Overall: 75/100
Main character 70/100 (least colorful in the book)
Wit: 90/100 (Scotch picaresque)
Economy of Prose: 70/100
Wisdom: 75/100
Story: 70/100

Damn fine book for a Tory. Bloom does have this in The Western Canon. It's funny in the tradition of Tom Jones - Tristram Shandy - Mason & Dixon. It's a clear precursor of Pynchon. I often needed a dictionary handy. Young Waverley is pulled along by events rather than molding them. It's a historical novel after all. He's a fiction inserted. It's also his nature. Early on, he complains of it as fortune. ".. the strangeness of his fortune, which seemed to delight in placing him at the disposal of others, without the power of directing his own motions..." (p 206 in the Oxford World Classic).

There are some masterpieces of Scottish insult like the fate of Balmawhapple.

"... the fate of Balmawhapple, who, mounted on a horse as headstrong and stiff-necked as his rider, pursued the flight of the dragoons above four miles from the field of battle, when some dozen of the fugitives took heart of grace, turned round, and cleaving his skull with their broad-swords, satisfied the world that the unfortunate gentleman had actually brains, the end of his life thus giving proof of a fact greatly doubted during its progress." (p 251)

Ultimately events and friends teach Waverley to know himself. "... for you are not celebrated for knowing your own mind very pointedly," (p 304) and he figures out where he belongs. "... he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced" (p 312).

Luckily, he's rich and of upper class and skates from any lawful sentence. Scott has to significantly bend belief in this regard to make Waverley's actions palatable to a certain kind of reader.

Edward Waverly is an utter drip. That is all.

Despite my whining about how crappy this book is, it had an amazing premise, and really great development of everything. It was a great story, but oh god, the writing. That was such a mission omg

3.75 stars
I started this book months and months ago and, because of how slow the first part is, I kept taking breaks from this read and would go on to others. But I'm so glad I finished it! The second half really picked up speed and I ended up loving the plot and characters.

3.5 stars

I will be honest with you friends, I've never been particularly interested in Scotland, as a seat of romance or adventure or otherwise. I'm probably the only period-drama addict who doesn't watch Outlander, and I've never really been into the whole ruggedly-handsome-kilted-Highlander thing either.

I have, however, been interested in reading Scott for a while now, for mostly educational purposes and through a curiosity to read more of the popular literature of the Regency era. Also, Sir Walter Scott is credited by many with the first historical-fiction novel, and as an eternal historical fiction reader, well, that is interesting to me.

Poor Scott would undoubtedly have still lay unread for many years to come had I not taken a 19th-century-British-novel class in university this year, in which one of the novels we studied happened to be Waverley.

Often, there is no surer way to kill one's enjoyment of a novel than to be forced to read it for school. Sometimes, you're lucky enough to be studying one of your favourite books and are free to proclaim your love for it to anyone who might listen (like when we read Pride and Prejudice and I could unashamedly defend Mr. Bingley's honour). But rarely, very rarely (as in like, never), will you actually be thankful that the first time you read a novel was for a class because it actually helped you.

Especially not for a 400+ page book that you somehow had to finish in less than two weeks, with barely enough time and energy to muster through the first few chapters.

All the elements combined to turn reading Waverley a most unpleasant experience: forced reading for school, super-lengthy book, ENDLESS PAGES OF EXPOSITION AND DESCRIPTION, the most slow-going plot imaginable in all historyand no time to read.
But…I actually quite enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it because it was interesting to read a novel that was so popular in the 19th century. I enjoyed it because a lot of the descriptions and passages were very beautiful. I enjoyed it because, deeply buried under the layers of prosy prose lay a very good plot and a sweet little romance. I enjoyed it because discussing it in class was actually fun, and made me so much more motivated to finish than if I’d been reading it on my own. I’m not sure I would have finished it otherwise, but I’m glad I did. It’s just important to be mentally prepared for a historiography and not a thriller.

This year I set myself the task of reading all Sir Walter's Scottish novels. It was hard going at times, but worth it … Here's the start of my essay on them.tt

Was it a recognition that Waverley speaks ultimately for peace and stability, for social and political cohesion and harmony, that made the Waverley novels so popular, or was it after all the other Scott, the Scott who speaks in the lofty tones of the heroic Evan Dhu rebuking the prudential Saxons, the romantically subversive and revolutionary Scott, who in the end called forth an irresistible response?

What was it that made Scott the most important writer of his day, the appeal to the romantic in his readers, or the essential stability of his message?

Scott’s invention of the ‘historical novel’:
I would like to start by looking at Scott’s invention of the ‘historical novel’ which is now such an important part of every bookshop’s income. The main form of novel set in history at the time was the Gothic novel, generally agreed to have started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), subtitled ‘A Gothic Story’ in its second edition. It was followed by novels by Clara Reeve in the 1770s, which tried to mix the sensational elements with 18th century realism. In the 1790s, popular novels included The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Mrs Radcliffe. She combined the supernatural element with explanations. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was moving towards pastiche, and Jane Austen satirised the genre in her early novel, Northanger Abbey (1798-9, published 1817). Whether explained away or not, the key elements of Gothic novels were suspense mingled with the supernatural. The characters were black-and-white villains or innocent heroines, the plots involved medieval castles, murders, dark stairs and gloomy housekeepers, and were often set abroad, with Italy being a favourite.
Scott also set his novels ‘abroad’, as Scotland was then unknown to many English readers. The Lakes had become a romantic success, following the poetry of Wordsworth and his friends (Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798), but the Scottish Highlands were still untravelled country, and his readers’ main aquaintance with them would be through the works of Pennant (A Journey in Scotland, 1769) and Boswell (The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnston (1785). Of particular interest in the context of Waverley is Boswell's interviews with those involved in helping the escape of the 'grandson of King James II' after Culloden. The Pirate’s setting of Orkney and Shetland is even further removed, being foreign territory to most Scots of Scott’s day – Scott visited it with the ‘Lighthouse’ Stevenson brothers.
Instead of returning to the medieval past often used in Gothic romances (despite the Gothic sounding titles, The Monastry and The Abbot are set in the early and mid sixteenth century; of the sixteen Scottish novels, only The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous could be called medieval), Scott chose, in his Scottish novels, to write about recent history, using the stories he had heard: his father’s tales of the Covenanters, his grandfather’s stories of the ’45, and his own researches. Speaking as Mr Pattieson, the teacher who patronises Jedediah Cleisbotham’s inn, he goes into details of his method in the opening to Old Mortality:
‘On the part of the Presbyterians, I have consulted such moorland farmers from the western districts, as ... have been able ... to retain possession of the grazings on which their grandsires fed their flocks and herds. ... I have ... called in the supplementary aid of those modest itinerants ... we have learned to call packmen or pedlars. ... I have been enabled to qualify the narratives of Old Mortality and his Cameronian friends, by the reports of more than one descendant of ancient and honorable families, who ... look proudly back on the period when their ancestors fought and fell in behalf of the exiled house of Stewart. ... more than one non-juring bishop ...have deigned ... to furnish me with information corrective of the facts which I learned from others.’
A comparison here could be with Daniel Defore’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Unlike Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), which were ostensibly autobiographical, but accepted as fiction, or Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Colonel Jack (1722), which were fictionalized lives of real people, The Journal of the Plague Year was published as non-fiction, and accepted as such by its readers. Purporting to be written in 1665, but actually written almost sixty years later (unless it genuinely was a re-working of the journals of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, under whose initials it was originally published) it has to be taken as a fictional work. In 1665, Defoe was five years old. Like Scott, he has used memoirs, memories and contemporary documents to create his own version of