There aren't any shortbread cookies in this novel. There is excellent butter, but no cookies, and the eponymous heroine isn't much of a cook. She is Scots by inheritance, but she doesn't grow up there; her childhood nurse is Italian and she's actually brought up by a gang of noble robbers in Exmoor. The cookie name is completely a shallow marketing ploy.
However, John Ridd the wonderful hero is awake to the chance of using a shallow marketing ploy to sell his butter, so in an accidental way it's a fine memorial. It would be a more accurate memorial with better butter and a couple gallons of beer.
John Ridd boasts about everything and is likeable anyway. He boasts about his strength, honesty, flirtatousness, commercial cunning, and modesty; you'd think the last would be a hard boast to carry, but no. Lorna Doone is a fluttery drip, but Ridd's narration is completely steady, although the author throws just everything into it; fantasias on the sublimity of Nature, lots and lots of food, wrestling, a battle-scene, a devil-and-saint fairy tale, considerable fondness for horses.
Between the farming and the horses this avoids ' Toughguide errors. It isn't technically a fantasy novel, it's rather a historical adventure in the late 17th century (the battle is the end of Monmouth's invasion), but the structure is a lot like fantasy novels. Local boy grows up to put down the evil horde, meets the King, etc.
The evil horde lives in one of my favorite clichés of tripe fiction: a beautiful, completely enclosed river valley, reached only through natural tunnels in the rock and other geological extravagances. The hero can sneak in and out, as in fact can servant-women who exchange news, not that anyone pays attention to the serving-women when discussing the impregnable hideaway. Casual Web lookups suggest that there are boggy, complicated valleys all over Exmoor, many of them now named after this novel and catering to the tourist trade. Actually, it sounds like a wonderful place for a holiday if you like rain (and butter); they advertise roadless areas for riding, where John Ridd remarked that wheels had not yet come to Exmoor because the roads were so muddy they required sledges.
(One of the series had an even better hideaway, a Caribbean island that looked like a waterless rock from the sea but had a green valley sustaining an entire herd of horses inside.)
Project Gutenberg etext #840
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack