Walter Scott, “St Ronan’s Well” (1823)

[Continuing my read-through of the Waverley novels: previously on this blog, Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823) and Quentin Durward (1823). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

St. Ronan’s Well (1823) is a very strange novel. The good news is that its strangeness, inadvertent though it may have been in terms that slippery and irrelevant beast ‘authorial intention’, is really very interesting.

What ‘intention’? ‘To do a Jane Austen’, for starters. After a string of hugely successful historical novels, Scott decided to write a book set in his present day, bare of kings, princes, battles and famous names and concentrating instead of some well-bred people at a fashionable health spa: conversations, card games, marriage proposals, all that. And that’s what this novel is, for a while. Then it suddenly becomes something else that is, not to put too fine a point on it, bonkers.

In his 1832 reissue author’s preface, Scott essentially confesses he wanted to try his hand at a Jane Austen novel by denying that he wanted to do any such thing. St Ronan’s Well, he says, is a book ‘upon a plan different from any other that the author has ever written’ intended ‘to give an imitation of the shifting manners of our own time, and paint scenes, the originals of which are daily passing round us,’ written simply because he wanted to try something new (‘avoiding worn-out characters and positions’) and absolutely not because he hoped to ‘rival the many formidable competitors who have already won deserved honours in this department.’

The ladies, in particular, gifted by nature with keen powers of observation and light satire, have been so distinguished by these works of talent [of] the brilliant and talented names of Edgeworth, Austin [sic], Charlotte Smith, and others, whose success seems to have appropriated this province of the novel as exclusively their own.

Yeah. Right.

Scott dived straight in to St. Ronan’s Well as soon as he finished Quentin Durward (also published in 1823). He wrote the early sections in May, and though his interest waned over the summer (it’s likely his publisher warned him against overproduction, worried that they were saturating the market for Scott novels) it picked up speed again in the autumn. The book was published 27th December 1823 in Edinburgh, and 29th December 1823 in London, cleverly just missing the lucrative Christmas market. As late as July 1823 Scott wrote to friends that he was unsure how the novel was going to end, so the composition was evidently fairly fluid.

The motto that guided him, he says in his author’s preface, was ‘celebrare domestica facta’ — Horace’s advice to writers in the Ars Poetica: ‘celebrate ordinary domestic events’ rather than the highfalutin adventures of gods and kings. Jane Austen, and even Jane Austin, certainly excelled at doing precisely that.

Saint Ronan’s Well is a spa at Innerleithen, a town near Peebles in southern Scotland. Some years before the story starts, it was a tiny, forgotten place, its only hotel, the Cleikum Inn, run by the forbidding and rather eccentric landlady Mrs Dods. Here’s the imposing figure of Mrs Dods, from a later 19th-C edition of the novel.

Not idividual to mess with. There’s also the local lord of the manor, Mowbray, and various commoners. But then some local natural springs were seized upon as a health-spa development opportunity. A new town centre was built, including a spanking new hotel, and various fashionable guests have rocked up to take residence. This has resulted in a fashionable ‘set’ at St Ronan’s Well, the kind of people who wouldn’t be seen dead in honest old Mrs Dod’s establishment.

The fashionable set is led by faded aristocratic former beauty Lady Penelope Penfeather, and the set includes Mrs Margaret Blower, a wealthy, dim but honest-hearted widow, Sir Bingo Binks, a huntin-fishin-shootin English baronet who is also a blithering idiot, Lady Binks, his young Scots wife who married her husband for the money and who despises him, and various other pungently named comic types: Dr Quackleben, Philip Winterblossom, Saunders Meikleham, Captain Hector MacTurk (with his eye on the main chance), Rev. Simon Chatterley (wet as a dishcloth) and others.

Old Mowbray has died as the novel starts, and his son John has inherited. John occasionally hobnobs with the fashionable set, although his sister Clara rarely does. Clara is pale and interesting, and prefers to keep herself to herself, nursing a broken heart (ah, but how was it broken?), roaming the countryside, dressing practically rather than according to the 1820s notion of fine feminine fashion and generally acquiring a reputation as an eccentric.

