The Heart of Mid-Lothian

"Well, all the books I have chosen were also landmarks in my own understanding of Scottish literature. I could have chosen any number of books. But I start with this one because until I was in my twenties, I had never read a Walter Scott novel. I’d read some of his poetry, but none of his fiction; I had tried when I was younger, but never got very far. It seemed hard-going and the books were very long. Anyway, I was doing a postgraduate degree in Scottish history and I began to realise that I was going to have to focus a lot on Scott, and ended up reading virtually everything he’d written. It was a revelation to me. I hadn’t appreciated what a major figure he was in our literature, and how he shaped so much of what happened subsequently. The Heart of Mid-Lothian was his seventh novel, and to me it’s his masterpiece. It’s a big book, longer even than most of his other novels. It’s set in 1736, so thirty or so years after the union of parliaments— —and he deals with the politics of the Union, and whether it’s working or not working, and how people feel about it. But he also has another story going on, the story of two sisters: Jeanie and Effie Deans. It seems to me quite a contemporary story, which is one of the reasons why I think it’s still relevant. Effie and Jeanie are the daughters of this very upright Presbyterian man. They live on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Effie’s been having a secret affair, and she’s fallen pregnant. She doesn’t tell anybody about it. Then her child is born, but nobody knows where the child is. As the law stood in those days, if it was known that you had had a child but you couldn’t produce it, then the assumption was that you had done away with it and you would be found guilty of the child’s murder. “Scottish literature is best understood if you treat it as something distinctive and separate” So Effie’s facing execution, and Jeanie believes her sister’s telling the truth when she says she didn’t kill it—but Effie still refuses to say what’s happened. Eventually Jeanie walks all the way to London, to try to seek an audience with the queen, and get her sister pardoned. There’s a lot more going on, but that’s the guts of it. There’s a very human story about these two sisters, set against the backdrop of this big political and cultural shift. It’s a huge, panoramic kind of novel. There’s a big set piece in the first few chapters, the Porteous Riots, which is a historical event. Scott wonderfully brings it to life in fiction. And—this is one of the reasons why I think Scott is so important, and why this novel in particular is so good—he has fictional characters rub shoulders with real historical figures. Jeanie meets the Queen, the Duke of Argyll and others. Walter Scott is the father of the modern historical novel . It’s a fantastic book, full of great characters, and many of the characters speak in a really beautiful Scots. It’s a real shame that Scott isn’t more widely read now, because his best novels are very good. One of the reasons I write big novels myself is that I want to try and emulate the sweep and skill of a novel like The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Obviously I try to write in my own voice, but I can’t deny that there’s probably a wee bit of Walter Scott’s influence in some of what I’ve written in the past. Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and other favourite writers from that period who we will come on to. There’s no question that the way they wrote about history has influenced and affected me."