a historical event. Waverley began as Tis Fifty Years Since, meaning that people present at the events mentioned would be at least in their seventies (as were Defoe’s plague memory informants), and few would be alive by 1814, the time of publication; the Covenanting events of Old Mortality begin in 1679, so stories would have come from five generations earlier. This does not mean the incidents passed down in this way are completely false; the plague, the Covenanter rebellion, the ’45, were stirring events which impressed themselves on those who were involved. Studies have shown how well memories can pass down an illiterate people, and the memories may well have been supported by written evidence. Scott was always interested in history, and would have been listening to stories as a child, when Culloden was only thirty years distant.
I mention the distance in time, however, to remind myself that Scott was writing novels, however much they were rooted in his historical researches. For our own generation, the sources for Waverley are equivalent to re-working handed-down stories of World War II, with the handicap of not being able to consult contemporary film and news-reels (newspapers would have been available to Scott), or, for Old Mortality and A Legend of Montrose, stories of the Boer War. Of the two, Waverley has a more particular interest to the historically-minded, given that Scott spoke directly to first-hand witnesses. Redgauntlet takes place some years later, and The Antiquary is more recent again; Scott refers to his own memories in the notes to the alarm of Napoleonic invasion.
Most of Scott’s novels end with detailed notes on the ‘real’ source of an incident : for example, in Waverley, Flora is hit with a musket ball during the triumphant entry of the Prince into Edinburgh. She exclaims, ‘...thank God with me that the accident happened to Flora MacIvor; for had it befallen a Whig, they would have pretended that the shot was fired on purpose.’ (p 358) This actually happened to Miss Nairne, ‘a lady known to [the author]’, who is quoted as having said the less lofty: ‘Thank God that the accident happened to me, whose principles are known. Had it befallen a Whig they would have said it was done on purpose.’ (Note Y, p508). Similarly, there are footnotes on Queen Mary’s escape from Loch Leven and final confrontation with Moray in The Abbot. In later novels, the quotations which head the chapters are not necessarily genuine (The Antiquary, for example, or the ‘Old Play’ headings of The Monastry, which seem far too apposite to be probable), and several novels, for example Rob Roy, include deliberate anachronisms, pointed out by the author in a footnote.
A Legend of Montrose is a good example of how far Scott is willing to play with history. It takes as its base the incident of Drummond’s head, and the slaying of Kilpont by Ardvoirlich. However, having given us to believe in Kilpont’s death, as in the original, Scott keeps him alive, and unlike the original Ardvorlich, who became a Covenanting soldier, Allan disappears, presumably murdered by the ‘children of the mist’. The two separate tales are thus woven into one, linked by Campbell’s missing child, Annot Lyle, giving a more orderly whole. Similarly, in Castle Dangerous, Sir John de Walton is kept alive in spite of the historical source (quoted at the start of the novel), to marry the Lady Augusta. In the English novels, far from being a new bride, the doomed Amy Robsart (Kenilworth) had been married to Leicester for ten years at the time of her death.
Writing in a time which was recent and known to his readers was as interesting to them as, for example, Monica Ali’s account (in Brick Lane) of the bombing of the World Trade Centre is to us. Scott’s account would be compared to the reader’s own memories or family tales. The setting was attractively remote, yet with a personal connection. It’s also evident in Waverley how Scott wishes to focus on the hero’s journey, rather than write a historical account of the ’45 campaign: for example he says,
t‘It is not necessary to record in these pages the triumphant entrance of the Chevalier into Edinburgh after the decisive affair at Preston.’ (p358)
He then recounts the musket-ball incident. Similarly, only the results of the campaign after Waverley has left it are given; Scott expected his readers to know the general shape of the rebellion. In Old Mortality, The Black Dwarf (set just after the Union of the Crowns in 1707), Rob Roy (1715) and The Heart of Midlothian (which opens with the Porteous Riots) he does not expect this knowledge, and so goes more into the political situation and events of the time, but the '15, for example is covered in Rob Roy only by a recital of events affecting the hero and his family, and he assumes reasonable reader knowledge of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots in The Abbot: the death of Darnley, her first husband, the subsequent marriage with Bothwell, and her defeat at Carberry by her half-brother, Moray.