For nearly half the novel, Scott paints this group portrait with nice and comic understatedness: snobbery, foibles, jockeying for position within the group, all rendered with a light touch, the very triviality of the stakes intensifying, as such tend to, the earnestness of the competition. Scott introduces our hero: fresh-faced young Francis Tyrrel, who returns to St Ronan’s Well after some time away. As a lad he had explored the countryside and perhaps — to the ire of Old Mowbray — poached a little, fowl-and-fish-wise. But now he has matured. He stays not with the fashionable set in the new hotel, but with old Mrs Dods, who remembers him and is pleased to put him up. But he calls on the fashionable crew, lest he be thought haughtily to be keeping off from them. He seems, though, strangely reluctant to meet Clara Mowbray, despite reports of her beauty and eligibility. Ay-ay, something’s up there, thinks the canny reader. Has he got something to do with her broken heart?

Captain McTurk engineers a specious quarrel between the easily fooled Sir Bingo and Francis Tyrrel. It can, it seems, only be settled by a duel, so the two men resolve to meet in a certain field at a certain time. On the morning in question Sir Bingo is terrified and regretful, dosing himself with alcohol, but he can’t back out, so he goes along. But Francis Tyrrel never shows! He had set out from Mrs Dods’ that morning declaring he was off to fight the duel, but he neither arrived, nor returned to Mrs Dods’. The set decide he’s done a runner, the dirty coward. Mrs Dods, who knows he is more honourable than that, believes he had been murdered.

We’re getting on for half way through and it’s so-far-so-good. But then, out of nowhere Scott introduces a slew of brand new characters. One is eccentric old Mr Touchwood, a wealthy merchant who made a fortune ‘in the east’ and has returned from Smyrna after many years away. He lodges with Mrs Dods at the Cleikum, and seems suspiciously interested in the local scene, especially the rumours that Clara is about to be married.

Then an English nobleman arrives, Francis Valentine Bulmer, Earl of Etherington. The Earl stays in the new hotel and patronises the fashionable set, who are terribly taken with him: ‘the young Earl of Etherington, reported to be rising on the horizon of fashion as a star of the first magnitude, intended to pass an hour, or a day, or a week, as it might happen, (for his lordship could not be supposed to know his own mind,) at St. Ronan’s Well.’ But when he arrives, the Earl has a wound in his shoulder — a footpad, he says, attacked him on the way into town. How shocking! The injury is not too serious and the Earl recovers.

John Mowbray, the young laird, is in hard financial straits. He appropriates his sister Clara’s money, improperly, to use as gambling stakes, in the hope of addressing his many debts. In a strange twist, the Earl allows him to win a massive £2000 at piquet, going to some lengths to ensure the outcome goes his opponent’s way:

In the first part of the game their luck appeared tolerably equal, and the play of both befitting gamesters who had dared to place such a sum on the cast. But, as it drew towards a conclusion, fortune altogether deserted him who stood most in need of her favour, and Mowbray, with silent despair, saw his fate depend on a single trick, and that with every odds against him, for Lord Etherington was elder hand. But how can fortune’s favour secure any one who is not true to himself? — By an infraction of the laws of the game, which could only have been expected from the veriest bungler that ever touched a card, Lord Etherington called a point without showing it, and, by the ordinary rule, Mowbray was entitled to count his own — and in the course of that and the next hand, gained the game and swept the stakes. [ch. 18]

Afterwards, with John in a cheery state of mind having bagged so much money, the Earl approaches him in confidence. He wishes, he says, to marry John’s sister Clara. It is a match below him in terms of social status, and one others have advised him against on account of the mental instability and eccentricity of Clara herself. Nor would it be (Etherington is frank) a love match. He wants the marriage because, for complicated inheritance-law reasons, it is only by marrying Clara that he can get his hands on the large and valuable English estate of Nettleworth. Moreover, he must marry her by a certain deadline and that date is fast approaching, so if John can help persuade his sister to the arrangement he would be much obliged. The looming deadline is a particularly bizarre touch, I feel. Even in the context of ornate 19th century novel plots about testacy and inheritance, it strains credulity.

Etherington claims never to have seen Clara (‘I have heard she is beautiful’) and brushes off the brother’s warning that she is not right in the head: ‘I have heard Miss Mowbray is in some respects — particular; to use a broader word — a little whimsical. — No matter”. If they get on as man and wife, fine; if not ‘arrangements may be made for us to live happily apart. My own estate is large, and Nettlewood will bear dividing.’ John Mowbray tries to talk his sister into this sudden marriage, but she is fiercely resistant to the idea.

Then we discover that the plot-knot is considerably more tangled and improbable than Etherington’s account implied. In a remarkably ungainly infodump, Etherington writes to an acquaintance in London, Captain Harry Jekyl — (was this where Stevenson found that surname I wonder?)— explaining the whole mare’s-nest in stupefying detail:

“Dear Harry … Thus then it was. — Francis, fifth Earl of Etherington, and my much-honoured father, was what is called a very eccentric man … this shatterbrained peer was, in other respects, a handsome accomplished man, with an expression somewhat haughty, yet singularly pleasing when he chose it — a man, in short, who might push his fortune with the fair sex.”

Believe me: the letter goes on for pages and pages and pages. It occupies two entire chapters.

“My father Lord Etherington, such as I have described him, being upon his travels in France, formed an attachment of the heart — ay, and some have pretended, of the hand also, with a certain beautiful orphan, Marie de Martigny. Of this union is said to have sprung (for I am determined not to be certain on that point) that most incommodious person, Francis Tyrrel, as he calls himself, but as I would rather call him, Francis Martigny; the latter suiting my views, as perhaps the former name agrees better with his pretensions. Now, I am too good a son to subscribe to the alleged regularity of the marriage between my right honourable and very good lord father, because my said right honourable and very good lord did, on his return to England, become wedded, in the face of the church, to my very affectionate and well-endowed mother, Ann Bulmer of Bulmer-hall, from which happy union sprung I, Francis Valentine Bulmer Tyrrel, lawful inheritor of my father and mother’s joint estates, as I was the proud possessor of their ancient names.” [ch 25]

This second, likely bigamous, marriage did not prosper, not least because Old Etheridge insisted on having his French squeeze’s son, Francis, live in the house with them all, and raising him.

“On one occasion, my right honourable mother, who was a free-spoken lady, found the language of her own rank quite inadequate to express the strength of her generous feelings, and borrowing from the vulgar two emphatic words, applied them to Marie de Martigny, and her son Francis Tyrrel. Never did Earl that ever wore coronet fly into a pitch of more uncontrollable rage, than did my right honourable father: and in the ardour of his reply, he adopted my mother’s phraseology, to inform her, that if there was a whore and bastard connected with his house, it was herself and her brat.”

Ouch! Anyway, the identity of the rightful heir depends on whether the Old Earl’s first marriage was lawful or not. Francis has the documentation to prove it was; the soi disant Lord Etherington bribes his valet to steal these materials, and so deprive Francis of the wherewithal for the lawsuit he is threatening to bring.

Then things take an even weirder turn. Why is pale young Clara so heartbroken? It seems that both half-brothers had been sent to St Ronan’s Well by their father years before (so Etherington is lying when he says he never met her). During that time Francis and Clara had fallen in love with one another. The match was disapproved-of by both fathers, so they decided to marry in secret. Young Valentine, hating his half-brother, nevertheless pretended to assist the lovebirds in this plan, only to trick them both. He learned, via a timely letter from his father, about the great estate Clara’s bridegroom would inherit, and, come the wedding day, he disguised himself as his brother and married Clara himself as a kind of confidence trick. I feel I should annotate this fact with ‘!!!’ or perhaps ‘???’ as they do in the chess magazines.

“It was easy to fix the appointment with Clara and the clergyman for I managed the whole correspondence — the resemblance between Francis and me in stature and in proportion — the disguise which we were to assume — the darkness of the church — the hurry of the moment — might, I trusted, prevent Clara from recognising me. To the minister I had only to say, that though I had hitherto talked of a friend, I myself was the happy man. My first name was Francis as well as his; and I had found Clara so gentle, so confiding, so flatteringly cordial in her intercourse with me, that, once within my power, and prevented from receding by shame, and a thousand contradictory feelings, I had, with the vanity of an amoureux de seize ans, the confidence to believe I could reconcile the fair lady to the exchange.

… It was so far successful, that the marriage ceremony was performed between us in the presence of a servant of mine, Clara’s accommodating companion, and the priest. — We got into the carriage, and were a mile from the church, when my unlucky or lucky brother stopped the chaise by force — through what means he had obtained knowledge of my little trick, I never have been able to learn.” [ch 26]

Then, another twist: getting out of the carriage to wrestle with his infuriated half-brother, Etherington slips, falls ‘under the wheel of the carriage, and, the horses taking fright, it went over my body.’ By the time he had recovered his health both brothers have been manoeuvred into promising never to see the shocked and stunned Clara again, and she settles down to her mental derangement and her broken heart.

