Showing posts with label Robert Louis Stevenson. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Book Review 024 / Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped

by Robert Louis Stevenson

1886

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’ is not just an adventure tale, it’s a timely novel about politics and dissent

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novel / No 24 / Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Michael Dirda

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” appeared in 1886, the same year as “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and just three years after “Treasure Island.” According to the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, it is “one of the most brilliant adventure stories of all times”— and that’s no exaggeration. Yet “Kidnapped” is also more than just exciting and more than just a kids’ book; it’s a thoughtful novel about politics and dissent, rich in moral complexity, and, for a reader in 2021, weirdly contemporary at times. It’s also beautifully written, the occasional Scots word or phrase contributing to its peaty flavor.

Irvine Welsh's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

Irvine Welsh (born 1958) is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer whose work is characterized by raw dialect and fierce depictions of life in Edinburgh. He achieved instant fame with his first novel, Trainspotting (1993), which recalled both Last Exit to Brooklynand A Clockwork Orange in its electric use of brutal street slang to tell the story of a group of nihilistic young heroin addicts with no dreams or possibilities. His other novels include Filth (1998),Porno (2002), Crime (2008) and The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (2014). His latest new, A Decent Ride (2015), short-listed for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler—a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent. His four short story collections include The Acid House (1994) and Reheated Cabbage (2009). For more information, visit hisofficial website.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922). Filled with convoluted plotting, scrambled syntax, puns, neologisms, and arcane mythological allusions, Ulysses recounts the misadventures of schlubby Dublin advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, 1904. As Everyman Bloom and a host of other characters act out, on a banal and quotidian scale, the major episodes of Homer’s Odyssey—including encounters with modern-day sirens and a Cyclops—Joyce’s bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern age.

2. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997). A finalist for the National Book Award, this literary page-turner is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, it has been called a “dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.”

3. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985). D. H. Lawrence famously remarked that the archetypal American hero was a stoic, a loner, and a killer. Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the formation and dissolution of a band of scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the late 1840s embodies that dire maxim. Led by a soldier named Glanton and a mysterious, hairless, moral monstrosity known as the “Judge,” these freebooters wipe out Indians, Mexicans, and each other amidst a landscape of such sublime desolation one feels it leaching into their very souls.

4. Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs (1981). This novel follows various plot strands – including 18^th century pirates seeking to live lives of freedom according to articles written by Captain James Mission; a present-day detective, “Clem Snide, Private Asshole,” investigating the ritual sex murder of young boys, and the rise of a radioactive virus that may involve the CIA. An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch, it is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Lands.

5. A Disaffection by James Kelman (1989). Patrick Doyle is a 29 year old Glasgow teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

6. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880). In perhaps the consummate Russian novel, Dostoevsky dramatizes the spiritual conundrums of nineteenth-century Russia through the story of three brothers and their father’s murder. Hedonistic Dmitri, tortured intellectual Ivan, and saintly Alyosha embody distinct philosophical positions, while remaining full-fledged human beings. Issues such as free will, secularism, and Russia’s unique destiny are argued not through authorial polemic, but through the confessions, diatribes, and nightmares of the characters themselves. An unsparing portrayal of human vice and weakness, the novel ultimately imparts a vision of redemption. Dostoevsky’s passion, doubt, and imaginative power compel even the secular West he scorned.

7. Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh (1952). Meet Guy Crouchback, a 35-year-old divorced Catholic. Though the armed services really don't want him, he manfully succeeds in joining the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during World War II. There he meets Apthorpe, an eccentric African who is devoted to his “thunderbox” (aka chemical closet). Together they make quite a team. This is the first book in Waugh’s “Swords of Honour” trilogy which explores war, religion and politics. It is followed by Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender(1961).

8. Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray (1981). In the maverick Scottish author’s testy allegory, four (eccentrically illustrated) “books,” which are presented nonsequentially, trace the lives of two protagonists who are a single frustrated artist. Grim naturalism depicts Glaswegian painter Duncan Thaw’s losing battles with public indifference and chronic illness. Blakean fantasy traces the parallel sufferings of Thaw’s eponymous alter ego, whose misadventures in the dystopian city of Unthank represent Thaw’s continuing miseries in the hereafter he inhabits following his suicide. Accusatory, opaque, redundant—the novel is also, oddly enough, compulsively readable and perversely memorable.

9. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934). The heartbreaking, semiautobiographical story of two expatriate Americans living in France during the 1920s: a gifted young psychiatrist, Dick Diver, and the wealthy, troubled patient who becomes his wife. In this tragic tale of romance and character, her lush lifestyle soon begins to destroy Diver, as alcohol, infidelities, and mental illness claim his hopes. Of the book, Fitzgerald wrote, “Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith.”

10. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). This novel might easily have become a victim of its own surpassing fame, which has removed all suspense from its central riddle: What is the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Yet as our narrator plumbs Dr. Jekyll’s descent into drug-addled, alter-ego madness, we are riveted by Stevenson’s portrait of the good and evil that lurks in one man’s heart. “This, too, was myself,” Jekyll says of Hyde. Somehow we suspect it’s us, too.

THE TOP TEN

Monday, May 28, 2018

Robert Louis Stevenson / Kidnapped / My heart’s in the Highlands

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

JULY 13, 2015 FICTIONFAN68 COMMENTS

My heart’s in the Highlands…

When young Davie Balfour is left orphaned on the death of his father, he is given a letter that his father left for him and told to take it to one Ebenezer Balfour, Esquire, of Shaws. Dutifully he obeys, only to find that miserly old Ebenezer is his uncle, who is not best pleased at having his nephew foisted upon him, for fear he may discover the family secret. So Ebenezer tricks David into going aboard the brig Covenanter, where he is promptly knocked senseless and carried off to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas. But with the help of a new-found friend, Alan Breck Stewart, David escapes and finds himself wandering the Highlands of Scotland – a dangerous place just a few years after the failed Jacobite rebellion, where clan is set against clan, and supporters of the Pretender are being hunted or victimised by those who support the King. And when David is accidentally caught up in a murder, he finds he too is being hunted. His only hope is to make it safely back to the Lowlands, while Alan Breck must try to escape back to France, where his chief is in exile.

Written in 1886, the story is set over a century earlier, in 1752. In reality, it’s mainly an adventure story, but I always find old historical novels interesting because of the double hit – seeing how people of an earlier generation interpreted an even earlier historical period. Stevenson gives us a very unromanticised version of the clans as uncouth hard-drinking, hard fighting men scratching out a subsistence living from the barren wastelands of the Highlands – a good deal more accurate, I’d imagine, than some of the later more idealised versions of the Jacobite story. It surprised me a little though since I thought that, by the time he was writing this book, the romanticisation of the landscape and culture, begun by Sir Walter Scott and encouraged by Queen Victoria’s love affair with the Highlands, was well underway. Stevenson’s depiction conveys none of the wild grandeur we now associate with the mountains and glens and even our heroes are pretty unheroic.

However, without over-emphasising it, he does show some sympathy for the hardships the Highlanders were forced to suffer at the hands of a government determined to destroy the clan system to prevent further rebellion. He talks of the banning of the kilt and points up the difficulties this caused to those too poor to acquire other kinds of clothing; he describes the hiding of arms to get round the ban on Highlanders carrying weapons; he shows the severe privations caused to the poor by being expected to support their own chieftains in exile while also paying taxes to the government; and he hints at the depopulation of the landscape through forced mass emigration to the New World – the beginnings of the euphemistically named Highland Clearances. But his hero is a loyal supporter of King George and a true son of the Covenanters, complete with priggish antipathy towards anything that might be considered fun.

All of this is entertaining to anyone with an interest in Scottish history, but I feel Stevenson assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the aftermath of the Rebellion that most non-Scottish readers and probably even many modern Scottish readers may not have. And I suspect the result of that may mean that the story feels slow in places as he digresses a little from the action to set the book in its historical and social context. I felt the pacing was uneven overall. There are some great action scenes – the battle aboard the ship, the shipwreck, the flight from the murder scene – but there are also quite lengthy lulls, usually when poor David is taken ill, which happens with great regularity. Again, probably realistic given the circumstances, but not the stuff of which great heroic adventures are normally made. And I found his personality grating – the older David who is narrating the story frequently remarks himself on how self-obsessed and immature his younger self’s behaviour was, and I could only agree. There is some Scots dialect in the dialogue but not enough and not broad enough, I think, to cause problems for non-Scottish readers.

The beginning of the book was the best part for me, when David was at sea, and it picked up again towards the end, when they had made it back to civilisation and set out to prove David’s identity. But I found the central section dragged, when David and Alan are wandering interminably around the Highlands, and half the time is spent on David bemoaning the physical hardship he is undergoing or describing his ill-health. And the ending is so abrupt that I actually wondered if a final chapter might be missing from my Kindle edition, but apparently not. Definitely worth reading, but if I was recommending just one novel about the Jacobite rebellion it would still be DK Broster’s The Flight of the Heron – it may be overly romanticised, but it’s also much more fun. And with a far, far better hero in my beloved Ewen Cameron, the Darcy of the Highlands…

Ian McCulloch as Ewen Cameron in the 1960s TV adaptation of The Flight of the Heron.

