Sometimes we’re allowed to indulge ourselves, and as part of the BBC’s #LovetoRead season I had the chance to choose a book that meant a lot to me as a young reader. It was easy to decide on something by Robert Louis Stevenson. But which one? In the end, it was Kidnapped, although of course it was hard to put aside Treasure Island. To add to my happiness we managed to record Bookclub in the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry, just under the girders of the Forth Bridge, which is the very place where Stevenson is said to be started to write the story (in Room 13) and the inn from which the young David Balfour is snatched on the order of his bad uncle Ebenezer, and taken on board a ship bound for the Carolinas. Of course, it is the start of a wild adventure that begins after a shipwreck off the isle of Mull and takes David and his new friend – the Jacobite renegade Alan Breck Stewart – on a perilous journey across Scotland and finally home to Edinburgh, where he claims his rightful inheritance.
It’s a story of adventure, friendship and war. Scotland is divided after the 1745 rising – between Highlands and Lowlands, across the religious schism – and young David is blooded in a country where loyalties are preserved at a price. The red-coated soldiers of the King are ready to deal with any evidence of rebellion, and David and Alan are running for their lives. We had the novelist Louise Welsh as a guide – she’s a huge Stevenson admirer – and we spoke about the subtlety of the story-telling, the wonderful evocation of youthful innocence, the picture of a dark and divided country. Our Bookclub audience was powerfully engaged in the book – we had a couple who live in one of Stevenson’s old homes in Edinburgh – and there was a wonderful series of reminiscences about the way the book had excited them at a young age.
And a number of them spoke about how intriguing it was to come back to the book in later life and to find how dark a story it was: the evocation of a difficult but passionate friendship between two people who were on different sides of a cultural and political divide, Balfour from a Lowland, Presbyterian background whose family would always support King George, Stewart a Highland Jacobite still loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie back in France and the idea of the restoration of a Catholic monarchy.
Above all we spoke about how Stevenson could spin a rattling good yarn with deceptive ease. He was a writer with profound psychological insights – think of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – but he knew how to write concise, clear and uplifting prose. Over the years he’s suffered a little for being seen as ‘a children’s writer’ – imagine! – as if that is not something to be proud of. But in recent years the people who have always rated Stevenson highly (and that goes back to literary figures like Henry James) have found that his reputation has been rising. Edinburgh, his childhood home from which he had to depart because of his consumptive illness (he died in Samoa in his mid-forties in 1894), has played its part in celebrating his life and work.
And this Bookclub has done its best, too. I hope my moment of self-indulgence has made for a good programme, just as the chance to select some favourite readings and dramatizations from the Radio 4 Archive will give you some pleasure when it is broadcast on Saturday on Radio 4 Extra throughout the morning (and again in the evening – what an embarrassment of riches…)
You can listen to James Naughtie - I love to Read on BBC Radio 4 Extra here.
Happy reading,
Jim.
