1. An Uneasy Alliance With The French
2. This Music Has A Whiff Of Papal Decadence About It; Are You Quite Sure You Are A Member Of The Elect?
3. Our Dreams Died With The Boy At Culloden
4. Ellen Refuses To Enter Into A Loveless Marriage As Her Highland Spirit Must Roam Free Or Be Broken
5. Life In Glasgow Grows Ever Grimmer
6. James Fitz-James Refuses To Discuss His Drink Problem At The Family Council
7. What Would The Poet Burns Ha’ Done?
8. This Rugged, Rocky Landscape Has Shaped Our Hardscrabble Souls In A Way This Soft-Handed Londoner Could Never Hope To Understand
9. The Preacher Withholds His Approval
10. Fishing Is More Important Than Talking About Your Feelings
11. What Do You Mean It’s Broken, All The Men Of The Family Said, As They Clustered Round And Shouted Over Each Other Over How Best To Fix It, Bring Us Another Drink And We’ll Have It Working In No Time
12. Sir Walter Scott Romanticizes The Highlands In A Historically Inaccurate Yet Enduring Way
13. In Hiding With The Jacobites
14. Those Effete Edinburghers
15. Flashman Escapes Just Consequences Yet Again, Commits Fornication
16. In The Long-Running Battle Between Guilt And Desire, Guilt Wins Out
17. Painting Your Shutters Is For Papists And Sexual Deviants; Whitewash Is Good Enough For The Likes Of Us
Tags: books, every novel ever, scotland
DYING. Especially the Flashman reference.
“Och! I wasna saying Boo-urns!”–Hans Moleman’s Scottish Ancestor
11 is one of those truths that transcend time and country.
it is true, that it requires only a critical mass of gents+alcohol of choice to engender one pretty much everywhere. Plus and also, in my family of origin, the women were fixing and using the object long before the general squabble-that-escalated had started to subside.
Ughh, I’m having a lot of Code Name Verity feels right now. “What Would The Poet Burns Ha’ Done?”= JUST STAB ME IN THE HEART THANKS.
And now I must weep.
Just took that out of the library today in order to reread it and cry!
That was my first thought. “My heart is sair for Somebody.” BRB, crying forever.
I was on a train listening to the audiobook when I got up to Morven Christie, as Julie, singing “My heart is sair…”
I really hope no one was looking, because friends, I started sobbing then, and I kept going for a while longer.
I have also cried over Code Name Verity on a train. It’s that sort of book.
Morven Christie is amazing and that audiobook made me cry in new places, which is a thing I didn’t think was possible.
Ellen sure does refuse to enter into a loveless marriage as her highland spirit must roam free or be broken. (I’ve never known many other Ellens and I’m always excited when one shows up and isn’t the maid.)
“I thought I was becoming besties with the Peter the Great but whoops it’s actually the Devil” is I guess only one particular Scottish novel* but one that most certainly deserves a mention.
*James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
This is what I came here to talk about.
“Hallucination, Devil, or Unreliable Narrator? You decide.”
“There are many opinions on predestination, but only one of them is CORRECT.”
“Now that I am saved I can use all my violent energy FOR THE LORD.”
Me too! oh man, Harriet? are you me?
I AM SO CONFUSED.
Apparently I need to start reading scottish novels.
This reminds me that I read Dorothy Sayers’s The Five Red Herrings this weekend, and it is full of scenes in which people with Scottish accents have intricate discussions of the relative merits of various train lines and their times and stops and transfers and all I could think was that it seemed like a direct precursor to the SNL “Californians” sketch, where Scots->Valley and trains->freeways.
“But, man, are ye no aware that the 8.45 disna mak’ ony connection wi’ London? It arrives in Carlisle at 9.59, which is verra late tae get dinner, and after that there’s nae train tae London till five meenuts past twelve.” Etc etc.
Running out to the library after work to find this wondrous novel.
I am having PTSD flashbacks. The only other Sayers that was as difficult to get through was The Nine Tailors, or “Much More Than I Ever Wanted To Know About Bell Ringing In English Parishes”.
The Nine Tailors stands up to rereading much better! Five Red Herrings was designed to be a straightforward puzzle-mystery and so is dull as wll as incomprehensible.