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Robert Louis Stevenson / Kidnapped / Pictures

Kidnapped

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

Published by Charles Scribner's Sons

1913

AL Kennedy's top 10 controversial books

AL Kennedy
THE GUARDIAN
Monday 3 February 2003 00.00 GMT

AL Kennedy appeared on the Granta best young British novelists lists of 1993 and 2003. The author of uncompromising, stylistically inventive and emotionally charged novels and short stories, her books include So I Am Glad, Everything You Need and On Bullfighting. Her most recent book is Indelible Acts.

"Taking offence at books is a centuries old tradition. This may concern a question of personal taste, political expediency, or a desire to guard the malleable from dreadful things that they might take to. Plato wanted Homer kept from immature readers, Caligula was keen to suppress The Odyssey in case the Greek style freedoms it suggested caught on. What follows is a list of books which trouble, which are awkward, and many of which have offended at some point - although, Lord knows, not one of them leaped into an unwilling reader's hand and forced them to study every line. My aim is not to offend but to illustrate that freedom of the imagination is something we sacrifice only at great risk and that sometimes we may be prepared to resist real evil by meeting its fictional self. So, in no particular order."

1. The Dark by John McGahern
An astonishing study in power, fear, sexuality and religion. Staggeringly well written and heartbreaking in every possible way. Famously banned for a time in Ireland.

2. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S Thompson
Insanity, obscenity, profanity, illegality and reptilian paranoia - but which is more distressing, HST's lunatic chemical life and Gonzo prose style, or Richard Milhous Nixon and co taking a whole country for a nasty ride? And where, by the way, is the energy of Gonzo now when we need it?

3. That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis
Dreadful title, wonderfully savage book. This fantasy anticipated the postwar decline in British education with ghoulish clarity. No fauns and witches (they're banned in some US schools, by the way), only very adult evil, moral weakness and the kind of unremitting justice that unsettles the soul.

4. Sergeant Getulio by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro
A stunningly written, unflinching journey with a man we should find appalling. And the sergeant does indeed horrify, but also emerges as terribly familiar, a monster we can feel under our skin. Not for the fainthearted, but worth it - a lovely, angry, truthful book.

5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Great for a kneejerk banning, even today. A different monster here, in paedophile Humbert Humbert, but one who is equally unnerving and, ultimately, just as close at hand. A faultlessly crafted work without prurience and with considerable knowledge of human nature. Also rather more use than a lynch mob on the lookout for paediatricians.

6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French".

7. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
This appears consistently on the American Library Association's list of "most frequently challenged books". Apparently the fact that it evokes the dreadfully disinterested havoc of war is offensive, rather than necessary. It also uses bad words and black humour, unforgivable in time of war, and employs phrases like "The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty." Dear me.

8. The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
A rarely appreciated masterpiece by a writer pushing the boundaries of his craft. It's also subtly and very deeply alarming in its examination of personality, compromise and evil.

9. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
Placed on the Index in Madrid for the sentence "Works of charity negligently performed are of no worth." Justifiably a classic of world literature and one a remarkable number of people have never actually read.

10. The Beach at Falesa/ The Ebb Tide/ Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by RL Stevenson
They're all published together in at least one edition. Mr Hyde, of course, didn't fit with the image of everyone's favourite children's author and the two late stories didn't appear unedited until long after the author's death; implying, as they did, that the British Empire might not have been an entirely altruistic enterprise. For burning moral certainty and deep understanding of human frailty and hypocrisy, see all the above. For an additional savage attack on economic violence, abuse of power and the insanity of capital, The Ebb Tide can't be beaten.

THE GUARDIAN

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Monday, March 3, 2014

The 100 best novel / No 24 / Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

The 100 best novels: No 24 – Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

A thrilling adventure story, gripping history and fascinating study of the Scottish character, Kidnapped has lost none of its power

Robert McCrum
Mon 3 Mar 2014

In a society shaped by the profound transformations of the 1870 Education Act, Robert Louis Stevenson stands apart from his late-Victorian contemporaries as a strikingly romantic artist, and literary celebrity. He held a very modern attitude to his profession and yet, nevertheless, somehow seemed to sacrifice life to literature. He, of course, disclaimed his commitment, telling an American admirer that he was "a person who prefers life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in love…" The record of his creativity suggests the opposite, only adding to the aura of enigma that still surrounds him.

