Right Wing Book Club

ROB ROY
By Sir Walter Scott

First a warning: the movie “Rob Roy” has little to do with the novel “Rob Roy,” except that they share the titular character. I was 250 pages into this book before I finally realized this was the case. I wouldn’t want the rest of you to make a similar error.

The story is a bit complicated. The book jacket says this is a tale set in the Jacobite Uprising of 1715, which sounds exciting, but is true only to the extent necessary to sell this book to you. The plot is much more subtle than that. The hero is not Rob Roy, but young Francis Osbaldistone (wha?), the callow son of a London tycoon/merchant whose business is what we would now describe as “import-export.” Dad has been trying to teach Francis the family business, but exiles his son to northern England after discovering that Francis has been writing poetry. Francis is sent to live at Osbaldistone Hall with his drunk uncle, 5 drunk cousins, and the uncle's beautiful-yet-mysterious ward Diana Vernon. Francis’ sinister cousin Rashleigh goes to take Francis’ place at the family firm. Rashleigh steals some bills of lading and absconds with them to Scotland where he hopes the resulting credit crunch will lead to armed insurrection and chaos (note how this plot manages to be torn from the headlines of two eras!). Francis, eager to prove himself to his father, follows Rashleigh into Scotland, where he eventually falls into the hands of Rob Roy, the Scottish version of Robin Hood. After a lot of running around among the Moors and Highlands, everyone lives happily ever after.

The virtues of this novel are immediately apparent. Scott’s descriptions of the book’s settings – whether a London counting house, a musty library, an underground church, downtown Glasgow, an isolated loch, a smokey tavern, etc – are simply masterful; and, I would say, some of the best descriptive writing I have ever read. Only Dostoyevsky and George Eliot are on the same level. The characters are also masterfully developed, with each character having a quirk or a quality that makes them vivid and three-dimensional. The love interest, Diana Vernon, is one of the great female characters in English literature – a beautiful intellectual with a mysterious past and a penchant for secret plotting, and a skilled horsewoman to boot. Scott’s tone gives this book a moral depth that is rare in literature. Even the death of the book’s most obnoxious character is treated as a mini-tragedy.

The real triumph of this book is Scott’s description of Scotland, which was, in 1715, a wild and chaotic land (interestingly, my research on the Internet indicates that Scott’s readers considered the Scots to be equivalent to American Indians). Much of this book is a travelogue of Scotland with plenty of descriptions of Scottish religious practice, clans, social customs, and even clothes and weaponry. There is also an extended sequence in Glasgow. Scott’s descriptions of the Scottish landscape add immeasurably to the tone of menace and mystery that the entire book is shrouded in from beginning to end. His rendering of Scottish dialect is also excellent. One imagines a young William Faulkner getting some of his ideas about dialogue from Scott’s example.

The book has some weaknesses. For one thing: who foments a rebellion in Scotland by stealing some shipping papers in London? It seems like a roundabout way to bring about the “Jacobite Rebellion” that is the book’s main plot point. The plot itself develops slowly (the first 200 pages could be described as expository), and then finishes in a rush of multiple denouements. The character of Rob Roy looms over the book, but he is not much in it until the last half. More often then not, he spends his time giving speeches justifying his life as an outlaw, which probably seemed very important to Scott, but doesn’t resonate much in the 21st century.

Of course, none of this should stop you from reading this book, or any others by Scott. He is one of the earliest novelists whose books can still be read for pleasure, and Rob Roy is one of his good ones.