Book Review: The Dark Mile
Jan. 13th, 2022 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have finished D. K. Broster’s Jacobite trilogy with The Dark Mile! Which, alas, I didn’t like as much as the others.
The Flight of the Heron was very tightly structured with the whole “five prophesied meetings” thing. The Gleam in the North was somewhat more diffuse, but still had a strong throughline the story of Dr. Archibald Campbell, and Ewen’s increasingly desperate (and ultimately unavailing) attempts to save him from the scaffold. The Dark Mile, on the other hand, feels like a fairly focused novella padded out with a love story.
That novella is the answer to the question “Who betrayed Dr. Campbell to his death?” Ewen thinks that the answer is Finlay MacPhair, a Highland chief of impeccable Jacobite credentials who is, unfortunately, also a British spy. But this is not true (although the odious Finlay wishes it was, because then he could collect the reward money): the true betrayer is Mr. Maitland, also a Jacobite, who betrayed Dr. Campbell not from base motives but out of an earnest desire to prevent the useless bloodshed that would result from another Rising.
Readers familiar with Broster will be unsurprised when Ewen ends up nursing Mr. Maitland back to health in his own house after Mr. Maitland takes ill in rushing to find help for Ewen’s hotheaded brother-in-law, Hector Grant, whom Finlay MacPhair had chained to a castle wall. (There’s quite a good moment when Hector assures himself that SURELY MacPhair won’t dare to kill him, with the English garrison so near and the traditional Scottish laird’s rights on his own demesne abrogated by English law… and then is horrified to find himself looking for hope in that particular direction.)
The problem is that, one, that Broster has pulled this particular trick enough times in this trilogy that the astute reader knows more or less how this will end almost as soon as Mr. Maitland’s treachery is revealed; and, two, this story is not enough to fill a book, and what fills the rest of it is a love story between Ewen’s cousin Ian Stewart and a daughter of the house of Campbell. The Stewarts and the Campbells are like unto the Montagus and Capulets, so their love CANNOT BE… until it turns out (in an eleventh hour reveal from Mr. Maitland) that Miss Campbell is in fact only an ADOPTED Campbell; her adoptive mother’s sister (Miss Campbell’s birth mother) died when her daughter was but a babe, and then Mrs. Campbell took in the baby and raised the child as her own, etc. etc.
Now possibly to a Scottish laird the fact that Miss Campbell is in fact an Urquhart by birth truly does CHANGE EVERYTHING!, but I felt (1) she’s still been raised as a Campbell for the last two decades and has surely picked up perfidious Campbell values in the process? If I were an anti-Campbell Scottish laird that would certainly bother me, and (2) this reveal just seemed a little bit too convenient, honestly. It’s not that I wanted them to drown themselves Romeo and Juliet style in the loch, but…
The book also contains no mention of Keith and only the briefest mention of his family (his stepfather secured for Ewen the right to bear arms, generally forbidden to the Scottish gentry after the Rising). In a way this is fair enough: it’s been years since Keith’s death, and I suspect that Dr. Cameron’s death has sort of driven other tragedies out of Ewen’s mind, given that he was on the very scaffold with Archie, and that Archie’s betrayer remains at large (and thus looms large in Ewen’s mind). Keith’s death is tragic, but there is no mystery about it.
…All the same, I think the book would have been improved had Keith’s half-brother Lord Aveling come to visit Ardroy, or something of that sort, if only because we could have had a bit less of Ian Stewart’s hopeless pining. I like hopeless pining as much as the next person but COME ON.
The Flight of the Heron was very tightly structured with the whole “five prophesied meetings” thing. The Gleam in the North was somewhat more diffuse, but still had a strong throughline the story of Dr. Archibald Campbell, and Ewen’s increasingly desperate (and ultimately unavailing) attempts to save him from the scaffold. The Dark Mile, on the other hand, feels like a fairly focused novella padded out with a love story.
That novella is the answer to the question “Who betrayed Dr. Campbell to his death?” Ewen thinks that the answer is Finlay MacPhair, a Highland chief of impeccable Jacobite credentials who is, unfortunately, also a British spy. But this is not true (although the odious Finlay wishes it was, because then he could collect the reward money): the true betrayer is Mr. Maitland, also a Jacobite, who betrayed Dr. Campbell not from base motives but out of an earnest desire to prevent the useless bloodshed that would result from another Rising.
Readers familiar with Broster will be unsurprised when Ewen ends up nursing Mr. Maitland back to health in his own house after Mr. Maitland takes ill in rushing to find help for Ewen’s hotheaded brother-in-law, Hector Grant, whom Finlay MacPhair had chained to a castle wall. (There’s quite a good moment when Hector assures himself that SURELY MacPhair won’t dare to kill him, with the English garrison so near and the traditional Scottish laird’s rights on his own demesne abrogated by English law… and then is horrified to find himself looking for hope in that particular direction.)
The problem is that, one, that Broster has pulled this particular trick enough times in this trilogy that the astute reader knows more or less how this will end almost as soon as Mr. Maitland’s treachery is revealed; and, two, this story is not enough to fill a book, and what fills the rest of it is a love story between Ewen’s cousin Ian Stewart and a daughter of the house of Campbell. The Stewarts and the Campbells are like unto the Montagus and Capulets, so their love CANNOT BE… until it turns out (in an eleventh hour reveal from Mr. Maitland) that Miss Campbell is in fact only an ADOPTED Campbell; her adoptive mother’s sister (Miss Campbell’s birth mother) died when her daughter was but a babe, and then Mrs. Campbell took in the baby and raised the child as her own, etc. etc.
Now possibly to a Scottish laird the fact that Miss Campbell is in fact an Urquhart by birth truly does CHANGE EVERYTHING!, but I felt (1) she’s still been raised as a Campbell for the last two decades and has surely picked up perfidious Campbell values in the process? If I were an anti-Campbell Scottish laird that would certainly bother me, and (2) this reveal just seemed a little bit too convenient, honestly. It’s not that I wanted them to drown themselves Romeo and Juliet style in the loch, but…
The book also contains no mention of Keith and only the briefest mention of his family (his stepfather secured for Ewen the right to bear arms, generally forbidden to the Scottish gentry after the Rising). In a way this is fair enough: it’s been years since Keith’s death, and I suspect that Dr. Cameron’s death has sort of driven other tragedies out of Ewen’s mind, given that he was on the very scaffold with Archie, and that Archie’s betrayer remains at large (and thus looms large in Ewen’s mind). Keith’s death is tragic, but there is no mystery about it.
…All the same, I think the book would have been improved had Keith’s half-brother Lord Aveling come to visit Ardroy, or something of that sort, if only because we could have had a bit less of Ian Stewart’s hopeless pining. I like hopeless pining as much as the next person but COME ON.
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Date: 2022-01-13 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 05:48 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I've commented on this particular aspect before, so it may not be a porridge-brain issue so much as the fact that I've mostly written about other things.
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Date: 2022-01-13 04:43 pm (UTC)At least two out of three isn't bad? Although unfortunate that the trilogy ends on a weak note.
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Date: 2022-01-13 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 06:55 pm (UTC)Even though the book doesn't come together as well as the other two, it did still DEFINITELY have some peak quality scenes. I also really like MacPhair as a baddie: his evil is just so waspish and petty that one can but cheer when he is thwarted at every turn.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 10:28 pm (UTC)Yep, it's definitely the weakest of the three.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-14 04:05 pm (UTC)