Shoulder to shoulder — Reading Notes

A Narrator Who Interrupts Himself

The most striking feature of the excerpts is the narrator's willingness to break the fourth wall. When describing Napoleon's ambition, he writes, 'On second thought, I beg to retract that wee word "sit." No ambitious man ever did or could sit.' This parenthetical correction is typical of the voice: it treats the reader as a listener, not a passive consumer. The narrator also inserts a Burns quotation mid-paragraph, then returns to his own prose without transition. These interruptions create a rhythm that is part lecture, part yarn.

Elsewhere, the narrator compares French courage to steam rising from a burning house—a simile that is both vivid and digressive. The effect is a narrative that feels spontaneous, as if the speaker is thinking aloud. Readers should expect the story to pause for such reflections, which often carry the moral weight of the book.

Scots Dialect and Formal Prose Side by Side

The excerpts show a deliberate code-switching between Scots and standard English. The epigraph from Burns—'Be Britain still to Britain true, Amang oursels united'—sets the linguistic tone, and within the Napoleon passage, the narrator quotes Burns again: 'A prince can mak' a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that.' These Scots lines appear without gloss, assuming the reader's familiarity.

By contrast, the historical commentary on treaties and Napoleon's campaigns uses formal, Latinate English: 'Treaties, in those days, were as often abrogated as not.' The juxtaposition suggests that the narrator moves between two registers: the intimate, colloquial voice of a Highland storyteller and the analytical tone of a historian. This duality may reflect the book's structure, which alternates between personal memory and broader military history.

Pacing: From List to Action

One notable structural choice in the excerpts is the use of a bulleted list to enumerate Napoleon's conquests: 'A hundred and seventy captured flags. A hundred and fifty thousand prisoners taken in battle.' The list is presented as a series of short, declarative lines, mimicking the style of a proclamation or a museum label. This slows the narrative to a near-halt, emphasizing the scale of Napoleon's achievements before the narrator returns to his moralizing.

In contrast, the chapter titles in the contents suggest rapid action: 'A Race for Life—"To Horse! To Horse!"' and 'Hand to Hand with Dirk and Claymore.' The excerpts do not include these scenes, but the juxtaposition of list-like exposition and breathless chapter headings indicates that the book shifts between documentary summary and adventure set-pieces. Readers should be prepared for sudden changes in tempo.

Stables' narrator is not a neutral chronicler; he is a character with opinions, a fondness for Burns, and a tendency to lecture. Readers will benefit from treating the historical digressions as part of the story's texture rather than obstacles to the plot. The book's subtitle promises 'stirring times of old,' but the stirrings are as much in the narrator's voice as in the events he describes. Pay attention to when he speeds up and when he slows down—those shifts are the key to his method.

That rainy afternoon, wandering through Stables’ digressions on ambition, I felt the weight of stories carried across generations. The cross in his grandfather’s tale lingered oddly. Later, almost by accident, I found The Legendary History of the Cross A Series of Sixty-four Woodcuts from a Dutch Book Published by Veldener, A.D. 1483 — A Closer Reading, and those old engravings offered the same quiet, patient telling—images instead of dialect, but the same steady hand.