Wrong but Wromantic (Waverley - Sir Walter Scott)

Member Name: Athanasius Green

Product:	Waverley - Sir Walter Scott
Date:	30/10/00 (399 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Vivid, historical, masculine, romantic

Disadvantages: Very slow start

Waverley is a novel about a young, well-bred Englishman, Edward Waverley, from a family of mixed Hanoverian vs. Jacobite (non-Juror) sympathies who finds himself unwittingly caught up in the '45 Jacobite rebellion. He fights at the Battle of Prestonpans and travels with the Highland army and Bonny Prince Charlie ("The Chevalier") right down to Derby and is separated from the Jacobite Army during their retreat through the Lake District. The rest, as they say, is history.

Don't be put off by the fact that Waverley starts off somewhat slowly! It was, after all, Scott's first novel and in his second wind of inspiration he really lifts this book off the ground. When Waverley meets the Chevalier in person, the novel becomes astonishingly vivid.

I read "Waverley" with a friend whilst on holiday in the Lake District. We were slightly amused to drive into town only to be immediately confronted by a pub called "The Waverley". We thought it was just an amusing coincidence - after all, the novel's action predates by a century the railway station named after "The Waverley" novels. We didn't realise at that point that one of the crucial moments in the novel takes place in the Lake District. Indeed, as the action moved into the Lake District, we realised that it was describing places we could see out of the window - and that these events were largely historical. The following day we went hunting for the grave of Bland's Troop of Horse named in the novel and duly found it.

"Waverley" is far more important than you may realise. It may just have been the novel that helped "rescue" novel writing and reading for men! It also paves the way for the historical novel as we know it - I suspect that Tolstoy's debt to Scott is immense.

What gives this novel its twist is Scott's own deeply divided sympathies. You can tell that his heart loves the romance of the Highla
nd uprising and the Jacobite cause - and that his head thinks that it is all the most dangerous and ill-advised nonsense conceivable. In Waverley you have the classic Romantic conflict between the Catholic noble savage (the Highlander) and the Protestant dully rational and civilising (the Lowland magistrate).

The conflict also has its forensic twist (unavoidable given that Scott was a lawyer) when the "barbaric" Highlanders are executed in Carlisle by the "civilised" method of hanging, drawing, and quartering. All in all, this is a very intriguing novel - as clear an exposition of divided heart as you are likely to come across.

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