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Title: Waverley by Walter Scott, Andrew Hook ISBN: 0-14-043071-7 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: February, 1981 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The ultimate coming-of-age novel
Comment: Scott can be a ragged storyteller, by our contemporary standards (which are unfair to apply, since he showed the way to all future English novelists). Patches of WAVERLEY are ragged and rambling. Such humor as there is is not very funny, and sometimes when the action is meant to be sweeping, it is more nearly absurd.
None of this is without compensations. The English novel was still young and unformed, and Scott is alive to all its possibilities, with a freshness and boldness not available to later writers. He thinks nothing, for instance, of having his hero (here as in IVANHOE) sick or asleep while the action is conducted elsewhere by more vidid, nominally secondary characters.
But WAVERLEY is not just of historical interest. It accomplishes something unique in the Bildungsroman genre. In its time, and even now, it is thought of as a nonpareil romantic adventure, but the reputation is misleading, since it is mostly about the unraveling of Waverley's romantic notions. For a time we share them: how merry and noble the highlanders seem, how manly and swashbuckling their leader, Fergus; how accomplished and womanly his sister, the beautiful Flora. By the the end of the book, however, Waverley's cause has turned to ashes, the man he idolized is revealed as an unfeeling monomaniac, and the woman he thought he loved seems just a sour harpy.
The cold slap of reality is an experience common enough in life, the painful accompaniment of growing up, but you'll have to look far and wide to find it so cannily presented in fiction as here.
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting critique of romantic tendencies
Comment: Waverley, Walter Scott's first successful novel, concerns Edward Waverley, the scion of a noble, landed family in England. He's a Romantic young man, in the formal sense of belonging to the Romantic movement and in temperament--the relative ease of his life and his passionate dilettantishness land him, eventually, in the service of the Jacobites during the rebellion of 1745. He discovers the wild landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, the curious manners of the Highland folk, and learns that life and war are not exactly like all those romantic books about adventure and glory he loves to read.
Scott's book can be interpreted as a critique of the Romantic temperament, and I think the book succeeds best when it contrasts reality with the puffed-up imaginings of Edward Waverley's literature-addled perception. He is not quite Don Quixote, according to Scott, but he suffers from a milder version of the same disease; the most amusing parts of the book center around Waverley's naivete toward battle, ceremony, and love. He is feckless, to be sure, and abysmally undisciplined--but he is a decent fellow in the end, and learns from his mistakes. The people that populate Scott's novel are generally civilized, noble, and upright people, even the fierce rebels; while Scott doesn't approve of rebellion, the rebels are portrayed as misguided at worst, and of equal nobility to the English at best. Scott's purpose was to peer into the world "sixty years since" his own time, and helped give birth to the historical novel. It has confusing and near-unreadable parts (especially when the pedantic Baron shows up), but as a historical novel, it certainly sets the template for all other books of its type to come.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Geste of Waverly
Comment: Mark Twain stated that Scott's writings had a "debilitating influence;" in fact drove the antebellum South "mad" with medieval notions of chivalry into the War Between the States. It's true, the popularity of Sir Walter at the time was unparalleled. Waverley, published in 1814, has the distinction of being the first historical novel; that is, where a heroic fictional character is set within an actual event in history. Waverley also stands out as a splendid example of the romantic trend in literature, where imagination is considered primary to understanding. Waverley is the first in a series of popular "historical romances" by Scott. The key event to Waverley is the colorful Jacobite rebellion of 1745, where Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last of the Stuarts, landed on Scottish shores to reclaim the English throne from King George II. 75,000 ex-Jacobites later immigrated to South Carolina following Prince Charlie's failure, no doubt giving King George III much to contend with, during the American Revolution. Over a hundred years later, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, by the Scott "crazed" generation. So, Twain's witty observation could have a basis in fact.
Scott published Waverley anonymously, giving the novel a thrilling mystique of historical authenticity; a romantic strategy ? for imaginative distancing or "negative capability" discussed by contemporary poet, John Keats. The hero, Edward Waverley, is born into a house of divided loyalties, between the treasonable Stuart cause and loyal ties to the Hanoverian crown. Although himself a Captain in the King's forces, Edward begins an adventure of self-discovery at the Scottish manor of Bradwardine; learns the ways of the Highlanders from Fergus McIvor and his sister, Flora; joins forces with "the Chief," and fights the battle of Preston. We are treated to riveting characterizations of famous historical persons and events, told in evocative poetic prose, with haunting images, dramatic set pieces, and convincingly real dialogue. I agree with A.N. Wilson, who more recently described Sir Walter Scott as "a genius of extraordinary range, depth and intelligence."
So, in reply to the ever gallant and wry wit of Mr. Twain, it's my belief that the creative genius, as evidenced by Waverley, promotes rather than detracts from cultural growth. The self-defeating principles which destroyed the Old South are endemic to all societies (including our own), as Toynbee could have said, and these causes lay deep within the collective unconscious (Jung).
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Title: Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott ISBN: 0679443622 Publisher: Everyman's Library Pub. Date: 23 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Heart of Mid-Lothian (Penguin Classics) by Walter, Sir Scott, Tony Inglis ISBN: 0140431292 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: December, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Bride of Lammermoor (Oxford World's Classics) by Sir Walter Scott, Fiona Robertson ISBN: 0192835440 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott ISBN: 0812565657 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $3.99 |
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Title: The Antiquary (Oxford World's Classics) by Nicola J. Watson, Walter, Sir Scott ISBN: 0192831879 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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