It's an incredibly frustrating thing to read. What's valuable about reading it? I'm not sure. I put it on my list after having bought it four or five years ago on the advice of Stephen Booth, who said he thought it was "funny." I suspect he found the backbiting clergy and the overbearing wives and browbeaten husbands funny, but I just kept wanting to hurl Barchester Towers across the room. Didn't, though. Finished it, but maybe I shouldn't have.
Waverley is called a novel, but it might not be one. It's about Edward Waverley, who is young and pretty (he looks good in a kilt, we learn) and likes to read fiction but knows little about the world. He goes to Scotland in 1745 as part of the pro-Hanoverian army, but he falls in love with the daughter of a highland chieftain who tells him she won't marry him because he's not a Jacobite. He quits the army and goes on a hunting expedition in which he is wounded, and taken back to the chieftain's house, but before he gets there the girl who's in love with him has him kidnapped—she's the daughter of a lowland Baron or something, and also a childhood friend of the chieftain's daughter—and sent off to Edinburgh, where he's presented to Charles Stuart, and of course he doesn't decline CS's offer that he join the Jacobite army. There's a battle. EW does nothing very interesting, except wince when his captain from his old English regiment is killed. He takes a prisoner, Captain Talbot, whom he releases when CT learns that his wife has lost the baby she was pregnant with and might die herself. EW then runs away, sort of by accident again—he doesn't decide to desert, but it just happens. (He never really decided to join the Jacobite army, either—other people made it happen.) He gets arrested, but is treated well, but then he's rescued by someone who thinks he's another Edward, and so he isn't charged with treason. He sees a newspaper that says his father in London is having to pay all sorts of bail because of EW's treason, so he takes a coach down. It takes three weeks, and he sits next to a very annoying woman who keeps wanting to pump him for stories, and he has to keep avoiding telling her that he's the famous traitor Edward Waverley, but otherwise nothing else happens. He sees CT, who tells him that his father, although dead, wasn't in any trouble at all. EW goes back to Edinburgh, because he's in love with the girl who had him kidnapped. He travels down and gets her father to consent to their marriage. Then he goes back to London. The highland chieftain's son is being tried for treason, and EW watches him hang. Then he goes back home, and his bride arrives and they're going to get married. Then they go see her father, who now lives in a cave. EW and CT get involved in some complicated real estate, and in the end CT buys EW's wife's father's home and says that father and EW and wife can all live there for the length of father's life, so they do.
So. Waverley doesn't do much, makes almost no decisions, and makes a muddle of everything. He's a failure, essentially—except that he sees interesting things, encounters exotic Scottish personages, and looks nice in a kilt. The plot of Waverley is also sort of stupid—every time something happens, it's an accident, which is disappointing in a novel that's supposed to be about heroism and wars and stuff. It's tempting to say that Scott is being satirical when he does this, but I don't think Scott is really that smart about his fiction.
