I don’t have a lot of peeves when it comes to novels, but I have one very strong one, and it concerns historical fiction. As Sir Walter Scott is considered to have invented the genre, I would probably feel qualified to blame him regardless of whether he committed the particular sin, but he did, and quite egregiously.
What I hate more than anything in historical fiction is when for no apparent reason, famous or mythological people wander in to the story simply because they are presumed to be alive at the time period in which the novel is set. Worse, when they appear early in the story and the reader does not know who they are until the author smugly reveals the secret in the third act. And the last straw is when the famous people are Robin Hood and his band of merry whoevers, all of whom possess superhuman abilities to shoot arrows, skulk silently through the forest, or get drunk and misquote Latin catechisms.
Other than that, though, I enjoyed Ivanhoe. I didn’t know a thing about the plot and assumed it was some sweeping epic chronicling battle after battle, but the story is actually quite small and personal, which is probably why it was one of the most popular books of its time. (The other reason is that all the bad guys are French.) There are some battle scenes, but they involve few players and lots of histrionics like a femme fatale burning to death in a castle turret, old men being tortured in dungeons, and knights dressing up like other knights.
One unexpected and distasteful aspect of this reading project has been the astounding amount of casual anti-Semitism, and so reading what is essentially a novel-length tract pleading for religious tolerance was pretty refreshing. Even Scott can’t stop himself from making many of his Jewish protoganists as Jewy as possible:
“O, Jacob!” he exclaimed—”O, all ye twelve Holy Fathers of our tribe! what a losing venture is this for one who hath duly kept every jot and tittle of the law of Moses—Fifty zecchins wrenched from me at one clutch, and by the talons of a tyrant!”
But the heroine Rebecca is not a stereotype, other than being a raven-haired exotic temptress (who isn’t?), and she is frequently the only character who behaves with the slightest bit of sense.
The actress who plays her in the 1997 miniseries does not do the character justice, at least not in the first hour or so, which was all we could take of it because it was seriously boring.