BBC Radio 4 adaptation. Narrated by David Tennant. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s0329

Rob Roy by Walter Scott
Adapted by Robin Brooks

Our Rob Roy has dispensed with the Jacobite setting and updates the story to the 20th century. It is 1924 and 20-year-old Frank falls foul of his father. He has spent a year in Paris, supposedly learning the business, but actually hanging out with Imagist poets. When he refuses to join the business his father sends him north to stay with his Uncle - a radical and mixed up in the cause of Irish Nationalism.

Scott's book doesn't really depend on the historical trappings on which the author's reputation now rests. A son being banished by his father because he wants to be a long-haired poet is a perennial situation, as is the love-triangle between Frank, Die Vernon and her wicked cousin Rashleigh. With this production the listener is asked to regard Scott as a novelist like any other, concerned with the workings of the human heart and how they play out in a society more like ours.

With David Tennant as Walter Scott
All other parts were played by members of the cast
The music was composed and performed by Ross Hughes and Esben Tjalve

Producer: Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.

This adventure into the foggy, craggy highlands of Loch Lomond was the perfect balm to the tragic and worrying events currently transpiring around us. I deeply miss Scotland. It is easy for me to see how influential the works of Sir Walter Scott were for subsequent literature, and this novel certainly had much that was remarkable. The romance of Diana Vernon and Francis was wonderful, the honorable, tragic, and touching portrait of the Robin Hood-esque Rob Roy, and the comic yet loving character of Bailie Jarvie were all fantastic. However, several aspects of the novel created a degree of tedium that made it a bit of an effort to stay engaged. Whilst normally a big fan of the inclusion of vernacular dialects, the huge quantity of it and my own relative distance from such speech made much of the character dialogue rather more work than it was worth. Yet i'd rather have had it than not. Also, the verbose nature of Scott's prose constrains the reader to quite a slow pace without offering enough payoff to make that pace worth it. All in all, I enjoyed this read despite the unexpectedly higher degree of effort it required. I think Dumas executes the romantic adventure novel slightly better than Scott, though I should hardly offer a comparison considering I've only read one offering of each author.

Medium recommendation to fans of Scotland and adventure.

Well, this was a hoot! By which I mean not that it was funny but that is was fun--a great, old-fashioned kind of novel with loads of curious dialect to tackle.

In 1817, Sir Walter Scott built this yarn around a Scottish outlaw and the unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion of 1715, which sought to overthrow the Protestant king of England and install a Catholic member of the Stewart family. The violent highland clans apparently joined the effort not because they were Catholic but because of the many abuses they were suffering under the reining monarch.

The story is narrated by the Protestant Frank Osbaldistone, whose father became a highly successful businessman in London after losing his Northumberland lands to a younger brother through a will. This burgher is outraged when Frank refuses to go into business with him, preferring poetry. He casts Frank out and offers the mercantile position to one of his younger brother's sons, the devious Rashleigh. Frank is sent off to visit Rashleigh's Catholic family and to figure out what to do with his life. There he meets the uncle who inherited the ancestral lands, a brace of unruly male cousins, and a distant relative, the feisty Diana Vernon, who is supposed to marry one of the brothers or enter a convent in the near future.

When Rashleigh steals from Frank's father and the business is on the verge of collapse, Frank pursues the money into the highlands, where he is aided by the mysterious Rob Roy thanks to the equally mysterious connections of Diana Vernon. The endlessly annoying Andrew Fairservice comes along because he claims to know Scotland. An honest "bailie" who has done business with Frank's father comes, too.

A good quarter of this book was written in Scots dialect, and though I caught on to a lot of the words, I admit there was much I didn't understand.

Listened to this one, and the Scottish accent of many of the characters was so thick that I couldn't follow. Add to that a need for more of a grounding in English/Scottish history in order to understand the context, and that explains the 2 star rating. Probably more on me than on Sir Walter Scott. In any case, I feel like I probably missed a good story.

Rob Roy is the second Scott novel I have read and the second one I loved to distraction! It is a perfect story with just the right amount of romance, adventure and humor in it. The characters were all incredibly memorable like old friends. If you have not read Rob Roy, you really need to!

Getting back to it, after abandoning it for a few years.
The book is totally worthy of its reputation.

This was very well narrated, but not very interesting. The story is mostly about Frank, a young man who is raised with too much money. He's sent to the ancestral estates near the Scottish border where he gets into a bit of a mess which takes him into Scotland. That's about halfway through & where I got lost simply because the narration was so good & Scottish is absolutely incomprehensible.