It has its moments, but I found it very hard to disentangle the six suspects, and no detective writer has ever managed to make a train timetable plot interesting. Still, any Lord Peter and Bunter novel is worth the slog, no matter how tedious the story.
noooooooo I ADORE Nine Tailors. I mean, Peter/Harriet all the way, but aside from the Harriet books, I love Nine Tailors the most.
Yes! I couldn’t read any of the Harriet books for a long time because of…*cough* Ok, it was because Peter was MINE, MINE, ALL MINE! and that took me a while to get over. But in that period of time I re-read The Nine Tailors so many times. So good. Sooo good. Seriously, if you want a writing exercise, check the first chapter of the NIne Tailors and watch how she uses Rev Venerables’ talking as he drives Peter and Bunter home to establish place and character. Oh god, I LOVE her characterizations!
Of course, I found that every time I came to a part about courses and bells I could just think about kittens wearing tapshoes for five minutes and then continue on. It’s not like understanding them is vital to the plot, unlike the cursed trains in FRH…
I’ve always secretly shipped Lord Peter and Bunter. Is that bad? The Nine Tailors is my favourite detective story hands down, and I’ve always loved the writing in the Venables chapters as a masterclass in plot and characterisation.
Looking at the amount of Peter and Bunter fic on the internet, I think that even if it’s bad you’re in good company.
I favor Murder Must Advertise myself. Is it mostly the title? It’s mostly the title.
Yup, those are the two that I’d only ever read once and remembered almost nothing about. Nine Tailors is next. I was kind of enjoying the LOOK AT ALL THE RESEARCH I DID quality of Five Red Herrings, so hopefully that’ll carry over into Nine Tailors.
I found the bell stuff fascinating! Whereas the train timetables just confused me. I always skip the reasoning bits of detective novels, because I’m not reading them to do a logic puzzle! I’m reading them for the comical early 20th-century characters and their mannerisms.
See also: the Sayers short story where the entire thing is a cryptic crossword puzzle. UGH.
It Leads Tae Hell If You’re Going There On The Sabbath
Based on an actual story told by some people who were mountain biking in Scotland and asked for directions. The Highlands can be particularly stern.
The Islands are worse – my godmother’s best friend and her whole family were shunned because she worked in a hotel on the mainland that had a bar in it. She didn’t work in the bar, she was a cleaner, but it was enough. They were denounced from the Pulpit. You still couldn’t hang out your washing or do anything other than read the Bible on Sundays until pretty recently in Shetland.
GO ON
OH, I HAVE A STORY LIKE THIS.
My mother’s family is not Scottish, rather New Jersey Irish Catholics. Back in the ’60s or early ’70s, the Pope declared it was acceptable to eat fish on Fridays. My great-grandfather’s response? “If the Pope wants to go to Hell, that’s his business.”
oh man speaking of the best scottish novel there is, remember when David has the fever and Alan tricks away his money and then loses it gambling with Cluny’s men and then David tries to provoke him into a duel by reminding him he has been ‘beaten on both sides’ and it works and Alan is just about to stab him in the gizzard when conscience overtakes him and he says it isna a fair fight because David is only a stupid boy with cold lowland blood who does not understand the burning pride of a man like Alan with his complicated highland loyalties, and then David faints and falls into Alan’s arms in remorse and they are friends again stronger than ever
what a good time that was. that book taught me all about Scotland and how to make a man fall in love with you (there are four ways: 1. be tall and gangly, 2. be short and powerful, 3. have a fever real bad, 4. be ready to run him through with a saber but then weep instead)
david SPECIFICALLY SAYS in the narration that Alan would go on fighting with him if he tried to explain himself so he just gets deliberately teary and says, either forgive me or leave me here to die, and it works in an instant because stubborn proud overbearing men are also deeply sentimental and easy to manipulate through crude emotional means. of all the life lessons in children’s books that is the one I have always remembered. it’s a good one
YES. I have shipped that so long for years and no one else has ever seemed to.
that can’t be possible, it just can’t. like 96 percent of my formative romantic fantasies came out of it. Alan Breck is the only fictional character I have been infatuated with for decades without ever having a physical picture of him in mind, I never even remember that he is short half the time because he is such a giant of my unconscious. I love everything Stevenson ever wrote, said, thought or did, but nothing is as good as Kidnapped. that book is erotic to the max. Alan Breck is what gallantry is all about. he is too good for David but he would cut you for saying so I bet, he is a loyal man.
