The finest Robert Louis Stevenson novel I hadn’t read, The Master of Ballantrae (1889) blends the high-seas piracy of Kidnapped! and Treasure Island, with Jekyll & Hyde‘s dark doubled vision of humanity. It seems to have had a strong influence on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1909), of which I was vividly reminded during certain long discussions in a ship’s cabin during a storm. And toward the stripped-down end of the novel, it turns into a grim frontier adventure reminiscent of Antonia Bird’s sublime Ravenous.
Highly recommended. Not all that hard to find online.
“Before us was the high range of mountains toward which we had been all day deviously drawing near. From the first light of the dawn, their silver peaks had been the goal of our advance across a tumbled lowland forest, thrid with rough streams, and strewn with monstrous boulders; the peaks (as I say) silver, for already at the higher altitudes the snow fell nightly; but the woods and the low ground only breathed upon with frost. All day heaven had been charged with ugly vapours, in the which the sun swam and glimmered like a shilling piece; all day the wind blew on our left cheek barbarous cold, but very pure to breathe. With the end of the afternoon, however, the wind fell; the clouds, being no longer reinforced, were scattered or drunk up; the sun set behind us with some wintry splendour, and the white brow of the mountains shared its dying glow.”
I have no doubt that my recent one-day sojourn in Roatan spurred a renewed interest in Stevenson, but I ended up glomming onto this instead of any of his South Sea stories.
[...] – This is not game-related in content at all, but Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw just updated his weblog with a great book recommendation: “The finest Robert Louis Stevenson novel I hadn’t read, The Master of Ballantrae (1889) blends the high-seas piracy of Kidnapped! and Treasure Island, with Jekyll & Hyde’s dark doubled vision of humanity. It seems to have had a strong influence on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1909), of which I was vividly reminded during certain long discussions in a ship’s cabin during a storm. And toward the stripped-down end of the novel, it turns into a grim frontier adventure reminiscent of Antonia Bird’s sublime Ravenous.” So there. [...]
I’m stunned. Having just read this book by random selection from my complete works of Stevenson, I find it to be a complete waste of time. The eponymous “hero” is a wholly despicable person, for whom the narrator has an unnatural ambivalence that could come right out of Gide. In fact, the behavior of all of the other major characters in this book is so perverse that as I read I felt as if there must be some huge joke behind it all that would somehow come clear. It didn’t, but some mobid fascination rather than any tension or excitement in the story itself kept me reading until the end. I cannot believe that this is regarded as a work of any merit whatsoever.
I thought the “unnatural ambivalence” of the narrator was a deliberate attempt to depict a mind making accommodations for evil that it in no way deserves, without actually giving in to it. This is especially strong in the ocean passages. However, the things that cause you to dislike it are the things I enjoyed about it, and which I think would lead others to find it anything but a waste of time. It does exert a morbid fascination beyond the level of plot, which admittedly creaks a bit–doubtless one reason it remains a minor Stevenson. I found the atmosphere of the ending quite powerful even if the specifics of the plot were by modern standards somewhat ludicrous. So I continue to feel the book has merit…it’s nice that you took the time to register how much you disliked it though. Books I find to be without merit generally don’t get finished.