You'd think with my good Scottish name I'd understand it. Nope. I was born in the USA. I don't understand Scottish. It sounds like someone stuffed 200 year old English English (tough enough to understand) into a garbage disposal which then regurgitated it while being beat by a stick. Even when we share common words, they're tough to decipher, but they also have enough of their own to require a glossary in the back of the printed edition. That probably would have been a better format for this story, but I don't know if I would have finished it then, either.

I tried, but Rob Roy barely made any appearances & it just wasn't worth the effort. I was over halfway through & the action was really picking up, but I just kept missing too much due to the language barrier.

It's a shame. I really liked Ivanhoe & Tales of a Grandfather. This just wasn't in the same class.

I enjoyed this book. Francis Osbaldistone is a sympathetic hero who would rather be a poet than work in his father's commercial firm. He is sent from London to live in his uncle's castle in the north of England and has many adventures in the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland. Rob Roy, the title character, is portrayed sympathetically as we learn about the difficult life of the Highland Scots. The novel has, of course, a mysterious feisty young heroine and a dastardly villain, who makes Francis' life difficult and exciting.

Modern historical fiction is quite well-appreciated and well-sold both among male and female readers. There's been a huge spreading of best- selling authors and series in the latest years. But where does this genre come from, actually? The Father of the Historical Novel was Sir Walter Scott ( 1771 - 1832 ) who started the publication of a long series of successful volumes to pay back his debts with Waverley (1814). The story takes place between Scotland and England in the years of the first Jacobite Uprising, just before 1715, and features both historical and fictional characters involved in historical and fictional event . The prototype for hugely successful Gabaldon's Outlander saga? Surely it was. Of that one and many more.

The Rob Roy (1671-1734) of the title really lived: he was involved in one of the 1715 Jacobite Uprising against the British monarch and he was a famous outlaw. As he usually did, Scott chose certain parts of his actual biography and combined them with things he invented. Interestingly, Rob Roy is not the main character in the book: a young poet named Frank Osbaldistone is. It seems Scott's editor thought that "Rob Roy" was a much more exciting title for a book than "Frank Osbaldistone".

Rob Roy's role in this tale is not primarily but indispensable, and you come away from the book feeling that Rob Roy is the central figure, even though he does not even make an appearance until halfway through the story. Consequently, it is not surprising that Rob Roy played a huge role in making Robert Roy MacGregor a household name throughout the world. As a matter of fact, Rob Roy fought valiantly during the uprising, and for a time, after the uprising was put down, lived a rather tranquil life as a cattle baron who acquired his herd primarily by theft (which wasn't exactly illegal at the time, but that is another story). A quiet country life was not to be for Rob Roy, and he was soon branned as an outlaw, and he spent most of his life fighting against what he saw as the injustices done to his family, and himself. In many regards, MacGregor was the Scottish equivalent of Robin Hood, and like the legendary English hero, he has been heralded in song, legend, and literature.

The plot of Scott's book has been criticised as "disjointed" but Robert Louis Stevenson, however, who loved it from childhood, regarded "Rob Roy" as the best novel of the greatest of all novelists.

Read the whole text on my post at FLY HIGH!

http://flyhigh-by-learnonline.blogspo...

AmblesideOnline year 7 free read. One of my kids read this last year and absolutely HATED it. Like, she may have said it was the worst book she had ever read…and it’s not the first Waverly Novel she’s read and she liked most of the others. I wanted to see what made it so bad and honestly, I’m not sure. I listened to it on audible and the recording was book. Reading it may have been difficult because there was a lot of Scottish brogue. It was sometimes even hard to understand in a good recording so maybe if you were reading or listening to a poor recording???

3,5*! Uma história de aventuras, intrigas e traições, mas por vezes um pouco confusa... Ainda assim, como gosto de clássicos, foram umas horas bem passadas! :)

A famous man is Robin Hood,t
The English ballad-singer’s joy!t
And Scotland has a thief as good,t
An outlaw of as daring mood;t
She has her brave Rob Roy!
~Wordsworth

This may be my favorite Scott novel yet! The first half of the book was far from what I expected, being focused on the experiences of Francis Osbaldistone, a young Englishman with poetical inclinations, who refuses to work in his father's business. Nevertheless, the story was extremely interesting. I loved and heartily sympathized with Diana Vernon, and Rashleigh was a villain who distinctly reminded me of Shakespeare's Richard III, even before the resemblance was mentioned! I honestly couldn't imagine how the story was eventually going to lead to the Scottish Highlands and Rob Roy, but it did, and it was... great! Once again, Scott's ability to make his characters so interesting and real utterly amazed me. I loved the Bailie, and the scene where he gets stuck hanging upside-down during the battle with the Highlanders had me laughing at odd times for the rest of the day!