Like Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is one of those books I had never read and thought everybody else had. Like Moby Dick, I found the book exhausting and dense and eventually learned that few have actually read it.

The problem with the book is three-fold, the biggest challenge being the archaic language, with words like slockens (moisten), gliff (look), clour (hit), kittle (difficult) and argle-bargled (argue) permeating the text. On top of the language is the convoluted politics of the 1700’s where you were either a Whig, a Jacobite or a repressed Highlander, Stevenson assuming the reader understood the background to all of this. (Which I didn’t.)

At the heart of the problem however is the narrative, which is a story of a young man who is knocked on the head and put on a ship for the slavery in the Carolinas only to escape and find his way tediously back through the highlands. It’s a never-ending journey that plugs on and on, like Ahab and his whale, until it doesn’t.

I eventually made it to the end but with little satisfaction. And I would not recommend the journey to anyone else, unless you know bauchle and kittle and can thole fashious things.