Scott’s realism compared to the Gothic novel, in plot and character; The Bride of Lammermoor and St Ronan’s Well:
Scott’s novels are as full of incident as any Gothic novel, and reality is at times stretched for a good story: the prolonged villainy of Donald Bean Lean which leads to the hero joining the rebels in Waverley, the kidnapping and return of Harry Bertram in Guy Mannering, the quite ridiculous plot against Eveline Neville in The Antiquary, the way nobody recognises Henry Morton when he returns at the end of Old Mortality (or, given the regularity with which this is used as a plot device, was it easier to forget a face in those pre-photograph days?), the excessive malevolence of Dwining, Ramorny’s apothecary in The Fair Maid of Perth, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone in Rob Roy, the mysterious behaviour of ‘Green Mantle’ in Redgauntle and, particularly, the interaction between humans and supernatural beings in Scott’s least well-received Scottish novel, The Monastry. With the exception of this last, and of Scott’s first Scottish tragedy, The Bride of Lammermoor, while there is often a supernatural frisson evoked by a night-time scene – for example when Jeanie Deans meets with her sister’s lover at night (The Heart of Midlothian, Chapter XV) – the main use of the supernatural is through his gipsy women, Meg Merrilees (Guy Mannering) and, particularly, the Shetland wise woman Norna (The Pirate), who seems able to command the elements. Here, however, the level-headed hero, Mordaunt Mertoun, argues that she reads the weather signs, reacts to them, and then persuades herself she has caused the storm, and by the end of the novel she has become a normal woman. Margaret Graeme (The Abbot) is also of this type. Fergus and Flora MacIvor (Waverley) and some other Highlanders, have an element of ‘the sight’ about them, particularly Allan (A Legend of Montrose), who forsees the death of Montrose, and his own attack on Monteith (p 60, p 67), but in general the characters who seem to have extra knowledge, like Edie the King’s Bedesman (The Antiquary), Elshie (The Black Dwarf), Rob Roy McGregor, Margaret Graeme’s hits regarding her grandson Roland’s future, or Meg Merrilees’ knowledge of Harry Bertram, have aquired it through natural means.
Generally, Scott’s narratives are plausible, with a bit of helpful leeway from being set in the past. He himself said (in a comment on Jane Austen) that he could do ‘the big bow-wow strain’ – the rollicking adventures, the chases by foot, on horse, in carriage, the battles, a breathless movement which keeps you reading. His large canvas goes from cottager to prince, and in novels like Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Abbot, A Legend of Montrose and Redgauntlet, the sovereignty of Scotland is at stake. His characters play for national issues, in contrast to the Gothic novel’s individual issues, and the tension is not lessened for the reader by knowledge of the broad outcome of Mary’s escape to England, Montrose’s campaign, Culloden or the declining fortunes of the Bonny Prince, because there are still the fates of the individual characters to be worked out against them – indeed, our anxiety is heightened by our awareness of the real tragic end.
Scott’s characters too are very far from the monochrome characters of the classic Gothic tales. Some, to be sure, are reminiscent of the Gothic: the malignant apothecary, Dwining (The Fair Maid of Perth), and the equally malicious Rashleigh Osbaldistone, who is the more determined to do Frank down because he has done him a favour; the obsessed Redgauntlet, the melancholy Earl of Glenallan in his mouldering grandeur (The Antiquary), the smuggler Dick Hatterick (Guy Mannering), the dwarf Elshie (The Black Dwarf), Allan McAulay’s visions, even the determined Covenanter John Balfour of Burley (Old Mortality) and the pantomime pedant Tullibardine (Waverley). Some of his women are rather sketchily drawn – for example, Mary Avenel of The Monastry, whose love of Halbert is only shared with the reader almost at the end of the book, or Annot Lyle of A Legend of Montrose. Most, however, are exaggerated versions of people we can believe in. Jeanie Deans’ sister Effie (The Heart of Midlothian), for example, grew up a lively young girl in a strict household, and fell for a glamorous aristocrat who had taken to