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The story is a fast-paced gripping adventure with a set of unique characters. The diversity of the characters heavily contributes to the enjoyment of this simple storyline. While many of them arrested my attention, including the titular character Rob Roy (who was a true historical character, who Scott calls the Scottish Robin Hood), it is the courageous female heroine, Diana Vernon, that touched me the most. It was a pleasant novelty. There was also a clear-cut villain in the story proving the saying that it is not a stranger but someone who is close to you that would be your worst enemy. It does feel like hours, even when reading. The characters discuss politics, the situation, love, life, business, etc'. At great length. follows them, and, when Morris and MacVittie depart, Frank confronts Rashleigh and demands an explanation of his behavior. As their argument grows more heated, swords are drawn, but the duel is broken up by Rob Roy, who cries shame at them because they are men of the same blood. Rob Roy considers both men his friends. Frank also learns that his father’s funds were mixed up with a Jacobite uprising in which Sir Hildebrand was one of the plotters. He suspects that Rashleigh robbed Morris based on information supplied by Rob Roy. The Tales of my Landlord sub-series was not advertised as "by the author of Waverley" and thus is not always included as part of the Waverley Novels series. Scott’s reinvention of Rob Roy as a highland Robin Hood conveniently supplied Disney with a link between the Jacobite setting of the novel and the more congenial medieval Scott of Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and Quentin Durward. [45] Conscious of the catastrophe of Alexander Korda’s Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1948, Hollywood studios were anxious to find ways of exploiting the magnificent Scottish scenery and the action, colour, and revelry of Scots “tartanry” without having to deal with the dramatically unpromising facts of the failed rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the integration of Scotland into the United Kingdom. The Highland Rogue therefore belongs more compellingly with other chivalric romances coming out of the British-American co-productions of the period, such as another Jacobite makeover of 1953, Warners’ film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, in which the presence of Errol Flynn inevitably calls up Robin Hood. [46]
His reluctance to write up to a name is also evident in the novel itself. Rob Roy is Scott’s only first-person novel, but it is not written in the voice of Rob Roy; instead the narrator is Scott’s fictional character Frank Osbaldistone, and Rob does not appear until well through the story, and then in disguise. Indeed, James Ballantyne, Scott’s printer (and the older brother of his agent), appears to have failed to recognize Rob at this point in the story. Scott teased him about it in a letter, writing “Never fear Rob making his appearance—if he has not done so already.” Constable perhaps also hoped that Scott would write an overtly Jacobite novel, building on the phenomenal success of Waverley, since Rob had certainly participated in the 1715 Jacobite Rising (one of several unsuccessful attempts to restore the exiled Stuart monarchy to the British throne, the most famous being led by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745–6). However, Jacobitism is in many ways tangential to the novel and, as David Hewitt, editor of the novel for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, notes, Scott refused to write the novel that had been anticipated by his publisher: Ivanhoe is the story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families at a time when the nobility in England was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king, Richard I. The story is set in 1194, after the failure of the Third Crusade, when many of the Crusaders were still returning to their homes in Europe.
Part medieval romance, part tartan Western, part classic novel adaptation, it is little wonder that Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue generated “so much confusion as to whose and what the story really is.” [54] Some of the same issues arise in Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy, which reorients the material in Scott’s “Author’s Introduction” to contemporary concerns and borrows other scenes (such as the escape down the river) directly from The Highland Rogue. Once again, the (now sensitively manly) Rob is a proto-American. The film repeats Scott’s remark about American Indians and amplifies the connection in a thematic strand dealing with the promise of new world emigration to Virginia. The film’s scriptwriter, Alan Sharp, wrote a number of Westerns, and in this script he constructs Liam Neeson’s softly spoken Rob Roy as a Western hero of the Gary Cooper-Alan Ladd type. [55] Like Richard Todd’s Rob Roy, he is, too, less a representative of Scottish resistance than a generalized Romantic individualism. He is the principled man who stands head and shoulders above the politics of Jacobites and Hanoverians, and who is misused by the corrupt and effete Montrose. He may be defeated, but, as the opening description of him attests, he maintains “respect and Honour” even in defeat. The historical Scotland of Montrose and Archie Cunningham [56] is represented as the decadent Scotland out of which, and against which, the new world was formed. It is customary to view kailyard stories as debased national narratives, myths of “an ideal national space” contrasted with “the outside world of degenerate city life.” [63] In this respect they are gentle, easy-going, but still canny counterparts of the more potent “tartan” myths of the romantic and noble Highlander associated with the Jacobite Rebellion and the novels of Scott. [64] They are also descendants of the Waverley novels. They exploited, as Scott did, the paradox of a people “living in a civilized age and country” who retained a strong “tincture of manners belonging to an early period of society” and “who are the last to feel the influence of that general polish which assimilates to each other the manners of different nations.” [65] In effect, kailyard novels recycled in a very diluted form Scott’s fables of belated modernity. For Scott, Scottish language and culture represented the one remaining genuine national spirit in a world where nations had become much like each other. For the kailyard novelists, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Scotland was recast as a lost world, a strange survival from pre-modernity calculated to satisfy, as other contemporary lost world romances did, the tastes of readers from widely different nations who had truly, by then, become assimilated to each other via the mass market. Will Francis shine in his dire assignment? Will he save his Dad's good name from the deep blue opprobrium of bankruptcy? And - most important - will his ladylove find him every inch as dashing in the end as he dreams he could be? In Rob Roy Scott was comparing an advanced commercial society alongside a traditional patriarchy. Readers were invited to conclude that the Hanoverian state offered new opportunities and that life in Northumberland and the Trossachs was nasty brutish and short. This was a Scott Hanoverian not Jacobite novel.
