that no one should have to put up with... but then he helps a stranger in need, and takes the part of a friend he has offended, and shows such patience and thoughtfulness toward the poorest in his community, especially when they need it the most. They know him to be both a blowhard and a man of uncommon good sense, a frivolous man and a man entirely to be counted on.

He's real. He's that relative that drives you nuts at family gatherings but would drive a hundred miles to get you out of trouble. He's not the most fun to be with, but he is absolutely necessary.

Edie Ochiltree is an old beggar, a mendicant authorized by the crown to live off the kindness of the community, a dispensation made visible by the blue gown all such beggars wear. He is the glue of this novel, the man who connects everyone else together. He knows what is happening everywhere in the area and is full of the lore of the place, remembering every story about every family. He is both entertaining and difficult, a little like jester, which he is sometimes compared to. But he is kindhearted and thinks nothing of spending whole days trudging from one town or castle to another carrying messages or warnings or working on someone's behalf, refusing any reward other than the handful of grain or smallest of coins. No, he won't come in the house. No, he won't take a silver coin. No, he won't accept anything more than he is entitled to as a blue-robed beggar. But he will repeat all the news, and he will sing an old song that you forgot you knew, and he will remind you of something embarrassing that you did years ago. There is kindness but no sentimentality in Edie.

Senile old Elspeth was remarkable. The German scam artist was entertaining. And any number of minor characters were just as finely drawn, even if they were only found on a few pages. They made the novel for me.

The plot is less central and the action less compelling in this novel than others I have read by Sir Walter Scott, but I enjoyed it just about the same as the rest. Maybe I struggled a bit with the long passages of dialogue in dialect, but that was okay, and a few passages were dense with exposition. I didn't mind. I enjoyed visiting these characters and following them to the end of their journey and the unraveling of all the mysteries. I won't lie--I'm looking for more adventure in the next one. But as long as it is as engrossing as The Antiquary in some way or another, I'm good.

Recommended for readers of old books.

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