So Stevenson remains an elfin, paradoxical figure. In his day, he was read avidly as the author of adventure stories for boys and bestselling horror/fantasy for adults. Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were instant classics, each a brilliantly concise narrative of quasi-cinematic intensity. Both Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island were written incredibly fast, in a matter of days, or weeks. Perhaps this is why (more than many writers in this series), Stevenson was a master at capturing fictional moments with a single vivid image. This was his forte. It was RLS, for instance, who identified the footprint in the sand (in Robinson Crusoe, no. 2 in this series) as a narrative masterstroke.

Anyway, to me, Kidnapped is his masterpiece, an unforgettable novel of action that would inspire writers as varied as Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. It is also a fascinating meditation on the complexity of the Scots character, half Celt, half Saxon. As in Jekyll and Hyde, it shows him obsessed with the divided self, and in the year of the independence vote, Kidnapped remains essential reading. I've chosen it for this series to represent Stevenson's profound Scottishness as well as his genius as a writer.

Stevenson by David Levine

The novel is deceptively simple. Although it's presented as a boys' story, rooted in historical reality, it also demonstrates Stevenson's artistic sleight-of-hand. Indeed, Kidnapped achieves at least three things simultaneously. First, it's an astounding action adventure in which Stevenson's command of narrative, prose that's pared to the bone, is never less than enthralling. As a reader, he leaves one almost breathless with excitement and admiration. Henry James, no less, was a great fan of the "Flight in the Heather" sequence of chapters. For storytelling verve, turn to chapter 10, "The Siege of the Round House".

Second, Kidnapped takes an historical event, the Appin murder of May 1752, the killing of "the Red Fox", and renders it into a compelling popular tale for the mass audience who first encountered it in the magazine Young Folks. Stevenson did not disdain the genre in which he was operating. Kidnapped, like Treasure Island, comes with a map, to elucidate the drama; his chapter titles alone are designed to sell his tale: "I Run a Great Danger in the House of Shaws"; "The Man with the Belt of Gold"; and "The House of Fear".

Finally, Kidnapped stands out as an inspired and memorable study of the duality in the Scots character. David Balfour, the Whig, is a Lowland Scot of prudent Presbyterian stock whose shocking kidnap occurs as he sets out to claim his inheritance from his evil uncle, Ebenezer. Alan Breck (Stewart), described by Balfour as "a condemned rebel, and a deserter, and a man of the French king's", represents the proud spirit of the Highlands after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, fiery, reckless, romantic and doomed, with a brilliant line in memorable dialogue. As a pair, they make an unforgettable, often contentious, double act, and both revel (with Stevenson) in the good Scots tongue. Like a rich country fruit cake, Kidnapped is seasoned throughout with handfuls of dialect words, "ain" (one), "bairn" (child), "blae" (cheerless), "chield" (fellow), "drammach" (raw oatmeal), "fash" (bother), "muckle" (big), "siller" (money), "unco" (extremely) , "wheesht!" (shush!), and dozens more.

The Scots dialect words somehow give Kidnapped an inexhaustible fire and brio, but its inner mood is sombre. Stevenson, in Balfour's voice, expresses this as he lives over again "the worst part of my adventures… Ransome carried below, Shaun dying on the round-house floor, or Colin Campbell (the Red Fox) grasping at the bosom of his coat…"

Balfour survives, of course, but for almost everyone else their fate is death. Stevenson himself died suddenly of a stroke on the island of Samoa on 3 December 1894, aged 44.

An NC Wyeth illustration from the 1913 edition of Kidnapped: 'Never less than enthralling.'

A note on the text

Kidnapped was written as a "boys' novel" and first published in serial form in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886. The novel first appeared in book form from Cassell and Company in July 1886. In the Collected Works of Stevenson, it boasts one of the longest and most elaborate subtitles in English literature: "Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751; How he was Cast Away; His Sufferings in a Desert Isle; His Journey in the Wild Highlands; His Acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other Notorious Highland Jacobites; with All that He Suffered at the Hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, Falsely So-Called. Written by Himself and Now Set Forth by Robert Louis Stevenson with a Preface by Mrs Stevenson".

Kidnapped was well-received on publication and has since attracted the admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, who praised its narrative brio, Jorge Luis Borges and Seamus Heaney, among many. An inferior sequel, Catriona, was published in 1893.

Other important Stevenson titles:

Treasure Island (1883); The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); A Child's Garden of Verses (1886); The Weir of Hermiston (1896, posthumous).

THE GUARDIAN