Bud: A Novel

Neil Munro was a Scottish journalist and novelist working at the turn of the twentieth century, best known to many readers for his comic Para Handy stories about the eccentric crew of the puffer steamboat Vital Spark plying the waters of the Clyde and the Western Isles. His more serious novels, including those set in the Scottish Highlands, earned him a substantial reputation in his own day, though he is less widely read now than he was in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Bud is one of Munro’s serious novels, set in late Victorian or Edwardian Scotland. The book takes its name from a young woman, the Bud of the title, and follows her growth through a slowly unfolding family and small town drama. Munro’s prose is more measured here than in the comic Para Handy sketches that brought him popular fame. He had a real ear for Scottish dialect and for the rhythms of small town speech, and his characters speak in voices that sound like the actual people he had spent years observing in his journalism.

The themes Munro tends to work with in his serious novels include the tension between the old Highland culture and the modernizing forces of late nineteenth century Britain, the long emotional reach of family history, and the small but consequential moral choices that ordinary people make in difficult circumstances. He is sometimes compared to other Scottish novelists of his era, including J.M. Barrie before Peter Pan made Barrie’s reputation a different thing, and to the broader kailyard school of late Victorian Scottish fiction.

For readers interested in Scottish literature, in late Victorian regional fiction, or in the period sources that influenced later writers like Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Munro is well worth knowing. Bud is one of his lesser known novels in modern circulation, but the public domain availability of much of his work has brought new readers to his catalogue. The novel rewards patience and a willingness to spend time with a story that builds slowly toward its emotional conclusions.