Rob Roy

Maloniai nustebau skaitydama šią knygą, pirmą kartą išleistą 1817 metais. Atrodo, kalbos būdas nėra įprastas, o veiksmas nėra itin išskirtinis, bet visgi ši istorija mane sugebėjo įtraukti. Kažkuo užkabino ir sudomino pasakojami jaunystės prisiminimai ir nuotykiai, prasidedantys lyg ir nekaltai - savo gyvenimo kelio ieškojimu ir atsisakymu sekti tėvo siūlomu keliu. Žingsnis po žingsnio atsiranda keistų įvykių, intrigų ir paslapčių. O su visu tuo ir pavojų, grėsmės garbei, turtui ir gyvybei. Buvo keista, kad tik ties 300 puslapių pagaliau ėmė aiškėti, apie ką yra knygos pavadinimas (o aš jau buvau pradėjusi galvoti, kad visai nepaaiškės). Toks senoviškas, bet savotiškai įdomus kūrinys.

I pretty much love this book on every level. It's hilarious, I love that Rob Roy is introduced as a peripheral character (keeps the author from speculating on what actually was his mentality too much...). I really enjoyed the view it gave of Scotland during that time period. The characters were all extremely well developed and distinct from one another, and they complimented each other exceptionally well in the overall plot. I saw that some people complained that they couldn't understand the gaelic in their reviews, but I actually thought it was kinda fun to "decode" the meanings--by the end of the book I was an expert.... And, for whatever reason, I appreciate jokes more when it takes me a while to get them translated. ANYWAY, it's a great book, can't say enough about how much I love it. Everyone should read it--MUCH better than any bestseller written in the last 50 years. HILARIOUS

This was a good story. But there was a lot of Scottish dialect that I had a hard time understanding. So there would be whole conversations where I wasn’t really sure what was said. If it hadn’t been for a good narrator I probably would’ve been even more lost. The setting is England & Scotland in the 1700s and the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants.

Pierwsza połowa dla mnie dużo bardziej zajmująca; później nieco się pogubiłam, zapanował chaos, mam wrażenie, że nie wszystko było właściwie wyjaśniane na bieżąco, co się dzieje.
Książka napisana nieaktualnym językiem, przez co miałam trudności w pełnym rozumieniu tego, co czytam.
Muszę jednak przyznać, że fabuła bardzo wyróżnia się spośród utartych schematów znanych zarówno z klasyki, jak i z współczesnej literatury.

Urgh, urgh, urgh. This book would have been so much better with a narrator other than Frank Osbaldistone. I could not stand how selfish and entitled he was. I was much more interested in Rob Roy and his story, which you get little of until Frank actually ends up in Scotland.

I made it through the book though. I enjoyed the Author's Introduction much more since it focused on Rob Roy!

116th book of 2023.

Well Scott felt like rational reading before journeying to Scotland in a few weeks, but what a disappointment. I always imagined him in the adventure leagues with Dumas, Stevenson, etc., and though I'm not generally a fan of mindless swashbuckling fun, I wanted at least a bit of fun. Sadly, Rob Roy follows whiny Francis Osbaldistone talking his way through 400 pages of novel before we get a taste of anything remotely close to action. The book's namesake is wasted and collectively appears in less than about 30 pages of the book. I guess the main thing is the bad marketing of the book: it's no an adventure story at all. Scott's writing was dialogue-heavy and rarely interested, either. There were some nice descriptions of the Scottish landscape, but only briefly. A shame. I'm just hoping Ivanhoe has some more kick to it, when I finally get to it.

Rob Roy is two half-stories jammed into one boom, almost like multiple kingdoms jammed into one island. Perhaps a better title for this tale would be Accidental Metaphor, though I think the novel would be best named Diana Vernon, since she is by far the more central and desirable object of the narrative.

Obh obh, at least it’s better than the original Robin Hood.


“I know not why it is, that a single deed of violence and cruelty affects our nerves more than when these are exercised on a more extended scale.”

“You remind me at the moment…of the fairy tale, where the man finds all the money which he had carried to market suddenly changed into pieces of slate…unless you have much better conversation than these fadeurs, which every gentleman with a toupet thinks himself obliged to recite to an unfortunate girl, merely because she is dressed in silk and gauze…Your natural paces,…are far preferable to your complimentary amble. Endeavor to forget my unlucky sex; call me Tom Vernon, if you have a mind, but speak to me as you would to a friend and companion; you have no idea how much I shall like you.”

“and when I stopped to seek for the most delicate turn of expression, she repeatedly interrupted me, with, ‘Go on—pray, go on; the first word which occurs to you is the plainest, and must be the best.’ “

“This same library is my den—the only corner of this Hell-house where I am safe from the Ourang-Outangs, my cousins. They never venture there, I suppose, for fear the folios should fall down and crack their skulls; for they will never affect their heads in any other way—So follow me.”

“The fresh and balmy air of the garden, impregnated with fragrance, produced its usual sedative effects on my over-heated and feverish blood; as these took place, the turmoil of my mind begane proportionately to abate,”

Scott was both a historian and novelist. He needs to be seen in the context of the historiographical background of the C18th Scottish Enlightenment. He was greatly influenced by the “conjectural” history propounded by Adam Smith and, most notably, Adam Ferguson, author of the “Essay on Civil Society” and the father of Scott’s best friend and now seen as one of the founders of sociology.

The conjectural historians saw history as the progress of society from hunter/gatherers, to shepherds/herdsmen, to farmers and finally to the latest age of commerce. Ferguson as a Highlander was acutely aware of these stages; he had experienced them all. There were other C18th historical schools. Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire were writing traditional political narrative history. In his novels Scott was writing in the new philosophical, sociological analytical tradition.

Scott is often seen as an ultra- romantic novelist but this was a misreading. David Daiches said “Scott’s best and characteristic novels might with justice be called anti-romantic. They attempt to show that heroic action is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful”. Daiches argued that Scott’s real interest as a novelist was “in the ways in which the past impinged on the present and in the effects of that impact on human character, in the relations between tradition and progress”. These themes were best realised in the novels dealing with the Scotland of the not too distant past of the C17th and C18th, ie Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate.

Looking at the novels in this way, a discernible conjectural model of a pilgrim’s progress could be described. An Englishman or Lowland Scot wandered into the Highlands, or an equivalent, from civilised to barbarian society and became involved with passionate partisans, often Jacobites for example in Waverley, Rob Roy and Redguantlet. The “heroes” ( Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy) were essentially dull, insipid, amiable young men who were disinterested, passive observers of the historical forces in conflict. Activity therefore depended upon other sources of energy - “dark heroes” (Rob Roy in Rob Roy) - whose intentions were good but mistaken. These contrasting pairs represented passion against reason, romantic emotion against sober judgement, the “passionate Scot versus prudent Briton”. Often the passive heroes became involved with the forces of barbaric society but they retained personal links with both sides and eventually put heroic ideas behind them and returned to civil society.

Scott was also the first great writer to be interested in the common people as well as the great. His “low life” characters were often the most real and best drawn, not least because he was able to use Scots idiom and dialogue in a dramatic way. This interest had been appreciated by many commentators, eg the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs in “ The Historical Novel”.

Turning now briefly and specifically to Rob Roy, it was the most clear articulation in any of his novels of the economic basis of conjectural history. Economic theory was central to the novel. The influence of Adam Smith’s ideas are obvious. Baillie Nicol Jarvie was a brilliant illustration of Smith’s idea that the selfishness of the individual pursuit of wealth can be reconciled with social obligations to one’s fellow men and country. Scott showed considerable awareness of the technical aspects of the regulation of trade and of banking and credit. The plot barely touched on the armed struggle of the ‘15 but centred on whether the Jacobites can use financial means to destabilise the British Government. Frank told us on his return to London that:

“ We immediately associated with those bankers and eminent merchants who agreed to support the credit of the government, and to meet that run on the Funds, on which the conspirators had greatly founded their hope of furthering their undertaking, by rendering the government bankrupt”.

The ability of the British Government to fight wars was based on its ability to finance them. The development of an efficient national finance system and London as a financial centre allowed the government to borrow what it needed. This was a major advantage not just in 1715 and 1745 but also in the series of wars against the French in the C18th.

In Rob Roy Scott was comparing an advanced commercial society alongside a traditional patriarchy. Readers were invited to conclude that the Hanoverian state offered new opportunities and that life in Northumberland and the Trossachs was nasty brutish and short. This was a Scott Hanoverian not Jacobite novel.

Scott had not just invented the historical novel, but had set a template for the great nineteenth century novels that were to follow.

There was no direct example amongst the English novels to date that he could model himself on – the epistolary novels such as Richardson; the comic picaresque novels of Fielding and Smollett; the gothic novels such as those of Mrs Radcliffe; and the novel of manners emerging with Jane Austen. Scott produced a new synthesis that took some elements from other novelists but drew most heavily on Shakespearean drama. He offered a serious exploration of social, economic and historic themes. He combined this with an exploration of character, with adventure, with humour, and with an early example of evocative writing about the natural world. And he had little truck with sentimentality in this novel – no sooner is the happy ending offered in one half of the sentence than the heroine is killed off in the second half.

Why Scott’s reputation had declined in the C20th? You might lay the blame squarely on F. R. Leavis. Leavis had excluded Scott from his “Great Tradition” of English novelists, dismissing him in a footnote, and argued that the great tradition ran through Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence. Leavis’s influence had been considerable and malign in respect of Scott’s reputation. The whole idea of a “great tradition” to which one had to belong was flawed, but Scott had been hugely influential on the great C19th English writers, with a clear line flowing through the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy to Lawrence. Half of all novels bought in the C19th were by Scott….

This is an extract from a review at http://monthlybookgroup.wordpress.com/. Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/