Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
Phantom Observations
By John Bayley
Music and Silence
by Rose Tremain
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 485 pp., $25.00
According to Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott was read to excess among the gentlefolk of the Southern states, who imbibed from him outdated notions of chivalry and honor. It may be so, but Scott is read today—if indeed he is read at all—for very different reasons. In spite of all his local color and sometimes quaint diction, Scott can still give us, as no other writer can, a sense of immersion in the world of the past. This is largely a question of his prose—calm, uniform, reassuring, wholly and inconspicuously confident. No matter what dramas and sensations the past may hold, we are, as it were, in safe hands. For readers still devoted to him, and there may be more than is usually realized, he has become not only the least troubling but the most supremely aesthetic of novelists.
Review, 2678 words
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