279 pages
Published 1886
Read from July 4 to July 7
Rating: 2 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
One of my favorite books as a kid was Treasure Island. This is no doubt a common outcome when your father is controlling and abusive and doesn’t let you read much, if anything, more current than the Edwardian era. So it happened that, when I was still young enough to eat up Readers Digest condensed classics (those stalwarts of impoverished American childhoods in the '80s and early '90s), I was thrilled to get my hands on their bowdlerized version of Kidnapped from the dollar store. Another seafaring adventure from Robert Louis Stevenson! Surely it would be exactly as good as Treasure Island!
Kidnapped is, of course, a very different book than Treasure Island. It was one of the very first times in my young life that I learned I could dislike a book. I don't remember why I didn't like it, though. I wouldn't be surprised if the Lowland Scots dialogue muddled my preteen brain; even at 40, I have no idea what the exclamation “Hoot-toot!” is meant to correspond to in actual Scots speech. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to follow the intricacies of Jacobite vs Whig politics as a child. Or maybe I tired of interminable wandering over the heather. Whatever the reason, Kidnapped was one of the vanishingly few books I had as a kid that I didn't reread even once.
Maybe as a consequence of that, Kidnapped became a book I've wanted to revisit for much of my adult life. (Or at least since I got my library card and began this blog, all those years ago.) Weirdly, the Suffolk County library system had exactly one copy, and it was a ratty old tome, fraying apart along the spine, so I didn’t try to read it. I finally happened upon a cheap Scholastic edition at the used bookstore a few weeks ago. At long last we can answer: Was it truly so mediocre? Or was it simply above my reading level?
After all these years, I can report: It’s fine? I guess?
Stevenson’s primary storytelling skill here is characterization. Uncle Ebenezer is one of the great bastards of Victorian literature, a standout in a crowded field. Ebenezer is so perfectly realized on the page: a miser in a flannel nightgown, refusing to have lights in the house, happy to measure out half of his own beer into David's cup if he wants a drink at dinner. David himself, by contrast, is insufferably smug and classist, perennially thinking himself superior to everyone and the master of every situation. There's a place for unappealing narrators, and I’m sure his priggishness was thoroughly realistic, but David being a titled prick who I want to push into a bog does the story no favors.
The true star of the book is Alan Breck, whose characterization here — a swaggering braggart in love with his own legend, a Jacobite partisan who forms a fast friendship with a Whig lad simply because the lad witnessed Alan’s feats of swordsmanship — is one I want to recycle for a queer sword and sorcery story.
When it comes to plotting, or even adventure, however, Stevenson does an indifferent job. Our young hero David caroms from seeking his fortune at his uncle’s house, to the titular kidnapping, to fighting beside Alan, to shipwreck, to a half-hearted Robinson Crusoe sequence, to a traipse across a couple Scottish islands, to witnessing a murder, to fleeing across the heather with Alan, to lying sick in a croft for a month, to (finally) talking to a lawyer. It is, if nothing else, thoroughly Victorian — a sprawling mess with a little bit of everything thrown in, for the kids to enjoy in their weekly serial. No wonder it was all too much for a kid in the early 1990s who just wanted some more swashbuckling.
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