Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet is rather like stumbling across a hidden bottle of whisky in a dusty old kirk – an unexpected pleasure, provided you can stomach the cobwebs and the dead rats floating inside. The story itself, once you prise it out from beneath the dreadful mound of vernacular rubble, is a deliciously grim and gripping slice of Gothic horror, filled with images that chill the bones and stir the darker corners of the imagination. But heavens above, what a criminal waste it is to see such a potent tale shackled in dialect so thick you’d need a pickaxe and a head torch to get through it.
Let’s start with the bones of it. Thrawn Janet is a masterclass in atmosphere, a fog-drenched waltz with the Devil himself, wrapped up in Presbyterian fire and brimstone. The slow creep of dread as the Rev. Mr. Soulis battles not just superstition but tangible evil in the form of poor, twisted Janet is handled with deft and malicious glee. There are scenes here – Janet’s corpse-like neck lolling like a broken marionette, the preacher’s grim, lonely vigil – that would give even the bravest reader the urge to keep a lamp burning through the night. The story builds to a climax so black and bracing it feels like standing naked on a moor in November, screaming at the northern winds.
However – and it’s a ‘however’ the size of Arthur’s Seat – Stevenson chooses to present this dark jewel in a form so clotted, so barbarously couthie, that one often feels less like a reader and more like an archaeologist trying to decipher a message scratched by a drunken ploughman onto the side of a cow. The Scots dialect, though doubtless authentic, is so relentless that it doesn’t invite the reader in; it builds a ten-foot-high palisade and dares them to climb it with their bare hands.
I have no quarrel with the Scots tongue itself, but Stevenson here handles it with all the subtlety of a man trying to eat soup with a pitchfork. Every line groans under the weight of apostrophes, every syllable trips up like a drunkard on market day. In his zeal for capturing the ‘voice’ of rural Scotland, Stevenson forgets that the primary business of writing is to be read, not to set a literary booby-trap. What could have been a work of nerve-jangling brilliance becomes, at times, an excruciating exercise in patience, much like trying to untangle Christmas lights that some sadist has plaited together with fishing wire.
And what a shame it is, because Thrawn Janet could have easily stood shoulder to shoulder with the finest Gothic tales of its age, had it not been dressed up like a prize-winning turnip at the village fair. When you finally beat your way through the undergrowth of dialect, the view that opens up is nothing short of stunning: evil palpable and near, piety strained to breaking, a community crackling with fear and superstition. Stevenson knows exactly where to press his thumb to leave the deepest bruise on the reader’s mind.
The characterisation, too, once you’ve translated it, is superb. Mr. Soulis is no pious waxwork; he is a man trembling at the precipice of faith and madness. Janet herself, whether witch, revenant, or something still worse, is a triumph of grotesque imagination – pitiful and monstrous in equal measure. Their final confrontation carries a savage, biblical force, the kind of apocalyptic fervour that rattles the pews and makes you question what dark things might slither under the world’s floorboards.
In short, Thrawn Janet is a spine-tingling marvel buried beneath a landslide of parochial overreach. Reading it is rather like trying to enjoy a fine cut of beef served raw, still mooing, and wrapped in a layer of wet heather: there’s nourishment and even beauty there, but for God’s sake, man, cook it properly. One can only imagine how much more potent and widely-loved this story might have been had Stevenson shown just a pinch more mercy to his audience.
Still, for all its sins, I find myself oddly fond of Thrawn Janet. It is wild, raw, and unrefined, like an ancestral ghost story growled out beside a peat fire. One must simply grit one’s teeth, sharpen one’s wits, and plunge in, hoping that the occasional glimmer of genius will light the way – and it does, often enough, to make the whole mad journey worthwhile.
Wording 