I find "Redgauntlet" one of the less satisfactory novels in the Waverley series. Certainly, it has the local flavor, the dialect, the imaginative description of evocative landscapes all his novels have, but it is not a blast as some of the others are. The plot involves a fictitious third Jacobite rebellion, and it is interesting to see how Scott (especially in the notes from the Magnum edition, included in this edition) argues this time not for the historicity but for the historical probability of the events described. While Scott is often hailed as the inventor of the historical novel, "Redgauntlet" also shows him to be a forerunner in the historically probable novel--a genre practiced to great effect by our present-day history buff, Umberto Eco.

But probability alone does not a great novel make. Darsie Latimer's character is even less probable than his semi-historical counterparts, such as Edmund Waverley and Henry Morton. And this is strange, since moving further into fictionality, one could argue, a writer might allow themselves more latitude to make a character interesting, even if certain circumstances remain historical. Is this a conscious effort on Scott's part to show, after the fictionality of history, the fictionality of fiction?

Scott disturbs narrative conventions even further when the conspiracy against the Hanoverian King George III completely fails to materialize--ironically, for what seems to be the silliest of reasons: the Pretender (or the Chevalier if you're a Jacobite), Charles Stuart, refuses to give up his mistress. Thus, the main plot of the novel sizzles out and really not much happens in these 400 pages. Mind you, I personally don't need much to happen, but the 19th century novel did. Scott as a postmodern writer? That is pushing it too far, but this novel awaits a postmodern critique enlightened by a reading of Eco and Bakhtin.

That said, there are some really interesting things going on. Apart from the "regular" set of characters of Scott's Scottish novels, this one features an orthodox Quaker who is the epitome of anti-militant mercantilism. The form is also quite new for Scott--the novel is an epistolary, a set of letters between Darsie Latimer and his friend Alan Fairford. Thus, the novel's first-person point of view is split, and this provides for interesting contrasts.

For me, Scott sort of shot himself in the foot with this novel. His earlier novels ("Redgauntlet" is the last of the Scottish novels, written eight years before his death) lead one to expect a major action to happen before the denouement, and this one avoids that a bit too artificially. It seems that Scott was at pains to stick to history, and his own political convictions, a bit too much: a fictitious Jacobite rebellion is OK as a narrative vehicle, but it shouldn't interfere with the peaceful Great Britain (in which Scotland was in many respects subsidiary to England) that Scott himself inhabited and advocated. And so narrative excitement has to give way to Scott's pacifist politics--an honest choice, which Scott consistently maintains in all the Waverley novels--and character development and politics take precedent.

A final note: Scott has always proven himself a masterful and honest critic of royalty and nobility, especially of those characters he seems to love. "Waverley"'s Mac-Ivor is chastised for his political obstinacy, in "The Fortunes of Nigel" King James I (a Scot) is rebuked for his fickleness and corruption, and in "Redgauntlet" the formerly charismatic Stuart proves effeminate and tragic (dying an impoverished alcoholic, in the footnotes). And often enough, these tragic characters are of more interest than the somewhat ineffectual and sometimes foolish main characters: something for readers of literature to sink their teeth into.