The Crest of the Broken Wave by James Barke
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Scottish Fiction at 12:00 on 14 June 2026
Collins, 1953, 318p, including 2p Note, 2p Contents and 2p list of characters.
This is the fourth in Barke’s Immortal Memory novel sequence on the life of Robert Burns. This instalment mainly concentrates on his taking the lease at Ellisland Farm, some miles north of Dumfries, a town which he does not care for, and his angling (the Scots word would be ettling) for a job with the Excise. There is though, a brief journey to Edinburgh where he finally settles accounts with his publisher William Creech and also with Jenny Clow, the mother of one of his many children, on whom he makes a settlement.
When we start, the house at Ellisland where he is to live with Jean Armour and his family, is in the course of being built and he has to live in a small, bare room nearby while Jean et al stay in Mauchline (still spelled Machlin by Barke.) Even when his new house is built, after many delays by the Dumfries builders, the walls are too damp with plaster drying out to be healthy.
The breaking in of Ellisland is an arduous task and Burns recognises it will not provide enough of a living hence his seeking of the Excise job. This is also arduous, involving many long miles on horseback in all weathers – and Burns was always prone to chills and fevers.
There is still time, though, for him to fall in with Anna Park, niece of the wife of a Dumfries innkeeper. She is portrayed as equally, if not more, willing than he is to consummate their passion and the inevitable occurs. (Reading these books it sometimes feels as if Burns only had to look at a woman to get her pregnant.) Her lying-in more or less coincides with that of Jean Armour’s latest and Jean selflessly agrees to treat Anna’s child as her own.
Within the text we are treated to a full rendering of Burns’s draft of Tam O’Shanter, a first reading of the poem given to his family assembled by the fire one night.
In an exchange with his strait-laced brother, Gilbert, Burns says, “the Scotland o’ saints and scholars and country squires is nothing but hypocrisy. Not one o’ them can square their beliefs with their practice,” adding that his reading of history and the Bible tells him “morality has ever been a snare and a delusion.”
Jean is well aware of Burns’s tendencies, earlier telling Rab’s sister Nancy that being jealous would do no good, and that she couldn’t deny him other women, so long as he loved them.
In an observation that reads a little too much like an authorial projection of future knowledge onto the past, Francis Grose, an author-antiquarian from London, tells Rab he admires the Scots peasantry, “the best educated in the world,” but not the gentry, with their aping of English foppery, yet considers the Scots nation as defeated, and “‘the English will beat and tame half the world before they’re done – especially the coloured races…… And dang me if they won’t get the Scotch to do all their dirty work for them and fight all their bloodiest battles.’”
Off-stage, the pre-Terror French Revolution rumbles away in the distance, with Burns privately expressing support, something an Exciseman could not do explicitly.
Apart from that performance of Tam O’Shanter none of the poetry makes it to the page this time, though Burns’s efforts in collecting and publishing Scots songs – without payment, a point which disquiets Jean – earn a few mentions.
The book’s title refers to the peak of Burns’s achievements, which Barke considers to have occurred around this time.
Pedant’s corner:- “‘You wrang to judge him’” (You’re wrang.) “It was the Burns’ fate she feared” (Burns’s,) “urgent breasts” (of Anna Park. Urgent?) “But it was a pity that necessity had compelled his to allow” (compelled him to allow.)
