The Master of Ballantrae (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) Book

I approached my rereading of The Master of Ballantrae with some trepidation. It was a book I adored when I was very young, and it's always a risky business revisiting bookish old flames (like old flames of any kind.)

I'm pleased to report that the novel stood up to revisitation quite triumphantly. I have a better knowledge of the literary context now, and I enjoyed picking up on the echoes of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (use of invented documents and memoirs as a narrative means; doomed pairing of contrasted brothers; theme of destiny vs free will; motifs of a night duel and an uncanny exhumation.) There are also echoes of Stevenson's own Jekyll and Hyde, written three years earlier, to the extent that the two Durie brothers, the devilish, mercurial James and the stolid, brooding Henry can seem unhappily yoked parts of a single, conflicted whole (perhaps, in a Scott-like way, representative of Scotland's divided identity: the novel is set in the aftermath of the '45 uprising, in which James Durie fights and is initially thought lost.)

The plot of the novel is highly melodramatic and exotic, in the spirit of romance. In addition to Ballantrae, on the south-west coast of Scotland, its settings include a primitive, traders' New York, and the wilderness of the Adirondacks, where the dramatic last chapters of the novel take place (and where Stevenson first conceived of the novel, in a stay in an experimental tuberculosis sanatorium in 1887.) The characters include a highly "orientalised" Hindu retainer, Secundra Dass, and the novel finds time for a small but perfectly formed Caribbean pirate narrative, told in an inset narrative by the rollicking Irish soldier of fortune Chevalier Francis Burke.

All this riot of color is kept expertly under control, throughout most of the novel, by the dry, methodical prose of the chief narrator, the steward Ephraim Mackellar, through whose unreliably partisan eyes we see most of the events of the novel. For long stretches, in between the action scenes, the novel is a kind of chamber piece, charting the changing relationships between a tight family knot of characters: the brothers, Henry and James (the Master of the title); their father, the old laird, unwitting cause of their rivalry through his favoritism; Allison Graeme, their cousin, who loves James and married Henry; and Mackellar himself.

Although our attention is directed principally towards the depicted characters, the romantic, doomed Durie family, Mackellar himself is pivotal to the effect of the novel. Despite the prissy, old maidish elements in his characterization, he is far from lacking in passion, as his fierce devotion to the put-upon Henry Durie shows. Nor is he quite secure from the Master's demonic seductions, however clearly he sees through his Byronic performances. One of the most interesting and destabilizing passages in the novel, set significantly on a ship heading across the Atlantic, sees our trusty narrator half-beginning to fall prey, despite himself, to the Master's charms.

After a long time of being consigned to the dusty dressing-up box of the "adventure novel," I have a sense that Stevenson is now taken much more seriously by literary criticism, as a forerunner of modernism, or post-modernism. I think that's right'although it doesn't stop his novels from being immensely enjoyable on a straight, adventure-novel level, as my adolescent self can attest.

I've also always loved Stevenson as a stylist. I came to this novel after Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, with its placid, leisurely prose, and I found his terseness quite thrilling by contrast. Stevenson has the meta-narrator figure in his preface'the man who publishes the found manuscript of Mackellar'refuse to embellish the style, on the grounds that "there is nothing so noble as baldness." It's typical of Stevenson's sprezzatura to frame a stylistic manifesto in such a nobly bald way.