The Shoes of Fortune

The Shoes of Fortune is one of Neil Munro’s serious Scottish historical novels, set in the eighteenth century Scottish Highlands and following the central characters through the kind of complicated political and military situation that the post Jacobite period produced. 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 but with a substantial body of serious historical fiction that earned him significant respect in his own day.

The shoes of fortune as a title concept points to the kind of contingent and accidental quality that the title characters’ lives depend on, with the metaphorical shoes representing the various conditions and circumstances that shape what fortune any individual life is allowed to make. Munro uses the title concept to anchor the wider historical and personal plot that the novel works through.

Munro had a real ear for the language and rhythms of Scottish Highland speech, and his prose captures the particular quality of eighteenth century Scottish Gaelic culture in ways that few English language writers of his era could match. The pacing is slower than modern historical fiction and the prose is in the formal late Victorian style, but readers who settle into the rhythm find a strong, atmospheric novel about a particular moment in Scottish history that Munro understood deeply.

For readers interested in Scottish historical fiction, in the literature of the post Jacobite Highland period, or in Neil Munro’s catalogue beyond the Para Handy stories, The Shoes of Fortune is worth knowing.