A marriage conducted under such circumstances wouldn’t be legal, surely! But the whole forward movement of the plot depends upon it being treated as such.

This, we’re suddenly told, explains Francis’s non-appearance at the appointment with Sir Bingo: he was on his way to do the duel when he chanced upon Etherington. Since neither man was supposed to be anywhere in the area of Clara, both were surprised to see one another. Shots were fired, Valentine was lightly injured, Francis more severely wounded — since then he has been being nursed to health in an adjacent town. He returns to Mrs Dods’ Cleikum Inn (the serving girls think he’s a ghost, in a pitched-for-laughs, deeply unfunny episode) and discovers Scrogie Touchwood lodging there. It turns out the two men know one another from Syria, and that Touchwood loaned young Francis the money to return home when Francis’s dastardly brother blocked his access to funds. Confused? (as they used to say at the start of every episode of Soap) You will be …

All the charming and variegated characters in the fashionable set, from earlier in the story, have been sidelined by this point. When Francis returns, his quarrel with the buffoonish Sir Bingo is completely forgotten. Instead Scott’s attention is elsewhere. Like the red weed the Martians import to Earth in Wells’ War of the Worlds, Scott’s bizarre bigamy/inheritance/ pantomime-marriage/rival-brothers storyline has choked out the rest of the novel.

Captain Jekyl comes up to St Ronan’s Well as summoned, and visits Francis, planning on bribing him, on behalf of his Etherington, to go away. Francis makes a counter-offer: all he cares about is Clara’s well-being. If Etherington leaves her alone and foregoes the marriage, then he, Francis, will abandon his lawsuit. Etherington will remain in possession of the title and estates (to which he is not actually entitled), at the cost of surrendering the extra estate of Nettlewood, and Francis will leave the country.

Etherington, though, is too much of a villain to agree to anything so reasonable. As the novel moves towards its conclusion, he reveals more and more of his cloven hoof. He sends his valet to destroy the documentary proofs, so stymieing Francis’ lawsuit. Having allowed John Mowbray to win £2K, he now fleeces him repeatedly at cards, more than taking back his initial loss and driving the other into his debt. He intends to pursue the marriage to Clara Mowbray as much out of spite as material gain. ‘Why, this is vengeance horrible and dire,’ Jekyl rebukes him, hoping to ‘intercede for the sister.’

“We shall see” — replied the Earl; and then suddenly, “I tell you what it is, Hal; her caprices are so diverting, that I sometimes think out of mere contradiction, I almost love her; at least, if she would but clear old scores, and forget one unlucky prank of mine, it should be her own fault if I did not make her a happy woman.” [ch 31]

The story lumbers towards its tragic conclusion. How can mentally unbalanced Clara extricate herself from this narrative knotweed and ride away with Francis into the sunset? She can’t. Which is to say, Scott couldn’t think of a way in which she could. I mean, you might think, just from the summary I have here given, that a way reveals itself. Let’s say the independently wealthy, avuncular Scrogie Touchwood, arriving in the story in its latter stages, might be one of those benevolent old gents of which Dickens later proved so fond. Let’s say he knows about so-called Etherington’s deceptions, reveals the truth of matters to the people of St Ronan’s Well, reunites Clara with truehearted Francis — the actual Earl of Etherington — sending the other ‘Francis Valentine’ away in disgrace. Easy, no? And rendered easier by the fact that this is exactly who Touchwood is, a proto-Dickensian benevolent rich guy who has arrived in town for no other reason than to put things right.

Things, however, are not put right. An imp of the perverse bestrides Scott’s pen — or, we might prefer to say, his imagination (which, up until a few months of actually finishing the novel, didn’t know how to finish it) hearkened to a more interestingly messed-up sequence of events. Very strange things transpire. Touchwood, making his way back to Mrs Dod’s at midnight, falls into the open sewer in the old-town high street, arriving at the Cleikum Inn covered in (Scott does not use the word, but) shit. You don’t, shall we say, get a lot of that in Sense and Sensibility. A rumour runs round town alleging sexual immorality of the (actually chaste) Clara. Her brother Mowbray, furious, rides home to confront her — he hates Etherington so intensely he would gladly kill him, yet Clara must marry him nevertheless, as the only way of redeeming her reputation, and incidentally of inheriting the money to relieve the family debts. When she weepingly insists she can not marry Etherington, her brother grows violent (‘He set his teeth, clenched his hands, as one that forms some horrid resolution, and muttered “It were charity to kill her!”’), punches her in the face (a blow ‘violent enough to have again extended her on the ground, had not a chair received her as she fell’) and screams at her until she agrees to marry the faux-Lord. Clara runs in tears to her room.

Then Touchwood turns out of the blue. He reveals himself as a distant relative of Mowbray’s, insisting he has the necessaries to prove Etherington’s villainy. He also promises the money to redeem Mowbray’s debts, and insists he can bring about a happy ending. More, he delves further in the Explanation Mines with regard to the great clotted mass of congealed plot-stuff at the heart of this novel, or he tries to. His interlocutor speaks for us all: ‘“I cannot understand one word of all this,” said Mowbray’ [ch 36].

Anyway it’s too late! Clara has run off into the night.

A couple of anxious chapters follow in which everyone searches for her, fearing the worst. Nowhere to be found! There’s just time to introduce one more new character: Hannah Irwin, a woman, previously ruined (that is, in less 19th-C idiom, seduced and abandoned) by Etherington. Hannah had been the false witness at the pantomime marriage between young Etherington and unwitting Clara years before. Etherington, keen to get her out of the way, had married her off to a ruffian acquaintance of his, paying him to take her off to the West Indies (‘Jamaica?’ ‘I did indeed — forced her against her better judgment’ &c &c). But she’s not in the West Indies now. She’s actually, by extraordinary coincidence, on her deathbed in a humble hut in the St Ronan’s Well environs. Eager to disburden her conscience she summons John Mowbray and Touchwood to tell them the truth before the end. Why is she back in St Ronan’s Well? It seems she has come ‘to gratify my hatred against him, who, having first robbed me of my virtue, made me a sport and a plunder to the basest of the species. For that I wandered here to unmask him.’

“Well, then,” said the sick woman, “Clara Mowbray ought to forgive me … I must see her, Josiah Cargill — I must see her before I die — I shall never pray till I see her” — —

She started at these words with a faint scream; for slowly, and with a feeble hand, the curtains of the bed opposite to the side at which Cargill sat, were opened, and the figure of Clara Mowbray, her clothes and long hair drenched and dripping with rain, stood in the opening by the bedside. The dying woman sat upright, her eyes starting from their sockets, her lips quivering, her face pale, her emaciated hands grasping the bed-clothes, as if to support herself, and looking as much aghast as if her confession had called up the apparition of her betrayed friend. [ch. 38]

Clara forgives her (“Hannah Irwin,” said Clara, with her usual sweetness of tone, “my early friend — my unprovoked enemy! — Betake thee to Him who hath pardon for us all, and betake thee with confidence — for I pardon you as freely as if you had never wronged me”). Then, with a narrative haste some might consider a little indecent, Hannah dies, of whatever is wrong with her, and immediately afterwards Clara dies too. Of what does Clara expire? Scott doesn’t say, so perhaps: of her dampness, after wandering the Scottish countryside in the rain (‘Clara Mowbray, her clothes and long hair drenched and dripping with rain’). A doctor later offers the following eminently scientific diagnosis: Clara had long suffered from ‘a pressure on the brain, probably accompanied by a suffusion’. Oh no! He adds that ‘if life had been spared, reason would, in all probability, never have returned. In such a case, sir, even the most affectionate relation must own, that death, in comparison to life, is a mercy.’

So that’s alright then!

All other plot-strands are either ignored by Scott, or else tied-up — or, say rather, snapped off — with breathless rapidity, in a handful of lines. Our hero, Francis Tyrrel, enraged by his beloved’s death, rushes off to take revenge upon the wicked Earl. He is stopped on the doorway by Touchwood:

“For revenge — for revenge!” said Tyrrel. “Give way, I charge you, on your peril!”

“Vengeance belongs to God,” replied the old man, “and his bolt has fallen … know that Mowbray of St. Ronan’s has met Bulmer within this half hour and has killed him on the spot.”

