Almond, Wild Almond by D. K. Broster
Jun. 30th, 2021 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeDespite the familiar settings, I'd been warned not to expect too much from this book, and now, yeah, I see what you mean. This was definitely not D. K. Broster's finest moment.
Almond, Wild Almond (1933), like The Flight of the Heron, takes place during the 1745 Jacobite rising. Broster tends to keep to a fairly narrow slice of history in her settings, and there have been small overlaps in the settings of her books before, but this is the first time she's returned to exactly the same piece of history as in a previous book. However, there's little direct crossover: this one is set largely in the eastern Highlands, around Loch Rannoch in Perthshire; and the events of the plot are entirely different again.
The beginning made me think that perhaps Broster was going to approach the '45 from the angle which, given her other books, one might have expected her to approach it all along, because this book opens in 1744 in Dunkirk, with the failed French expedition to England which preceded the eventual successful landing of Prince Charles in Scotland. We see the Prince meeting a Highland Jacobite named Ranald Maclean and a French officer, M. de Lancize, and see something of the Comte de Saxe's plans. However, we swiftly return to Scotland and follow Ranald as he meets Bride Stewart, a young woman from a Perthshire Jacobite family (they're Stewarts from the royal line, as we keep being reminded!). Ranald, upon receiving the news of the Prince's landing, is torn between his duty to the cause, his sudden love for Bride and his need to go back to France to fight in an inheritance dispute which will determine his own future. Of course he decides to stay and fight for the Prince; and the rest of the book follows his, and Bride's, fate over the course of the rising.
I'll talk about the things I liked first, so as not to be unfair! Broster's prose is as lovely as ever, and there are some more good descriptions of the Highlands. I liked getting to see a slightly different side of the '45, including a few scenes set during the march into England, a memorable appearance by the historical Jacobite heroine Lady Lude, some detailed description of the experience of Highland households forced to quarter Government soldiers and the (cliched, but fun) encounter with the Prince while he's skulking amongst the heather in the summer of '46. I very much enjoyed Ewen Cameron's brief cameo, in which he rather impatiently breaks up a duel between two far less sensible young men (no old heads on young shoulders in this book!). Oh, and the book includes a rather lovely map, although no Ardroy on this one, I note.
The things I didn't like... well, there have been some less than ideal thematic trends hovering in the background of Broster's writing for a while, I think, and in this book they come to the fore in a decidedly unfortunate way. Spoilers below:
Later on, then, Ranald is on the run after Culloden. He makes it back to Bride's house, and they marry even more hastily than Ewen and Alison did (this incident was apparently historical!). There's some discussion of sex which is both surprisingly frank for Broster's style and incredibly unappealing (that made an interesting comparison with Return to Night...!). Then a party of redcoats turn up suddenly at the house, and Ranald, trapped in Bride's bedroom, hides in the cupboard; she saves him by pretending that the man with her is not her husband, but an English officer with whom she's cheating on him. The soldiers leave, and Ranald reacts with utter horror and disgust to what his wife has done.
I think what Broster was aiming for here was one of her honour-based conflicts, this time in the context of sexual relationships; and I can understand an eighteenth-century gentleman not being thrilled at it, but saying things like this:
...Besides all that, the inevitable comparisons with Flight of the Heron somewhat undermine even the good things about this book. There are some nice passages about the characters' love for their Highland homes; but they're nothing like as good or as convincing as Ewen's love for Ardroy (and Ranald's conflict over leaving the Highlands for his French inheritance is strangely dismissed by the ending). We see the defeat of the Jacobite cause, and the bravery of the Prince; but we don't feel it the way we felt it with Ewen after Culloden. And there are no interesting m/m relationships at all. Can that side of Broster's id come back, please, instead of this one?
Overall, definitely a disappointment. I shall carry on in hope of better things to come; and, hmm, I think the next book, World Under Snow, might be just that...
Almond, Wild Almond (1933), like The Flight of the Heron, takes place during the 1745 Jacobite rising. Broster tends to keep to a fairly narrow slice of history in her settings, and there have been small overlaps in the settings of her books before, but this is the first time she's returned to exactly the same piece of history as in a previous book. However, there's little direct crossover: this one is set largely in the eastern Highlands, around Loch Rannoch in Perthshire; and the events of the plot are entirely different again.
