Scottish Journey [Paperback]

Edwin Muir (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

First published in 1935, Scottish Journey is a perceptive, subtle, and beautifully written account by one of Scotland's greatest modern writers of prose and poetry. Edwin Muir's journey took him from Edinburgh to the Lowlands, to Glasgow and the Highlands, and the book, while a masterpiece of travel writing, is also a quest for the real nature of Scottish identity.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Muir's account of a journey undertaken across his native land works as both a travel book and a social investigation into the nature of the Scottish people.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Mainstream Publishing (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1851588418
• ISBN-13: 978-1851588411
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,040,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most thoughtful travel books ever written, September 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Scottish Journey (Paperback)

Muir combines vivid descriptions of people and scenes with passionate discussions of socialism, unemployment, and the spiritual poverty of the Scottish people in the 30's. Truly a political poet's book

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great travel writing, silly and ill-informed politics., September 23, 2003

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scottish Journey (Paperback)

Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (Mainstream Publishing, 1935)

Edwin Muir is a pretty good writer, when he sticks to travelogues and abstract philosophy. He doesn't do so in Scottish Journey, though one would think so from the first hundred pages. Scottish Journey is meant as (and was commissioned as) a travelogue, and for the most part, Muir sticks to the template. He writes well of the Scots countryside, and passably of Edinburgh, slipping in bits of philosophy here and there, as is to be expected in any good travelogue. As well, Muir is an extremely quotable writer; his words are clear and precise, and draw excellent pictures in the reader's mind.

Muir was, however, an ardent Socialist of the closed-minded sort, as much as he professes otherwise. This affects the book in his long chapter on Glasgow, which he starts with a screed against Industrialism (he always capitalizes the word, I might as well, too) and capitalism. Humorously, he attempts to say that Industrialism, in and of itself, isn't all that bad. He does so in a paragraph that spans almost two and a half pages. The first and last few sentences are of the opinion that Industrialism isn't all that bad. It's the middle hundred or so sentences that shoot the argument in the foot, as he catalogs a list of the horrors he sees in Glasgow. One wonders how it's possible to write all these things and frame them with "it's not bad." It would be kind of like a pagan writing the same of the Inquisition, from the evils that Muir ascribes to Industrialism.

What's worse, he can't see the forest for the trees. In one breath, he talks about ho a capitalist system can't take population contraction into account; in the next, he's talking about unemployment. And he sees no correlation between the two, or at least none he's willing to admit. At one point, perhaps the book's nadir, he says, while discussing the rise of the Scottish Nationalist party, "....If such devotion and fidelity are not to be admired, then all our ideas of morality are mistaken." Leaving it as it is, he infers that no such thing could possibly be true. Yet not five pages later, at the beginning of his chapter on the Highlands, he has little good to say about the morality of a people who are so embarrassed by the twin hills known as the Paps of Jura, one of Scotland's biggest tourist draws at the time, that he couldn't find a postcard that showed them clearly anywhere in the town. One is tempted to see the inconsistencies as a (sub?)conscious undercutting of Muir's own arguments, but nothing else in the book points to it; the man's to solid and straightforward a writer to resort to such tricks.

Overall, though, it's worth checking out for the travel writing and the easy read. Just take his political outlook with a grain of salt. ** ½