This book further cemented my prejudice against blond females in books.

A fun read! Many beautiful and powerful scenes and fun characters -- Norna most of all -- but it took until the very last chapters before almost all of the action.

Scott throws together the most interesting ingredients-- pirates, the Dwarfie Stone, Norna of the Fitful Head, bland, the Stones of Stennis-- and this fearlessness covers a multitude of sins. Not that I find a multitude of sins; I like Scott and I don't think he deserves his ignominy. He's got panache, he's got poetry, and he's got a friend in me.

It took me nearly a year to read this book. I made the error of buying a copy of the original first edition which made the text difficult to read. Despite skimming over some sections of overly indulgent verses I did enjoy the read. Some great characters stride across the pages. Melodramatic in places and with a slightly annoying ending it nevertheless is a good read. Particularly if you are familiar with the wild setting of Shetland and Orkney where it is set. Scott wrote the book whilst travelling around these islands on an inspection duty with the lighthouse Stephensons. He certainly accurately captures the wild and superstitious nature of these beautiful islands.

This is Scott’s only novel set in the Shetland Islands, and this sets it apart from other Scottish novels. The Shetlands, of course, are famously very un-Scottish, on account of their distinctive Norse history and culture. By setting the novel in the seventeenth century, Scott makes this distinctiveness even more apparent.

I loved the atmosphere and sense of place. Some years ago I very nearly got to spend a week with a community of nuns living on Fetlar, one of the remotest and most northerly of the Shetland islands, and was very sorry when family commitments intervened to prevent my visit. (Alas, they’ve since moved to a less remote island, which doesn’t appeal so much, so I missed the opportunity).

The handsome young man who is Scott’s hero is slightly different from the usual in the sense that the mystery of his paternity is revealed in the most thrillingly unexpected fashion. The figure of the pirate Bunce – a frustrated actor – is played mostly for laughs, though one feels he would have been funnier for Scott’s contemporaries than for us. The hero Mordaunt Mertoun (what a name!) often takes out his frustrations by shooting at seals or seagulls, which considerably diminishes his heroism in my eyes, and was for me the most unpleasant part of the narrative. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

The real scene stealer, though, is the female lead Norna of the Fitful Head, who is a superbly realised character radiating strangeness, mystery and awe. But there are a lot of excellent characters here, and all with splendid names. (I’m thinking of changing my name to Triptolemus Yellowley. What a pity covid regulations mean that one is now denied the innocent pleasure of using a nom de plume like that to book a restaurant table or sign a hotel register).

I listened to the LibriVox edition of this book. The soloist takes getting used to, but it's an acceptable rendering.

Lore has it that Victor Hugo was paid by the page, which is why his works are heavily padded with description and digression. I'd accuse Scott of the same charge, except his wordiness also involves so many 50-cent words that one almost needs an English degree to comprehend it all.

The story itself - which could have been told in half the time - is a good one. Mordant, the son of a recluse, rescues a shipwrecked sailor, who turns out to be a pirate captain. Both men vie for the attentions (and love) of the most important family in the area and come into conflict. Added to this is the mysterious old woman of the neighbourhood, credited with controlling the weather and other supernatural acts, who tries to orchestrate events and relationships.

If you have a lot of time to listen to this story, do so. But at least you're forewarned that you might keep saying to Scott, "Get on with it!"

I read most of Scott's novels a good many years ago, but it seems that The Pirate is one that escaped my attention. It is, as Scott novels go, fairly lightweight, definitely an entertainment rather than a novel (to borrow Graham Greene's distinction); but, like so many (perhaps all?) of his works, it is centred on a conflict between characters and values which are, broadly speaking, ancient, mysterious, romantic, passionate and those which are, by contrast, modern, enlightened, rational, unsentimental. This conflict expresses itself partly through the question as to which of the two Troil daughters, Minna or Brenda, will become the bride of Mordaunt; and it is a mark of the comparative weakness of this work that the final union of Mordaunt with Brenda is not prepared for by any convincing exploration of the feelings of the parties concerned. It is rather sprung upon us, in the final pages of the novel, as one element in the winding up of the various strands of the tale whereby the forces of rational modernity are seen to triumph over those of primitive superstition. That said, The Pirate is, like all Scott novels I have read, a thoroughly compelling narrative.