Goddamn it, it’s like my whole course was worthless when I could just print this out for my final essay.
But yes. And much of this is still surprisingly relevant. Edinburghers are still effete, Glasgow grows ever grimmer, and my wee Highland heart still roams the mountains.
– Fiona in Aberdeen
O Heroin, My Heroin
If You Don’t Understand This Transcribed Dialect You Are Nae Troo Highlander And The Book Wasnae Meant For The Likes O’ Ye.
Lymond does this best of all.
Wi nae wee bairn ye’ll me beget, untwinkle little ee.
Oh no, earworm!
“I thought I was becoming besties with the Peter the Great but whoops it’s actually the Devil” is I guess only one particular Scottish novel but one that most certainly deserves a mention.
I am unreasonably pleased with this post
“Those Effete Edinburghers”
Tell me about it. All fur coat and nae knickers.*
(* My favorite Scottish expression).
That is my new favorite ever.
The problem is that so many of us here are english 😉
Please recommend some Scottish novels! All of these sound wonderful.
In addition to the fantastic Confessions of a Justified Sinner mentioned above, there’s also the amazing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Most of The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan takes place in Scotland, as do several of his subsequent novels. It’s evocative and very readable stuff, although a bit reliant on coincidences and with a rather weak ending which every adaptation since has rewitten. Warning – it was written in 1915 and attitudes to race, colour etc. are decidedly colonial.
Sunset Song. Definitely Sunset Song. It has an amazing female central character. The whole of A Scots Quair is brilliant, but the first part is the best and can be read as a standalone.
Lanark : A life in four books.
Very much “Life In Glasgow Grows Ever Grimmer” but also modern and witty and wonderful
::cries over perpetually unfinished Master’s thesis on Walter Scott::
I have never even read one his books, and I often walk past Waverly station, so very occasionally I feel bad about that gap.
I don’t think I read enough Scottish novels! But it did make me think of Josephine Tey and The Singing Sands, and her general “so you think because I write detective novels the mystery is the important part? LOL” attitude toward writing.
YES! ahem, Yes!! this! that book has haunted me for decades now, and I reread it far too often, and I am so so so sorry she wrote not more than the ones I can find and I am reduced to reading Brat Farrar forever and ever.
Sayers has the same attitude and I love her for it. (Also, I just read The Singing Sands, in a recent Tey binge. The mystery was definitely not the main thing I cared about.)
What about the Lymond chronicles? Dorothy Bennett, and her fondness for Scotland and her willingness to let people stray away from it only to return home to it again, in the MOST complex and hair-raising ways possible.
shh don’t mention Lymond, if Mallory takes to making fun of him and his ways it will blight my whole existence.
his problems are very serious and his emotional state is of grave importance
uhh, boyfriend literally developed testerical blindness from the force of his blue balls. I’m surprised he didn’t wind up with his testicles coming unmoored & sadly wandering through his body. Love Francis to bits but his problems are… make-fun-of-able.
Umm, Dorothy DUNNETT- her novels, both series, Lymond and Niccolo, my favourite books ever…
Extensive Golf With Historical Religious Commentary.
“Schoolmistress Thinks She Is The God of Calvin And Also Sex.”
Can’t have a list of Scottish novels without Miss Jean Brodie!
And my reading for Burns Night ’16 is taken care of!
Let’s Start This Novel At Book Three Because Why Not? And It’s Clearly Autobiographical Apart From All The Massively Weird Bits.
Lanark, by Alasdair Gray. Read it with goggles on to stop your eyes popping out.
5 is pretty much the Complete Works of Irvine Welsh in a nutshell. With subsections
5a: Life Sucks For Glasgow People Even When They Leave.
5b: Even In The Grimness We Grasp At Shreds Of Joy
Life In Glasgow Grows Ever Grimmer__I’ve been sitting watching it rain from my office window, watching it rain, all day. Can confirm.
Morven Christie is amazing and that audiobook made me cry in new places, which is a thing I didn't think was possible.
I AM SO CONFUSED.
The only Scottish books I read are trashy murder mysteries, but this makes me think I should expand my horizons ASAP.