Ye Be Gleg Aneuch with the Claymore, Laddie

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley is a romantic novel in which romantic love of the conventional sort plays only a surprisingly small role.  On the most surface level, it is a bildungsroman of a fairly traditional type:  the idealistic young protagonist who achieves maturity by being caught up in the passions and perils of warfare. Beyond that, it is an exercise in sociological memory, portraying to the best of Scott's very considerable ability the manners and mores of a Scotland that had largely vanished away "Sixty Years Since."  Modern American readers might resent the enormous lengths Scott goes to in resurrecting this vanished age,often more travelogue than narrative, but I found it entirely charming, with vivid scenes and vibrantly memorable characterizations.  As a fictionalized history of "the '45", the author is scrupulously careful not to stray far from the available sources.

But Scott's greatest achievement, it seems to me, is to call into question the morality of the English victors, by exhibiting in counterpoint a vanished way of life founded upon honour, generosity, hospitality to strangers, and loyalty to Clan and Laird. Ultimately, the destruction of the Highland clans after the catastrophe at Culloden was the twilight of a way of freedom through belonging to an extended family, the downfall of a system of obligations to a Laird who was immanent and personal and involved; against a modern state, with its alien ruling house, which is distant and impersonal and ultimately uncaring about the fate of the individual.

Waverley is not merely Scott's lament for the loss of a Scottish past aristocratic, romantic, worthy, and noble, to a British present increasingly crass, commercial, polluted, wage-driven, materialistic, anonymous, ignoble, and inglorious.  It is also the substitution of one kind of God for another or, perhaps, as the modern age has amply demonstrated, for none at all.

357 days, 49 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.