Weir of Hermiston (the unfinished novel) by Robert Louis Stevenson.

It saddens me that Robert Louis Stevenson was so young and left an unanswered question about him as a writer in the future. Weir of Hermiston was his work in progress, which in the end became he dictated. The Scotsman completed nine chapters but drafts of the whole story were left as well.

Sometimes it made me believe that the text wasn’t a final edition. Strong writing, including mighty in its sense metaphors and magnificence in the recreation of the Scottish accent through dialogs between characters intersects with drastically different behavior of heroes, exaggerated metaphoring, and the unmade novel changes in person, where the involvement of a third-person after telling in a first person confuses and makes the first chapter illogical because if a servant wanted to tell about his lord, why did he mention a marriage of his parents, which was supposed to be in just several sentences in this case?

Nevertheless, a story that I read (I ended earlier by dropping at the fourth chapter) and these notes headed to a potential novel doesn’t look as stand out if realized as a whole. Judge Adam Weir, who is merciless in acts such as executing people, and as a personality, has a conflict with his son Archie Weir, who is against capital punishment. It turns to Weir Sr. barring his offspring from studying law and exiling him to an outskirt of Edinburgh. This makes it worse, which is downgrading into melodrama, and it combined with all text’s mess. The lead hero falls in love with a girl whose name Christina, but he always calls her Kirstie, and she doesn’t like it and reminds him two times. As well as, the writer or the narrator uses that disparaging variant. She has a strange attitude, saying that has feelings toward the protagonist but very soon uttering the opposite to his expression of wanting to be with her. The left notes reveal the involvement of Archie’s college friend Frank, who will create a love triangle, and will use evil methods to get her. It ends with Archie slaying Frank and that puts him into prison. Adam, without amazement, is a judge over his son and who, of course, because he is not a complex character, sentences him to hanging, which doesn’t happen because Christina’s four likely homogeneous nephews, who, according to that bad which in melodrama, have a personal issue with protagonist’s father, break into the confinement place and release the main hero of the story. The final is that the true lovers escaping to America. It would be a usual novel of that period.

If put aside this element belonging to dime romance books for women and convolution of characteristics, such as the protagonist who was presented as an unseen and unknown person but it contradicts the following chapter, or that Archie’s father wasn't a famous man despite his well-known reputation and accent on the relations of two generations – it isn’t powerful. There is no complexity between them. Adam is a toxic and vile man without anything good; about whom is claimed that he doesn’t care what people think about him. He smiles when sending his son into exile. Certainly, of that one can create a fine story, but Stevenson doesn’t achieve attraction in that ordinariness. It confuses that Adam disliked his wife Jeannie, and had no feelings toward her death, upon which he concluded on the spot that they didn’t belong to each other. A man who didn't look for love, but it is illogical that he aspire to get sympathy from his son. And in that court case, in which Archie presents and criticizes a sentence, Robert Louis Stevenson doesn’t develop details of the crime of the accused. And another misfire by the writer is that Jeannie dies without reason. It just occurred to her. He wanted to do the same with Adam in the conclusion. That element of killing a character was typical in those times, which usually explained, but Stevenson doesn’t do that. Maybe, he would have changed if completed the writing. But I am not sure because I recalled Catriona (1893) in reading, which was one of his last novels. It was with two book’s villains: a main personage’s uncle, who was supposed to do that for a plot, and a vapid Scotsman, who doesn’t commit anything threatening, simply gets sick in the final and that kills him. And, of course, the novel concludes with a marriage.