robbery. When she was sentenced for child murder, her sister walked to London to plead to the Queen, but on her release, back with her simple family, Effie quickly became bored of the rural life, and ran back to her lover – and what could be more natural, in the character Scott has drawn? Jeanie herself is equally a product of her environment, the sturdy, barely literate Cameronian’s daughter who does her best to do the right thing as her simple creed understands it. Dominie Sampson (Guy Mannering), with his cry of ‘Prodigious!’, is a simpler version of Baron Tullibardine; we believe his erudition, but aren’t bored by constant Latin, and his recognition of Harry Bertram is one of the moving moments of the book. Dugald Dalgetty, the dogged, pragmatic soldier of fortune, is the anti-hero who holds A Legend of Montrose together.
Scott’s first Scottish tragedy, The Bride of Lammermoor, is the novel nearest to the Gothic mode. We have a dark, vengeful hero whose father has been ruined by a lawyer’s cleverness, and a simple, gentle heroine whose sanity has been undermined by her malevolent mother in league with an actual witch, Dame Gourlay, who 'was tried, condemned and burned on the top of Berwick Law' [p 300]. There is the ruined castle of Wolf’s Crag, where Lucy and her father spend the night. There are the dire warnings of Old Alice that their love is fated [p 190-5], the witch’s prophecy at Lucy’s wedding that ‘her winding-sheet is up as high as her throat already’ [p 319] and the family curse [p178] which is fulfilled with Ravenswood’s eventual disappearance. There is the spectre of Old Alice at the well [p236], and the portrait that appears at the wedding [p 322]. However, even among this high drama, Scott insists on the reality of the tale, among the Dalrymples of Stair in the 1660s, with an introduction detailing his sources at length, and even in this esentially domestic drama there is still a political dimension, with Ruthven’s relative, the Marquis of A______ in the ascendent in the new government, Sir William Ashton descending, and Craigengelt and Bucklaw Jacobites, and the place-jostling is mirrored in the ‘low’ characters, the Cooper family [p142ff] and the villagers. In a strict tragic sense, Ravenswood’s flaw is his pride: he feels he has set aside his own honour for Lucy, and lets that rule him in the betrothal confrontation with her mother [Chapter XXXIII] However there is reality in their characters, as they come to know each other: 'The lovers soon discovered that they differed on other and no less important topics ... Religion ... Lucy felt a secret awe of Ravenswood. His soul was of a higher, prouder character ... Ravenswood saw in Lucy a soft and flexible character, which ... seemed too susceptible of being moulded to any form by those with whom she lived. [p206-7] The gloom of The Bride of Lammermoor is also relieved by one of Scott’s finest comic characters, Caleb Balderstone, Ravenswood’s only remaining retainer, whose desperation to uphold the family honour in worldly things is a comic mirror of Ravenswood’s dark broodings.
St Ronan’s Well, Scott’s other Scottish tragedy, written five years later, also has echoes of the Gothic. It’s his most modern novel, set in the early nineteenth century, and the surprising thing about it, given that most of the novel is taken up by the various comic characters who have gathered around the watering spa, is that it is a tragedy at all, when it would have been easy to have let Clara live, recover, and be happy. As in The Bride of Lammermoor, we have the half-mad heroine; there is a surprising amount of duelling for so late-set a work; we have half-brothers who resemble each other so much that one takes the other’s place at his wedding (not even twilight and the bride’s sensibilities will excuse her not noticing); we have a dastardly plot against the rightful heir; we have the strange will enjoining an unusual marriage. The ‘twinning’ of low and high is evident here too: Touchwood is a distortion of Etherington’s plotting against Clara, and the novel concludes that ‘He often talks of his disappointments, but can never be made to understand, or at least to admit, that they were in some measure precipitated by his own talent for intrigue and manoeuvring.’ Etherington himself, in his letters to his friend, is a direct descendent of Richardson’s Lovelace (Clarissa).

