The Master of Ballantrae (Penguin Classics)

by Adrian Poole (Author), Adrian Poole (Author), Adrian Poole (Author), Robert Louis Stevenson (Author), Robert Louis Stevenson (Author)

• New

  paperback
  

  $11.68

  Set at the time of the Jacobite uprising, The Master of Ballantrae tells of a family divided. James Durie, Master of Ballantrae, abandons his ancestral home to support the Scottish rebellion - leaving his younger brother Henry, who is faithful to the English crown, to inherit the title of Lord Durrisdeer. But he is to return years later, embittered by battles and a savage life of piracy on the high seas, to demand his inheritance. Turning the people against the Lord, he begins a savage feud with his brother that will lead the pair from the Scottish Highlands to the American Wilderness. Satanic and seductive, the Master was regarded by Stevenson as 'all I know of the devil'; his darkly manipulative schemes dominate this subtle and compelling tragedy. This edition takes as its text the Edinburgh Edition of the novel, the last approved by the author. The introduction considers the novel's inspiration and its place as one of Stevenson's greatest studies in cruelty.

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.29

  Introduced by Roderick Watson. The Master of Ballantrae is Shakespeare's darkest book, the strange tale of two Durie brothers whose differences symbolize the conflicting calls of romance and reason in 18th-century Scotland. Stevenson called this novel 'a winter's tale', as if he were revisiting the brighter worlds of Kidnapped and Treasure Island in a bleaker light, as if the old romances could only lead us now to a wilderness of disorder, emptiness, coldness and night. The story's conclusion bears this out: the two brothers are brought to a bleak and savage end, together and far from home, in the trackless wastes of North America. The Master of Ballantrae reviews and revises the world of the earlier novels (including Jekyll and Hyde) to make one of Stevenson's most challenging and thought-provoking books.