“Killed? — whom?” answered the bewildered Tyrrel.

“Valentine Bulmer, the titular Earl of Etherington.” [ch 38]

So much for Etherington! Mowbray had hurried away, met Valentine, insisted on a duel there and then, and shot him through the heart. With a touch of slapstick humour that may, or may not, be advertent, we’re told that when the bullet struck Etherington’s heart ‘he sprung a yard from the ground, and fell down a dead man’. I can only hope that when my time comes I have the elasticity to jump three feet in the air before expiring.

In a couple of wrapping-up paragraphs we’re told that Mowbray’s character is profoundly altered by all this. He joins the army, and ‘Lieutenant Mowbray’ acquits himself honourably in the Peninsular War. He forswears his previous gambling and rakehell ways, and is frugal with his money, except in one respect: he buys, for a considerable sum, all the property built around the fashionable new well, ‘the hotel, lodging-houses, shops, &c., at St. Ronan’s Well’ and issued ‘positive orders for the demolition of the whole.’ Bang! Crash! The fashionable types all troop off to some other watering hole. Nothing now stands in the way of Francis, our hero, inheriting the Earldom of Etherington, but it lies vacant. Francis instead enters ‘a Moravian mission’ and there, we assume, ends his days.

We’re a long way from Jane Austen, or even Jane Austin, with all this of course. Indeed, Tara Ghoshal (one of the few critics to engage with this neglected novel) goes so far as to argue that St Ronan’s Well represents Scott deliberately and destructively writing against the feminine novelistic model that was his initial inspiration: ‘unlike Burney or Austen, Scott is not a part of the world he depicts in St. Ronan ‘s Well — the world of fashionable spas. Nor is he, in the end, part of their novelistic world. Undertaken as a novelty, written against the grain of his own theories about fiction, St. Ronan’s Well is a necessary failure, one that both expresses and distances Scott’s ambivalences about feminine novelistic discourse’ [Tara Ghoshal, ‘Walter Scott and Feminine Discourse: The Case of St. Ronan’s Well’ Journal of Narrative Technique 19 (1989), 244].

I’m not so sure. This novel is certainly a case of crashed together, inimical modes: witty social satire, some silver-fork silliness on the one hand, grand guignol, melodrama and strenuously forced tragedy on the other. And we might say that’s enough to call it a failure. Hesketh Pearson thought so: ‘the drama is unconvincing … in short, St. Ronan’s Well gives us a rough idea of what might have happened if Jane Austen had written Wuthering Heights [Pearson, Walter Scott (New York 1954), 192]. He meant this dismissively, but we’re entitled to wonder not only what Jane Austen’s Wuthering Heights might look like, but to consider the experiment a worthwhile undertaking.

What strikes me most pungently on reading this novel is the way it treats marriage. If anyone ever tries you with that old David Lodge argument that all nineteenth-century novels end with a marriage, an inheritance or an emigration — ‘and often all three’ — you must feel free to flourish your copy of St Ronan’s Well in their face, since it ends with none of them.

Where other novelists treat marriage as not only the fit (happy) ending to the story, but also as a kind of universal solvent, the magic ceremony that sacramentally seals the ontology of the novel-world, Scott not only repudiates any such nuptiae ex machina, he shines a desiccating spotlight on ‘marriage’ as such. The yin-yang deuteragonists, virtuous Francis and wicked Valentine, are the sons of a bigamist who, so far from being punished for, or ashamed by, his double marriage uses it as leverage, holding it over the heads of his second wife and younger son. Sir Bingo’s wife, having taken the title and money that goes along with her union, feels nothing but contempt for her idiot husband (later in the novel she flirts with Etherington, and, Scott implies, only his need to get Clara ‘in the bag’ prevents him from having an affair with her). Though the first half of the novel teases various marital endings, as is conventional, in fact none of the main characters — or any of the characters at all, actually — get married at the novel’s conclusion. The one wedding the novel gives us is a farce, a sham, a ludicrous parade conducted for nefarious reasons in which the bridegroom is play-acting and the bridge unwittingly marrying somebody else entirely. Marriage, this novel is saying, is a bust; and in a world in which there is no history, no heroes, no kings and princes, no exotic sultans disguised as physicians, or grand adventures to be had, without bourgeois marriage … what is there? A disfigured wasteland of a novel and fascinating for that reason.