The romantic nature of Scott’s novels: scenery and emotions:
However, to my question: was it the romantic elements of his tales that made Scott the runaway best-seller of his day, or the essential stability underlying his nostalgia for the days of high romance? Let me start by asking what Scott and his readers understood by 'romantic'. For a start, the Lakes poets wrote about the beauty of unspoiled nature, and Scott mentions this in The Monastry, when he is describing Glendearg, that in the days of which he is writing, the people had not learned to consider this scenery romantic. His descriptions of the Scottish scenery emphasise this, making the countryside almost take part in the events: ‘... the road now suddenly emerged from the forset ground, and, winding close by the margin of the loch, afforded us a full view of its spacious mirror, which now, the breeze having totally subsided, reflected in its still magnificence the high dark heathy mountains, huge grey rocks, and shaggy banks, by which it is encircled. The hills now sunk on its margin so closely, and were so broken and precipitous, as to afford no passage except just upon the narrow line of the track which we occupied, and which was overhung

Waverley is (so far) my favorite book of Sir Walter Scott's. Even better than Ivanhoe. It shows to the best advantage his genius for detail and description, and his talent for sympathy with the past.

So it took me a very long time to read this, though I was only reading it in small bits. I ended up thinking it was great, but I did not get intrigued and caught up in the plot until about 180 pages in. Scott does a very nice job introducing Edward Waverley, the protagonist, and connecting him with Cervantes's Don Quixote. Scott's narrator makes clear from the beginning that Waverley has, like his literary predecessor, read too many romances (mostly Ariosto) and not tested his reading experiences against actual life. Early on, though, it was not clear to me exactly what aspects of the romance form needed to be tested against life. I assumed that it was likely the aspects of romance that had to do with women.

As Waverley becomes increasingly involved in the politics of the Scottish highlands, I was uncertain what I was reading for. At some point, though, it becomes very clear that the problems of Waverley's romance reading impact not only his relations with women, but also (and most importantly!) his sense of politics, heroism, war, and his willingness to get caught up in and manipulated into, well, treason. Thus, eventually, readers realize that they are exploring the story of a young man who somewhat culpably and somewhat accidentally ends up making war with the English government. How will he extricate himself? This I found interesting, and, in the conclusion, I realized was the connection Scott was trying to make with an entire lost age of life in Scotland.

So ultimately I recommend _Waverley_ and have a growing understanding of why Scott was so damn popular throughout the nineteenth century. I do admit, though, that I wasn't always looking up all of the references that the OWC editor has annotated so diligently. Especially when it came to one of the humorous characters of the novel, the Baron of Brandwardine--a guy who loves to quote classical poetry. Maybe if I read it again I will venture into that aspect of the text!

Scott had more of a sense of humour than I’d realised. Mostly he tends to be remembered by the monument on Princes Street (the “Gothic Rocket”) and for organising George IV’s cringe-worthy visit to Scotland and its subsequent myths of romantic history.

However that image probably helped in improving relationships between England and Scotland which had only been in political union since 1707 with the Jacobite risings of ‘15 and ‘45 having resulted in vigorous suppression of the Highland way of life.

The story was far more interesting than I had imagined. It was Scott’s first novel although he was already an established poet.

I found it fascinating for a bunch of different reasons. First I enjoyed the story, even though the two main women in it were pretty much paper, as most heroines are in those tales, and not always written by men. Female writers could be just as determined to lift the novel out of the mire of trashiness like the immensely popular but male-het-id-vortex The Monk (I think the author was nineteen when he wrote it?).

In Waverley, the cast is mostly male, and what a variety of complex figures! Scott sets out to put an ordinary fellow, Edward Waverley, through the '45. Which was in living memory for many. Scott keeps referring to Sixty Years Since, meaning sixty years in the past. He talked to a bunch of vets, and the research shows. He also knows Scottish dialects, and that shows. This is where a lot of readers bog down. But I've been listening to Scottish folk music for a long time, so I could parse most of it fairly quickly, though there were plenty of words I stumbled over--but I could always get the gist.

I could see why this kicked off the modern historical novel form in earnest. Historical novels had been around. As 17-year-old Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey says at one point, she isn't sure why she finds historical fiction so tiresome when events were so big, but it had something to do with the dullness of the speeches put in the mouths of famous characters, and either no women or they were all good-for-nothing. Austen wrote the first draft of that in 1793, if I remember right.

I think the problem is the preachiness of those well-meant novels. It is true that Jane Porter wrote The Scottish Chiefs early in the nineteenth century, and it remained immensely popular as a kids' book for the next century or so, but wow is it eighteenth century. In fact, it's pretty much what Catherine is decrying. It's the story of William Wallace, complete to virtuous speeches, for the Scottish hero is an absolute saint all the way through, including to his saintly martyrdom. It's pretty much a kids' book, with the heroes and villains black and white, and plenty of inspiring speeches at every turn.

