Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile by Ian Bell Headline $119 AS a child, one of my fondest memories is of reading again and again an abridged version of Treasure Island with brightly coloured illustrations.
Sadly that is how most of us probably remember the works of Robert Louis Stevenson; that, and Robert Newton as Long John Silver limping and leering across our television screens in the 1950 Hollywood adaptation of the writer's classic.
There was far more to this man than the few essays, short stories and novels which survive in print today. In his all-too-brief, sickness-marred adulthood, he packed a lot in.
Ian Bell sees Stevenson's life as being shaped by three things - his native Scotland, the almost continual bouts of illness and his travels.
''Had he not been born in Edinburgh, he might have enjoyed better health; had he been healthier he might not have travelled so much; had he not travelled he would not have written as he did.'' This is a book that is long overdue. It was time for a modern observer, with a suitable distance of time between himself and his subject, to lay the ghost of Stevenson to rest and to declare once and for all that he was, and always will be, one of Scotland's greatest writers.
Mr Bell does not force his arguments. He simply persuades with a gentle, lilting style that leaves you in no doubt of the high regard he holds for the man. Thus he can be forgiven the occasional lapses when his florid prose gets carried away with itself.