Extract from the Epilogue of 'Narrating Scotland'

Of all of Stevenson' many and varied works, the critical consensus, virtually by acclamation, was that Kidnapped and David Balfour exhibited all his best qualities in their finest form. The books represented "the topmost reach" of his art, "the high water-mark of [his] powers as a novelist," and were his "most substantial claim to fame." None thought Kidnapped a boy's book, and not a few were shrewd enough to see a "more compact and highly-wrought style" in David Balfour, attributed to Stevenson's last years in the Pacific and his maturity as a writer.

In the eyes of Stevenson's readers, these two books constituted a masterwork of fiction, and they were eager to slot it into the recognizable form of of the historical novel, hence the repeated invocation of the name of Scott. Yet, over time, these books lost their status as historical fictions. Kidnapped was transformed into a popular classic for boys, and David Balfour disappeared into semi-oblivion. The historical character of the novels was virtually relegated to Stevenson's own comment in his dedication and to the the occasional scholar, like David Daiches, who called our attention to the world that stood behind the story. But in a sense Stevenson's own contemporaries were in the dark as to his larger objectives - to create a historical fiction within the context of the nineteenth-century realistic novel and to base that fiction so completely on fact that it would be impossible to distinguish between the two genres. He succeeded by refining down the realistic-historical novel, which was almost a contradiction in terms, into an art where the style became a poetic instrument yet the realistic base was never lost. Time was reduced to a brevity worthy of an Aristotelian, and the history embedded in the elegance and simplicity of the plot concealed itself so as not to turn the book into just another Victorian triple-decker. Stevenson created a social and political chronicle without ever giving he impression of having done so. It was at bottom an anticolonialist document, both a proclamation and an elegy for a vanished culture, a statement on the power of art to reclaim the past and reconstitute its victims and its villains, in the process giving them all a place in the endless stream of years that we call history, but that is really nothing more, nor less, than life itself. It was, in the end, one of the most daringly inventive achievements in English prose fiction, and one that was virtually sui generis. To duplicate it required both scholarship and artistry of a high order, and it was not until the late twentieth century, with the collapse of the genres of fact and fiction, or perhaps their merger, that the originality of his experiment could be appreciated. Both in the impulse that intuited a major subject in an old crime, and in the technique that brought that idea to life, Stevenson paved the way for later writers like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and W.G. Sebald.

Kidnapped and David Balfour formed the arc of Stevenson's career. When he was writing the first book, he was a midlist author, still making a name for himself, familiar to the Grub Street fraternity as exceptional but not above publishing a disposable pulp weekly. By the time of David Balfour he was R.L.S., known throughout the English-speaking world simply by his initials. Yet, in a fundamental way, Stevenson never really changed, even though his style and his manner matured in the course of those seven years. The painstakingness with which he ground out the last chapters of Kidnapped, or the handwritten composition of two complete versions of David Balfour, is more than an emblem of his art. For he always wrote with such intense exactitude - one only has to look at a manuscript page to see the meticulous care of his hand - as if he were writing against physical illness itself, even against mortality, as if to write were to live, to endure, and in the end endurance, like ripeness, was all.

Extract by kind permission of Barry Menikoff