GLANDARA

This differs rather sharply from Evelyn Anthony's other books, in that the characters are not the name people involved, but are at least partly fictional. In earlier books for example, she has made her central characters Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, King Charles I, Catherine the Great, etc. -- the main factors in her history-urned-fiction. This time, while Charles Edward, the Pretender, figures as deus exachina Katherine of the Fraser clan and James Macdonald, his bitterest enemy, are the lovers around whom the story revolves, a story that embraces the whole of the crisis in which the Stuart claims to the Scottish throne met disaster. John Prebble's (1961- p. 1045), in non-fiction form, supports the grim and ghastly picture of the atrocities perpetrated on both sides, but in Clandara one gets more of the personal and emotional climate in which the ill-fated and brief journey into glory took place. In the story and the history, Evelyn Anthony does an excellent job; as a novelist, her dialogue is flat and her characters are somewhat stock figures.