When young Francis Osbaldistone discovers that his vicious and scheming cousin Rashleigh has designs both on his father’s business and his beloved Diana Vernon, he turns in desperation to Rob Roy for help. Chieftain of the MacGregor clan, Rob Roy is a brave and fearless man, able and cunning. But he is also an outlaw with a price on his head, and as he and Francis join forces to pursue Rashleigh, he is constantly aware that he, too, is being pursued—and could be captured at any moment. Set on the eve of the 1715 Jacobite uprising, Rob Roy brilliantly evokes a Scotland on the verge of rebellion, blending historical fact and a novelist’s imagination to create an incomparable portrait of intrigue, rivalry and romance. Scott’s role in the revival of history writing in the nineteenth century, and later in history-filmmaking, should not be underestimated, however. In 1990 the American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns described his groundbreaking six-part television series, The Civil War (1990), as an attempt to show that television could “become a new Homeric mode”. [24] Had he remarked that he believed television was a vital new mode for reviving the tradition of modern historical narrative descending from Sir Walter Scott, he would surely have provoked incomprehension. Yet Burns’s method—to integrate stories of the world-historical figures in the drama such as Lincoln, Grant, and Jefferson Davis with stories of ordinary soldiers and civilians—is derived first from Scott, who had also in his time been hailed as the new Homer. [25] Scott was, Hippolyte Taine declared in 1858, “the Homer of modern citizen life.” [26] But if his fiction reinvoked “the old epic self-activity of man, the old epic directness of social life,” his heroes were not epic heroes, as Lukács well understood. [27] Homer’s heroes, he wrote, quoting Hegel, are “‘total individuals who magnificently concentrate within themselves what is otherwise dispersed in the national character’.” [28] They embody the great historical events in which they participate. Scott’s heroes, Lukacs reminds us, have a different function, as middlemen, agents for the conciliation of the great warring forces. Thus, “certain crises in the personal destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis.” [29] As Hugh Trevor-Roper argued in 1969, it was Scott who transformed the writing of history by challenging those enlightenment historians who, It follows the Saxon protagonist, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king Richard the Lionheart. Ivanhoe is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1820 in three volumes and subtitled A Romance. It has proved to be one of the best known and most influential of Scott's novels. He first portrayed peasant characters sympathetically and realistically and equally justly portrayed merchants, soldiers, and even kings.
One day, Frank receives a letter from his father’s partner, Mr. Tresham. The letter informs him that his father has gone to the Continent on business, leaving Rashleigh in charge; Rashleigh, however, has gone to Scotland, where he is reportedly involved in a scheme to embezzle funds from Osbaldistone and Tresham.
The story has many twists and is a story of love, intrigue and betrayal. There is a lot of narrative in Scottish dialect which is hard to understand at first but which I feel adds to the story, even when I couldn't understand what was being said. You'll find synopsis after synopsis here and elsewhere. But if you like adventure, heroism, romance, loyalty, betrayal...any or all of the above you won't go wrong here.
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We immediately associated with those bankers and eminent merchants who agreed to support the credit of the government, and to meet that run on the Funds, on which the conspirators had greatly founded their hope of furthering their undertaking, by rendering the government bankrupt”. Looking at the novels in this way, a discernible conjectural model of a pilgrim’s progress could be described. An Englishman or Lowland Scot wandered into the Highlands, or an equivalent, from civilised to barbarian society and became involved with passionate partisans, often Jacobites for example in Waverley, Rob Roy and Redguantlet. The “heroes” ( Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy) were essentially dull, insipid, amiable young men who were disinterested, passive observers of the historical forces in conflict. Activity therefore depended upon other sources of energy - “dark heroes” (Rob Roy in Rob Roy) - whose intentions were good but mistaken. These contrasting pairs represented passion against reason, romantic emotion against sober judgement, the “passionate Scot versus prudent Briton”. Often the passive heroes became involved with the forces of barbaric society but they retained personal links with both sides and eventually put heroic ideas behind them and returned to civil society. Note, March 17, 2014: I posted this review some time ago, but just finished tweaking the language in one sentence to clarify a thought.
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