The BBC is reporting today that the Scottish National Party, the SNP, has added 17,000 members since it lost the referendum vote on independence a few days ago. I infer that a lot of people have discovered or rediscovered a national identity.
And I've been re-reading Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" since we've been traveling in the Scottish highlands. The design of the drama of the narrative is so elegant and compelling it's easy to miss that Stevenson's novel functions on several levels, sometimes simultaneously. For example, the subject of the conversations between David Balfour and Alan Breck Stuart are, often as not, concerned with their dramatic predicament and their strategy for avoiding capture by the government forces or Clan Campbell. The same conversations also serve to explicate the values, social structure and mores of the highland culture of the time. Indeed the dramatic or rhetorical turn of those dialogues rest more often on the latter than the former. It is as a travel novel that I find "Kidnapped" most engaging this time through. Of course it's time travel,too, and an excellent entree into the 4-dimensionality of the place through which we're moving physically.
One of the central, unspoken issues at the heart of the novel is national identity. Scotland was diverse and complicated in the 1100s, the 1200s, the 1700s and now. Whether or not its future leads to independence from the UK or not, it has just done something very remarkable. It has considered and made a decision about the independence of the country peacefully. To these grim eyes it seems rather heroic.
Yesterday, we spent a fine day walking around and photographing Tioram Castle. Today we walked the desolate beach where "Local Hero" was filmed.
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