Novella of poet's life is superbly readable
The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns
John Ivison
Ottawa Press and Publishing
One glory of John Ivison's new novella, The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns, lies in its evocation of a great city, the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment, as it neared the end of the 18th century.
Edinburgh becomes a character in its own right as Ivison leads us through its cobbled streets. This was a city whose temperament found room for the contrasting extremes of Royal Mile, Fleshmarket Close and the stewpots of Barefoot Park, for John's Coffee House and John Dowie's Tavern.
Thanks to Ivison, we feel we know the urgently alive world that greeted Scotland's rising ploughman poet, Robert Burns, when he blazed into Edinburgh in 1786. The freethinking Burns of this book, exerting a presence both irrepressible and irresistible, will also consider it natural that he live up to his image as a great love poet capable of reducing women to melting acquiescence.
Ivison, a National Post columnist, must have been aware of a potential minefield here. A couple of years ago, poet Liz Lochhead scandalized Burns disciples by comparing the warm-hearted creator of Flow Gently Sweet Afton with sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. As evidence, she cited a 1788 letter in which he boasts of his prowess in bedding his heavily pregnant girlfriend and electrifying “the very marrow of her bones.”
This letter also makes an appearance in the present book. It is no less shocking, but here it adds a further element to the complicated psychology of the poetic genius.
Ivison employs a cunning narrative device in giving us a witty memory piece filtered through the affectionate but often dismayed prism of John Bruce, Robbie's young Edinburgh companion. Bruce's friendship is sometimes severely tested, yet his fondness for his maddening friend endured. “We were living in the age of enlightenment,” he reflects near the end. “Natural philosophers had calculated the movement of the stars. But none could chart the madness of men afflicted by the exquisite bliss of love.”
Ivison's tale is superbly readable but carries a tinge of ruefulness and lament.