Review: Rob Roy

Rob Roy by Walter Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Elmore Leonard famously say that he tried not to write the parts that people tried not to read. I like to think of that as an extension of the ‘technology of narrative,’ as one step in changing the techniques we have for writing fiction. In that case, it means realizing that contemporary readers have the capacity to understand gaps in the narrative. We’re sharp enough (and grateful) to be able to fill in the more tedious parts of what lie behind an otherwise compelling story.

Credit Walter Scott with creating a good chunk of the technology of the novel. Arguably the first commercially successful giant of the English-language novel, he taught us how to do the historical romance. Ivanhoe holds up two centuries later as a thrilling story of dual allegiance and heroism. Waverley, as I remember it, is also pretty good, taking a young man and putting him at the heart of powerful historical events.

I figured Rob Roy would be along those lines, and I also decided I could use a classic to wash down some of the other things I’d been reading recently. Rob Roy McGregor was a historical outlaw, a Scottish clan chief who used his knowledge of the Highlands to remain at large and to play a part in some of the conclusion to the Jacobite Wars.

If you take the last quarter of this novel, it’s just that – as good as advertised. But, there’s a lot of build-up, a lot, that is, that Scott could have learned from his authorial descendent Elmore Leonard. (To be fair, Leonard learned a great deal from Scott, of course. It may not have come directly from Scott, but it started from him.)

In other words, this gets exciting when Frank, our young protagonist, finds himself brokering peace between the triumphant English and the purportedly defeated Scots – all the while as he negotiates his own fortunes in love and society. It’s compelling work as it puts him in the middle of his Scottish heritage (his father left his Lowland home to make a commercial success in England) and his English livelihood, and you can see why Scott has been so beloved by so many generations.

The first part of this, though, I wish I could have skipped – or at least gotten to in compressed fashion. It’s thrilling when Frank is navigating the wilds and looking for Rob Roy. It’s, well, tedious, when he’s explaining some of the ins and outs of his father’s trading house or when he’s talking about how he’s tutoring the woman he eventually comes to love. That is, the material here is simply dryer than in Ivanhoe. There, even the quotidian is interesting when we learn about heraldry or get an indirect sense of the social divisions among the Saxons, the Normans, and the Jews. Here, it’s a subtler, social commentary and Scott isn’t quite acute enough to catch it in an intriguing way. (For that, he might have benefitted from the narrative technology of a woman writing at roughly the same time – Jane Austen.)

So, I’m glad to have read this, and glad especially to have it end on a note that intrigues me enough to put another Scott on my long list. As a caution, though, the beginning is dense and slow enough that this doesn’t feel like his best work.


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