NEIL Munro is probably best known for the highly popular Vital Spark tales of Para Handy and his crew, which were televised some years ago. Written in the early days of the twentieth century, they emerged from his columns for the Glasgow Evening News; Munro’s first love, it could be argued, was journalism.

But he also carved a role for himself as writer of historical romance, and this last novel of his in that genre was completed in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War. It seems tragically timely. A story about a son looking for the truth about his dead father, a Jacobite reputedly killed at the Battle of Glenshiel in 1719, would have had resonance for future sons destined to grow up without fathers who had also been killed in battle.

Munro was no Jacobite. His romance is a Unionist one, which exposes the corruption of Highland chiefs and celebrates the progress of the Hanoverian government. How, then, will his literary legacy fare in a Scotland that seems to be turning more and more towards independence and away from the Unionist project? During last year’s referendum, those of Scotland’s writers – past and present – who embraced independence were highlighted in books by the likes of Robert Crawford’s Bannockburns, for example, and artist networks like National Collective. It was left to right-wing, Unionist magazines like The Spectator to decry this artistic leaning towards all things independent.

My question would imply that literary heritage, the selection of those members of the literary canon, is nearly always a political exercise. But surely that is the case, when so many women writers are excluded from the literary canon? It doesn’t seem outrageous to suggest that other kinds of politics, apart from sexual politics, play a part, too. The question of pure literary merit is hard to answer. Munro’s last novel is a dense thriller, where his hero, young Aeneas Macmaster, travels north into the Highlands with Ninian Macgregor Campbell, to investigate suspected gun-running. A “new road” is being built between Stirling and Inverness, which is being sabotaged by those who oppose such signs of progress.

The villains of the piece are Duncanson, the man who has usurped Aeneas’s claim on his father’s house, and who believes Aeneas to have stolen a snuff box from him; and Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, an all-powerful clan chief who wants to prevent progress, who refuses to let his people be educated or improve their lives. Munro’s political message is clear, then. But his plot is less easy to follow, partly due to the heavy use of Scots and Gaelic, which in many ways adds to the beauty of the prose, and partly due to the speed with which events overtake Aeneas and Ninian. This is an often fast-paced tale of fights, double-crossing and even death.

In that sense, Munro is a very masculine writer. The women in the story are the trapped young wife of Lovat, who longs to escape her husband; Annabel the spirited and often flirtatious wife of Ninian; and Ninian's equally spirited daughter, Janet, who thinks nothing of a three-day journey on horseback. These women are interesting but are glimpsed only; it is the men who solve the mystery of what happened to Aeneas’s father and why a man like Duncanson was able to so easily take Aeneas’s inheritance from him. It is a story of male inheritance, a classic father-son tale.

Munro’s historical romances, which include earlier works like Doom Castle and The Shoes of Fortune, meant that he was often cited as a successor to Scott, and also to Stevenson. His innovative use of Scots and Gaelic perhaps belie the more conservative aspects of the historical romance genre as he employed it, and certainly his view, represented in this last novel, of the “new road” as a sign of progress, would suggest that he didn’t consider the message of his book as a conservative one. For the Highlands to survive, he clearly felt they must throw off the shackles of the old clan system and embrace the new order of the Hanoverians.

Only time will tell if Munro can maintain his position with regard to Scott and Stevenson, but this final novel of his is probably the best one to do that. It is his use of language in the book that will save him for posterity, if he is saved, not the politics therein, nor the “romance” of the son searching for the truth about a lost father.