In contrast, Scott's book breathes tolerance all the way through. His characters are complex, some are comical, everyone has actual human motivations for what they do, and there is a lot of grace on both sides. The characters talk to each other, they don't stand and pontificate. He does whitewash Charlie Stuart a bit--but even the bonnie prince's foibles are hinted at pretty strongly, meanwhile Scott demonstrates Charles Edward Stuar's immense charisma--and some of the problems it brought him. (One thing you can say for him, he inspired some terrific folk songs!)

The narrative voice is wry, observant, witty. There are some great comic bits, and some vivid action. The main character is pretty much a stand-in for the author (in the journal he wrote later, he uses the same language for his early education as he does for the hero) but this hero has to grow up during the course of the novel. I can see why Scott rocketed to popularity right off the bat--and also how this novel began to lift The English Novel out of the general lack of respect with which it was regarded by society.

Often regarded as the English language's first historical novel; and that's the only reason to read it. If you're the sort of person who loves firsts for their own sake, if you get all nostalgic and teary over the original Apple computer or "the first instance of a post-modern epic poem by a Jewish Native American" then by all means, go right ahead. Personally, I like to give new concepts some time to get perfected. In other words, early bicycles = not for me. Early motion pictures...nah, I'll hold out for the invention of Technicolor and The Wizard of Oz. New software...I'll wait for it to come out of beta.

Waverley reads like a novel in beta. It's full of bugs, flaws, and problems--this in addition to the fact that it's all-but-incomprehensible to modern readers who don't have the same historical or geographical or cultural reference points as Waverley's first readers (most of whom, it seems loved the book. The only quibble Jane Austen had, apparently, was that it was too good.) To be absolutely honest, I didn't exactly finish. Unlike Waverley himself (The novel is named for its protagonist.), I really tried to roll with the punches and hang in there. But I gave up shortly after Waverley proposes to (the woman he feels to be) his ladylove, gets rejected, and then cries. Immediately. In her presence. Now I'm all for men not being afraid to show their emotions...but honestly (this is so weird to be saying about a book written in the early 1800's, the era of Napoleon and Horatio Hornblower): there is a time and a place.

Maybe I would have found more to like in the novel if I'd continued reading. Maybe some readers won't find Waverley as off-putting a character as I did. Maybe I'll still read Ivanhoe. Maybe.

I'd somehow gone through life--and a career teaching literature--without ever reading a Scott novel. Looking forward to leading a literary walking tour of Scotland next Fall (focusing on Johnson, Boswell, the Wordsworths, and Stevenson), I felt I had to dip into at least one of his novels. I chose "Waverley" as his first--and because it lent its name to a slew of others. I'm glad to have read it (or, perhaps more honestly, to have finished it), but it was less of a "dip" than a mucky slog.

I was happily surprised by the witty cynicism and generic self-awareness of the narrative voice. It's almost as though I was reading Charles Dickens plagiarizing a James Fenimore Cooper romance set in Scotland. The plot, though, is often excruciatingly slow-moving and it's advanced with such involved and convoluted syntax that it's easy to lose your way. I don't know how many times I had to say "Wait a minute" and wade back through a paragraph or two to discern what had happened. I also found myself almost as challenged by the vocabulary as if I were reading a foreign language--and I mean the book's English vocabulary and not the bits of Scotch English and French that are scattered throughout. Ironically, Scott (together with some of his characters) makes fun of one of his principals for speaking in Latin half of the time. Often enough, he may just as well have been doing the same.

So, you ask, why the "3-star" rating? Largely because of the book's historical significance, not only as a majestic evocation of one of the more tumultuous times of British history but also as a genre-establishing work of fiction. The characters are sharply drawn and complex, often treated with a winning irony, and you come to care about a fair number of them. There were any number of times I was put in mind of another narrative of an impressionable young man traveling in the company of a daring and resourceful Highlander, and I honestly don't know if Stevenson could or would have written "Kidnapped" if it weren't for "Waverley" (and the later "Rob Roy"). You could carry the line forward all the way to the "Outlander" series.

All in all, if one reads with patience, some knowledge of other languages, an English dictionary in hand, and an appreciation for the wry exploration of an exciting moment in history, "Waverley" is worth the slog. At worst, you can say you've witnessed something like Edison inventing the light bulb.