Difficult as this may be to believe, given my 19th-century-novel-reading propensities, I've never consumed many of Sir Walter Scott's books--to this point maybe just Waverly and Ivanhoe, and neither of those very recently. But now I am reading Old Mortality, which, as I've discovered, is crammed to the gills with page-turner plot devices: handsome young men on the lam, the vicissitudes of a rocky landscape, noble gentlemanly principles, beautiful fainting ladies who live in towers, sword play, the comic dialect of yokels, etc., etc. Yet it's also a serious treatise on 17th-century Scottish politics, economy, culture, and especially religious extremism; and as I read I'm seeing why Scott's work mattered so much to the social-conscience novelists who came after him--for instance, Charlotte Bronte, whose Shirley deals with similar religious/economic/cultural/political themes but in a Yorkshire weavers-versus-millowners setting.

It would be tough, however, to convince you that Old Mortality is a brisk, action-packed read if you were to start the novel at the beginning. For some reason, so many early novels have the most hideously boring opening chapters; and even though I have learned to expect verbiage, windy prefaces, and the coy asides of faux-narrators, I still cannot manage to make my way through Sterne's Tristram Shandy, no matter how funny Dickens found it. Even by Trollope's era, when the genre was in full swing, a novel's first chapter was likely to be dull. But the opening of OM goes beyond dull into excruciating. It begins with an introduction written in the voice of a pedantic schoolmaster, who is telling us that his assistant schoolmaster has recently died and left a poorly written manuscript in his care, which we are about to read. This is followed by a second intro, from the not-dead-yet assistant schoolmaster, discussing his composition habits (walks along the babbling brook in the gloaming, visiting the mossy churchyard as the little birds sing their evening lullabies, blah blah blah). Then, finally, Scott disentangles himself from all this maundering and hurls himself full steam into drama, suspense, plot twists, denouements, and come-uppances. There was absolutely no need for 30 pages of blathering backdrop, yet there they stood, blocking my way, so I obediently plowed through them. But I was sorry afterward.

[P.S. As I was taking a shower, I thought, You know which of Scott's contemporaries never began a novel with a boring chapter? Jane Austen, that's who. Queen of the Snappy Opening we might call her.]