A review by vasha
Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson

Did not finish book. Stopped at 80%.

I'll bet a lot of people here have read Kidnapped, but few will have read it together with its second half Catriona. This I attempted, only to find out for myself why it isn't often done. For a brief recap, Kidnapped is the story of David Balfour whose scheming uncle has him abducted; he escapes (details omitted, no spoilers) and later is falsely implicated in a murder and has to flee from the forces of the law. At the end of the novel he satisfactorily deals with his uncle, but the issue of the murder is unresolved, with an innocent man on trial and possibly able to be saved by Balfour's testimony, if he could give it... The book breaks off almost in the middle of a paragraph. I don't know why Stevenson couldn't finish it at the time, but when he finally did, seven years later, the result was rather a mess. In my opinion the work as a whole is what's known as a "curate's egg." Catriona resolves the trial business at considerably more length than necessary; that section has the merit of interestingly continuing some political themes that were touched on in the first volume, but it's diffuse. It's even interrupted by a stay on an isolated island, not uninteresting but a digression, and the telling of a lengthy folktale... And to roll even more genres into one novel, there are some not-too-interesting attempts at the comedy of a naive young man in good society, and after the trial concludes, a long and wearisomely Victorian love story. That last was what finally forced me to stop reading 80% through. It's too bad, because I think I can see the outlines of an effective conclusion to Kidnapped that would have included about 1/3 of the material in Catriona, somewhat rearranged. Even the love story could have contributed; it could have tied in nicely to the political and cultural themes of the book, if shorn of a vast amount of piffle. Oh well, no use regretting the great novel that could have been; I'll do as most people do, read Kidnapped and imagine how it should end.