Wikipedia says, “Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.” That’s why I read it. But I liked Lorna Doone much better.
(I guess readers can’t be expected to agree with authors about their work; Mark Twain liked Joan of Arc best of his novels, whereas I preferred Connecticut Yankee; E.M. Forster liked The Longest Journey best of all his novels, whereas I preferred A Room with a View.)
This 213,414-word novel is supposedly about a two-year-old high-born girl who mysteriously washes up alone in a boat on the coast of a farm called Sker. However, in actual fact, the book is about the narrator, an old Welsh fisherman and sailor, and could more accurately have been titled David Llewellyn of Newton-Nottage. Old Davy finds the child, who calls herself Bardie, in the summer of 1782, but the tale spans eighteen years, and Davy has spent most of them far away from Bardie. Large swaths of the book are devoted to Davy’s adventures in Devon, which eventually shed some light on Bardie’s origins—but large swaths of the book are also devoted to his adventures in the navy, which do not.
As a narrator, Old Davy suffers greatly in comparison to John Ridd, the narrator of Lorna Doone. Both men profess a commitment to honesty, but Old Davy not only exaggerates (particularly about himself, while pretending to be modest), he lies, and calls his rationalizations honesty! Early on in the novel, he describes to the reader how he tricks people into buying fish he caught that aren’t fresh anymore. That’s disgusting to me for three reasons: I don’t eat fish at all because I don’t like the taste; rotting fish don’t taste good even to people who normally like fish; habitually lying to and running from your customers is the opposite of admirable. He also poaches, smuggles, and simultaneously collects both a pension and a salary from the government. The louder he says he’s not doing something, the more certain you can be that he is (like the duck in the comic at this link). Davy is intended to be funny, and to an extent, he is. But to have this weasely, money-grubbing, boastful man conveying the story is intermittently quite irksome, especially when he says nothing whatsoever related to the maid of Sker for many pages at a time—and all the more when I already read a book by the same author that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Still, the book is a kind of unusually cheerful mystery; everything works out all right in the end, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested along the way. The story’s origin as a serial publication probably explains the plot tangents.
See below for passages that illustrate the humor of Old Davy.
Continue reading The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore
When and Why I Read The Maid of Sker
I'm reading this because I enjoyed Lorna Doone, by the same author.
Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 03-May-25 to 29-May-25
Length: 474 pages
ISBN:
Originally published in: 1872/2014/2024
