The Monastery (1820)

Great fun - I normally find ghosts and ghoulies rather irritating in novels (and silly anywhere else...), but there's something endearingly batty about a ghost who can only talk in ballad-verses and makes it her business to promote the Protestant faith. It would be churlish indeed to complain about her.

This is another book where Scott wisely lets the "minor" characters do all the hard work, and leaves the ostensible hero and heroine very much on the sidelines. Halbert gets to fight a duel and escape from the evil baron's castle hanging from his belt, but that's about it; the lovely Mary Avenel has to be content with about three lines in the whole book. The characters who steal the show are the foppish courtier Sir Piercie Shafton and the intrepid Mysie of the Mill. Sir Piercie can't stop himself talking like an Elizabethan play, to the growing frustration of all those around him; Mysie is a splendid woman of action out of the same stable as Jeanie Deans (but unaccountably in love with Piercie).

Abbot Boniface and his sub-prior Father Eustace are also one of the great boss/sidekick teams of literature. At some points their interaction seems to be straight out of Dilbert: at others it's reminiscent of Burns and Smithers...

Scott is very obviously enjoying himself on his Tweedsdale home territory - we get some nice little literary, geographical and historical digressions, as well as a lot of fascinating detail about the perquisites of millers under Scottish law.

It struck me as I was reading this that The Monastery is an even more operatic story than The Bride of Lammermoor, but no-one seems to have made a successful opera out of it. (I did find a reference to something called La Donna bianca di Avenello by Pavesi, but as far as I could see it's a completely different story.) Maybe the Italian censors weren't ready for stories that show protestants getting the better of Cistercians. A missed opportunity: it would have been great if Bellini or someone had done it, with Dame Joan as the Donna Bianca, Dame Janet as Maësi della Molina, and Sir Geraint as Sir Piercie. I suppose we'd have had to have Domingo and Carreras as Halberto and Eduardo, too... ( )