mountains” that are even more forbidding. David’s perception of this land “as waste as the sea” (p. 193) is remarkably consistent throughout the narrative.
It was near noon before we set out: a dark day, with clouds and the sun shining upon little patches. The sea was here very deep and still, and had scarce a wave upon it; so that I must put the water to my lips, before I could believe it to be truly salt. The mountains on either side were high, rough and barren, very black and gloomy in the shadow of the clouds, but all silver-laced with little water-courses where the sun shone upon them. It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did. (p. 145)
Each of the first three sentences of this brief paragraph begins with an unremarkable observation (“It was near noon,” “The sea was … deep and still,” “The mountains … were high”), while the fourth and final sentence offers a summary judgment on all that went before. David has just entered the country of Appin, where the murder of Colin Campbell is about to occur. The time, so carefully indicated, is a detail that Stevenson drops into nearly every chapter, a means of enforcing the psychological realism and maintaining a tight rein on the structure. And the images, while foreshadowing the “death of the Red Fox,” are equally representative of the natural elements that recur throughout the text. The bright sun shining, the sea so still that it might pass for fresh water, the black mountains—the scene is more suggestive than descriptive; it is not a picture that Steven-son captures but a mood, and it is characteristic that both the attractive and the ominous elements coexist, or are conjoined in the scene itself. So the dark mountains are laced with rivulets that, under the reflection of the sun, are silver to the eye, thus encasing in prose Stevenson’s deep conviction that in nature, as in human experience, duality is all. But no scene, however suggestive-descriptive, is complete without commentary or interpretation: “It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did.” For David, a young man desperately in search of his origins, and almost preter- naturally sensitive to scenes of intimacy (“a scroll of smoke … meant a fire, and warmth, and cookery, and some living inhabitant that must have lit it; and this comforted my heart wonderfully” [p. 21]), the vastness and emptiness of the spaces only heightened his feelings of coldness and loneliness. What he does not yet understand, as Stevenson does, is that people’s attachment to their country often has little to do with the ease of the land: that place may have a more profound meaning for their lives than can be found in any calculus, and that despite the charms (and protection) of the country across the water, as Alan grudgingly admits, Scotland has a deeper hold on one’s affections: “‘France is a braw place, nae doubt; but I weary for the heather and the deer’” (p. 102).
Stevenson’s gift for evocation, achieved by the combination of prose rhythm and poetic image, is so subtle and compelling that a reader might easily overlook its role in developing and furthering the narrative. Nothing in a Stevenson text is merely technical, nothing is without meaning, and that is especially the case in a novel as densely compacted of ideas as Kidnapped, one that joins historical incident with psychological truth. The novel is based upon a famous political trial in Inveraray in 1752,8 and focuses on the period immediately following the defeat of the Jacobites in 1746 after their final failed effort to retrieve the crown of England for the house of Stewart. It would be fruitful to examine the narrative in this context. In our own time we have forgotten how deeply historical Stevenson was, how familiar he was with all aspects of Scottish life and culture, and how determined he was to represent it in his fiction. Indeed, the choice of subject of Kidnapped is nothing less than a testament to his own country’s history, ensuring that its transmission be shaped by a Scottish as opposed to an English reading. Stevenson provides that reading, and for all those devoted to the eighteenth century, and the unending studies of the last Jacobite rebellion, and the clan system, and the divergences between the Highlands and the Lowlands, and the clash between two cultures, and between three countries, Kidnapped is a model text.
Yet it is also a text that lives outside its own history, and independently of our knowledge of the real Colin Campbell’s murder, or Robin Oig’s hanging, or Alan Breck’s exile, even though those hard facts are not just integral but essential to the narrative. The novel has clearly flourished in an array of national cultures where the barest outlines of the historical events are Greek to the audience. Even North American readers can hardly be expected to know the incidents that the story purports to narrate. What, then, enables it to move readers in spite of (or apart from) its historical vestments? Perhaps it is the unobtrusive way in which fundamental realities about the conditions of the world are introduced into the narrative. For issues that Stevenson uncovers under the guise of adventure, indeed in the form of adventure, such as innocence terrorized, or cruel and capricious violence, to name just one constellation, are profoundly affecting as experiences and timeless when considered as philosophical reflections. This is a story that begins with the offstage presence of death and the palpable feeling of abandonment: David Balfour has just become an orphan. The question of how he will manage makes for interest, as Henry James might say, but in the world according to Stevenson, nothing comes without pain and certainly not without grief. For the conditions of life are hard—Stevenson called it a “battlefield” in The Suicide Club—and victory, which at best is nothing more than survival, is not for the faint of heart.
One of the most striking characteristics of Kidnapped is the starkness of its realism, a feature recognized immediately upon its publication: “Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid Mr. Stevenson is to say that he has the true Defoe manner, for there are all those little side issues, trifles, as it were, which he often introduces, which makes the whole thing, though you know it to be fiction, to read as if it were fact.”9 Although the realism touches all aspects of the narrative, from historical events to portraiture,10 it can be seen in some of the smallest details as well. There is Cluny Macpherson, rebel, imprisoned in his own “Cage,” half noble, half pathetic, offering David a meal of col- lops with a squeeze of lemon juice (“cookery was one of his chief fancies” [p. 204]), a small luxury he could not afford a few years earlier when Prince Charles visited him on the run from the English (“‘for at that time we were glad to get the meat and never fashed for kitchen’” [p. 205]). Or David alone on the isle Earraid, cold, weary, and wet, who “knew indeed that shellfish were counted good to eat” (Stevenson had read that in Edmund Burt)11 and who then winds up nearly “retching” to death. So much for the truth of books. Unlike in fanciful fiction, David never knows what to expect from his diet of raw fish; “sometimes all was well and sometimes I was thrown into a miserable sickness; nor could I ever distinguish what particular fish it was that hurt me” (p. 119). This might be read as emblematic of one of the book’s central principles: David Balfour lives with the same kind of uncertainty as do people in life. Stevenson places us in David’s position so that we are roughly in the same state of confusion and ignorance as he is when confronted by his uncle, or Captain Hoseason, on Earraid or in the Highlands. The purpose of the narrative is to make us first experience the action, then only gradually come to understand its meaning, so that the lesson of life is that we engage first, and only later do we understand. In effect, Stevenson illustrates a general principle of life, that our knowledge cannot come before our experience; or put another way, existence precedes understanding.
We must be careful how far we take this argument, or at least not rigidify it. For Stevenson was a deep believer in the embodiment of intelligence in books. We cannot say that he argues for experience at the expense of knowledge. When David finally gets off Earraid, he says that had he been sea bred he would not have spent a day on the isle, but if he had only “sat down to think” he “must have soon guessed the secret and got free” (p. 125). For boys of the sea it is a matter of knowledge that comes by way of experience; for David, lacking the experience, it is a problem to be deduced through the use of intelligence, a process that is about the best one can hope for in an imperfect world, or in a world where the experiences