The beginning made me think that perhaps Broster was going to approach the '45 from the angle which, given her other books, one might have expected her to approach it all along, because this book opens in 1744 in Dunkirk, with the failed French expedition to England which preceded the eventual successful landing of Prince Charles in Scotland. We see the Prince meeting a Highland Jacobite named Ranald Maclean and a French officer, M. de Lancize, and see something of the Comte de Saxe's plans. However, we swiftly return to Scotland and follow Ranald as he meets Bride Stewart, a young woman from a Perthshire Jacobite family (they're Stewarts from the royal line, as we keep being reminded!). Ranald, upon receiving the news of the Prince's landing, is torn between his duty to the cause, his sudden love for Bride and his need to go back to France to fight in an inheritance dispute which will determine his own future. Of course he decides to stay and fight for the Prince; and the rest of the book follows his, and Bride's, fate over the course of the rising.
I'll talk about the things I liked first, so as not to be unfair! Broster's prose is as lovely as ever, and there are some more good descriptions of the Highlands. I liked getting to see a slightly different side of the '45, including a few scenes set during the march into England, a memorable appearance by the historical Jacobite heroine Lady Lude, some detailed description of the experience of Highland households forced to quarter Government soldiers and the (cliched, but fun) encounter with the Prince while he's skulking amongst the heather in the summer of '46. I very much enjoyed Ewen Cameron's brief cameo, in which he rather impatiently breaks up a duel between two far less sensible young men (no old heads on young shoulders in this book!). Oh, and the book includes a rather lovely map, although no Ardroy on this one, I note.
The things I didn't like... well, there have been some less than ideal thematic trends hovering in the background of Broster's writing for a while, I think, and in this book they come to the fore in a decidedly unfortunate way. Spoilers below:
Later on, then, Ranald is on the run after Culloden. He makes it back to Bride's house, and they marry even more hastily than Ewen and Alison did (this incident was apparently historical!). There's some discussion of sex which is both surprisingly frank for Broster's style and incredibly unappealing (that made an interesting comparison with Return to Night...!). Then a party of redcoats turn up suddenly at the house, and Ranald, trapped in Bride's bedroom, hides in the cupboard; she saves him by pretending that the man with her is not her husband, but an English officer with whom she's cheating on him. The soldiers leave, and Ranald reacts with utter horror and disgust to what his wife has done.
I think what Broster was aiming for here was one of her honour-based conflicts, this time in the context of sexual relationships; and I can understand an eighteenth-century gentleman not being thrilled at it, but saying things like this:
'You are my stainless flower, my white rose; there is some misunderstanding . . . or else, since you are so young, you did not realise what you were doing?' [...] 'And you, whom I thought so pure that I hardly liked to touch you, could not see that it cost too much!'...is really not on. And it gets worse! After this, Ranald runs off and ends up being injured in a convoluted sequence of events; the French officer M. de Lancize returns, on a mission for the Prince, and ends up at Bride's house. He's attracted to her (all the men in the book are, unfortunately for her); he keeps sort of pushing at this, culminating in him turning up in her bedroom and pressing his suit so ardently that she's obliged to resort to threatening him with Ranald's dirk. But it's OK! He decides to stop, because:
...he knew that he would not be able to touch her. He had learnt last night that in some people—Bride Maclean was one of them—purity and innocence are not mere negative virtues, they are active powers....yeah. There's more of this sort of thing throughout the book, including in the early scenes with Bride and Ranald; and M. de Lancize, who later on starts congratulating himself on continuing to respect Bride's innocence in the face of his attraction for her, is treated with a sort of amused indulgence. Broster, I think, has always had a bit of a weakness around a certain type of young female character (a review quoted on Faded Page observes that Bride is 'not noticeably different from Alison'; neither is she much different from Lucienne, Avoye, Nest or Olivia; the pure and innocent ingenue romantic heroine, etc.). There are some very unsavoury moral assumptions surrounding the stereotype, and, well, here they are. That this is horrifyingly misogynistic hopefully goes without saying, but it's also such a depressing and alien view of relationships in general; this idea of attraction, and wanting to be with someone, being so divorced from their humanity, their own wishes and any possibility of a relationship between equals. It's incredibly frustrating, because I know Broster can do better than this—Raymonde, Valentine, Juliana?—but her own preferences seem to be working against the quality of her writing. I really hope there's no more like this to come.
...Besides all that, the inevitable comparisons with Flight of the Heron somewhat undermine even the good things about this book. There are some nice passages about the characters' love for their Highland homes; but they're nothing like as good or as convincing as Ewen's love for Ardroy (and Ranald's conflict over leaving the Highlands for his French inheritance is strangely dismissed by the ending). We see the defeat of the Jacobite cause, and the bravery of the Prince; but we don't feel it the way we felt it with Ewen after Culloden. And there are no interesting m/m relationships at all. Can that side of Broster's id come back, please, instead of this one?
Overall, definitely a disappointment. I shall carry on in hope of better things to come; and, hmm, I think the next book, World Under Snow, might be just that...
