cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-11 11:01 am
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-11 11:01 am
Entry tags:
Scott, various
I finally read Waverley earlier this year, and loved it (my next step will be to read a nonScots Scott, as I've also read Old Mortality), so picked this up - Walter Scott, as the sheriff of Edinburgh, investigates a case involving disappearing women and the eponymous Lady in the Loch.
The plotting is obvious - for a while, I thought the author was trying for a double-bluff, as the hints as to who is the first person narrator of the interspersed medical notes (a la Doctor Frankenstein) were so heavily inserted - but the descriptions of early Edinburgh are evocative without being intrusive. I like Scott in it, but he seems to have had his edges smoothed off, or maybe it's just my mental image of him. Midge Margaret, one of the travellers who asks for his help, is also good.
Scarborough starts the book with a set piece in which the stabbed body of a girl sits up (at midnight, at a wake, after being called) and identifies her murderer. In her version of Edinburgh, magic works, but it's mostly side-lined, old-fashioned. I found this an interesting decision, but I'm not sure it worked for me. I find it difficult believing that reliably raising the dead wouldn't impress people and stick in their minds as something useful to do.
One of the plot points in this story is the selling of bodies (sometimes over-fresh) to doctors for dissection, which reminds me that I did want to, at some stage, look up the contemporary medical literature to see how this was discussed. This, in my head, is tagged next to Arthur Conan Doyle's letters in one of the British medical journals (the Lancet, I think) about the cost of keeping a horse, which indicates some of my problems with internal organisation.
The plotting is obvious - for a while, I thought the author was trying for a double-bluff, as the hints as to who is the first person narrator of the interspersed medical notes (a la Doctor Frankenstein) were so heavily inserted - but the descriptions of early Edinburgh are evocative without being intrusive. I like Scott in it, but he seems to have had his edges smoothed off, or maybe it's just my mental image of him. Midge Margaret, one of the travellers who asks for his help, is also good.
Scarborough starts the book with a set piece in which the stabbed body of a girl sits up (at midnight, at a wake, after being called) and identifies her murderer. In her version of Edinburgh, magic works, but it's mostly side-lined, old-fashioned. I found this an interesting decision, but I'm not sure it worked for me. I find it difficult believing that reliably raising the dead wouldn't impress people and stick in their minds as something useful to do.
One of the plot points in this story is the selling of bodies (sometimes over-fresh) to doctors for dissection, which reminds me that I did want to, at some stage, look up the contemporary medical literature to see how this was discussed. This, in my head, is tagged next to Arthur Conan Doyle's letters in one of the British medical journals (the Lancet, I think) about the cost of keeping a horse, which indicates some of my problems with internal organisation.