My thanks go to Peggy Ann for pointing me in the direction of this book. I really enjoyed it. Again, it’s set in Scotland so it’s not exactly exotic for me, but although Susanna Kearsley is actually Canadian she did very well at getting the correct speech patterns and of course the book is sprinkled with a plethora of Scots words.
Verity Grey is a young, ambitious English archaeologist who is travelling to a dig near Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders. Peter Quinnell is in charge of the dig, he’s getting on in years and the archaelogical world sees him as a bit of a nutter, but Peter is determined to be taken seriously and he has the money to pay for plenty of assistants.
Peter is looking for the lost Ninth Roman Legion. Although there is no evidence of any Roman camp in the area, Peter is sure there is one because young Robbie, a local 8 year old who has the ‘second sight’ has seen a Roman soldier walking around in the fields.
This book did remind me of Mary Stewart and Rosemary Sutcliff, which can’t be bad. It’s a mixture of mystery, history and the supernatural and has romance thrown in for good measure. I could quite happily do without the romance but I understand that for a lot of people the romance will be the most important aspect of the book. I must admit that I think I have a 10 year old boy stuck in me somehow as my reaction to romance is generally yeuch – but it’s probably something to do with me having been married for a very long time indeed!
You might know that I never see anything as being perfect – in fact I don’t think perfection is possible or even desirable, so here are my few gripes.
I could have been doing with a bit more description of scenery, but that goes for nearly every book which I read. The other thing is my bugbear because although the author says that she had the book checked to make sure that there were no mistakes in her Scots I have to report that one did get through the checkers – and it was on page 300. It’s not the first time that I’ve found this mistake in Scots and in fact the word might have been ‘corrected’ by an English editor. That has happened before I know, and I happen to know that the author involved had words with his editor who realised that he had been wrong and it was put back to the original version. I am of course speaking about – amn’t I, because there are not only Scots words but also Scots grammar and there is just no way that a Scottish lad from Eyemouth would be saying – ‘I’m a finds assistant, aren’t I, Miss Grey?’ Of course he should have said amn’t I.
What’s she making a fuss about? I hear you say. But it is important that we don’t lose the correct way to speak Scots and it is in danger of being wiped out because from time to time Scottish actors do occasionally say aren’t I on TV, obviously because they aren’t confident enough to say to the director that it’s wrong. They should because it sounds awful in a Scots accent, but more than that we will get Scottish youngsters speaking like that because someone on the telly did, and I happen to think that the Scots language is every bit as important as the Gaelic language, so we have to be vigilant otherwise it will disappear and we will be left with just an accent rather than a dialect and language.
As my m-i-l grew up in Eyemouth I know for sure that it isn’t some kind of weird anomaly that they speak in an English way there. She definitely said amn’t I despite the fact that she was a daughter of the rectory, meaning that her father was the minister of the Scottish Episcopal Church there, and they were always seen as being a bit posh/snooty/English!
Of course the same goes for all languages, they are mobile to an extent but it can be taken too far. Another of my pet hates is the English word fulsome – well I don’t hate the word but I hate the fact that people use it completely wrongly. We’re always hearing people on TV speaking about ‘fulsome praise’ – when they mean that someone or something has been praised a lot. However the word fulsome means – cloying, excessive, disgusting by excess, which is a very different meaning altogether. Honestly, look it up if you don’t believe me. Call me Mrs Pedantic if you like, I don’t mind!
Anyway that’s my rant over, to get back to the book, I’ll be looking for more books by Susanna Kearsley in the future and if you are doing a Canadian reading challenge, which I’m not, remember that she is a Canadian author.
Robinsheugh by Eileen Dunlop was first published in 1975. The setting is the Scottish Border Country, but it begins in London’s King’s Cross Station where Elizabeth has just boarded a train bound for Scotland. She’s not at all happy, her parents are going to America for months and Elizabeth had been desperate to go with them, but it couldn’t be afforded and Elizabeth is having to go to stay with her aunt, a historian who usually lives in Oxford but at the moment she’s doing research at Robinsheugh into the family that lived there during the 18th century.