The book that changed my life - Carl MacDougall

Published on Saturday 2 October 2004 01:40

I FIRST discovered Kidnapped when I was ten. I’d just read Treasure Island and went into Possil Library to see if there were any other novels by Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped has an orange cover with a black ink drawing of a Jacobite standing on a rock with his sword raised aloft. That’ll do me, I thought.

I liked it from the first. I felt as though I knew the landscape in which it was set: those awe-inspiring mountains I’d see from the road as we drove up to see my relatives in Oban. Also, I could identify with David Balfour. The way in which he is bundled from one situation to another over which he has no control, that overall sense of confusion - it’s all very like childhood.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read it, but it’s certainly more than any other novel. What impresses me now is Stevenson’s sheer narrative drive. You can stop reading at any point in the novel and guess where you’d be in 30 pages and you’d never get it right.

In the last episode of our TV series Writing Scotland, we look at that scene from Kidnapped in which Balfour and Breck are hiding from the redcoats on top of a large boulder. I didn’t read the whole book again for that, but I wouldn’t mind doing so again.

• Carl MacDougall presents Writing Scotland on BBC2 on Tuesdays at 8.30pm. A comprehensive guide to writers featured in the programme can be found on www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland