‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child.
‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. The publisher’s mistake is appropriate. Kelly’s Walter Scott himself is a man who was never just what he seemed to be, and who invented an idea of a country and nation we can’t escape from. He wore a mask, several masks indeed, throughout his life, and put another mask on the face of Scotland. Many Scots resent it. Nobody has managed to remove it. Some resent Scott himself, as a Tory and a Unionist, a ‘sham bard of a sham nation’, as Edwin Muir put it, though unlike Scott’s critics today, he said the same of Robert Burns. Others who admire Scott claim him as a belated and also premature Nationalist.
Stuart Kelly, as a clever 16-year-old, despised Scott as ‘a second-rate Dickens, a pale shadow of Dumas’ (though it is actually in Scott’s shadow that Dumas worked) and thought that real novels ‘involved sexual dysfunction, random violence, typographical experimentation and lots of references to books I should have read, and then did.’ In contrast, any novel by the ‘Author of Waverley’ was ‘some kind of literary trilobite’.
Then he grew up, read Scott and found, for instance, that ‘the opening pages of Waverley had the very self-awareness I had thrilled to in its more strident and jejune form in the pages of the fading avant-garde.’
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