Greenmantle

Today for John Buchan June, we look at the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that expands upon everything that made that rousing, fast-paced, and timely thriller successful into a tale that is part spy novel, part man-on-the-run thriller, part travelogue, and part war story—Greenmantle.

Greenmantle begins with hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, resting and recuperating back home in England. It is December of 1915, Hannay is now Major Hannay, and he has been wounded leading an attack on the Western Front. Hannay receives an urgent invitation to meet Sir Walter Bullivant, the man with whom, in the previous story, he had finally been able to find refuge and to confide in after weeks on the run from German spies.

Bullivant tells Hannay that a British agent, staggering wounded into a British outpost in the Middle East, had delivered a message consisting of only three words before he died, three words that Bullivant believes may be clues to German strategic intentions in the east. The agent, Bullivant reveals, was his son, and Bullivant asks Hannay to use the same skills that had helped him unravel the Black Stone’s plot against Britain a few years earlier to infiltrate German intelligence and uncover their plans. Hannay hesitates but, duty-bound and not one to shrink from task just because it’s impossible, agrees.

Bullivant pairs Hannay with John S Blenkiron, an eccentric but brilliant intelligence operative—and an American, and so theoretically neutral. Hannay also asks his brother officer Sandy Arbuthnot, also recuperating from wounds received on the Western Front, to join them. Arbuthnot has years of experience in the Balkans and Middle East gained before the war and is a master of languages and local customs. He will prove a crucial part of operation, though not in any way they could have predicted.

Hannay, Blenkiron, and Arbuthnot agree to split up, infiltrate enemy territory, and reconnect in Istanbul in the new year. Hannay takes ship for Portugal, where he runs into his old friend Peter Pienaar, a Boer hunter and outdoorsman, and together they pass themselves off as German sympathizing South Africans seeking revenge against the British. Clandestinely sent to Germany, they are interrogated by Colonel von Stumm, a brutish intelligence officer tasked with assessing their usefulness. He separates Hannay from Pienaar, and, following a brawl at Stumm’s secluded home in Bavaria, Hannay flees. He is a hunted man once more.

Hannay’s situation is desperate, but he has already begun to decipher the first of the clues Bullivant’s son had revealed—the identity of a dangerous female operative in the Middle East, Hilda von Einem.

At the midpoint of the novel, Hannay, Blenkiron, Arbuthnot, and even Pienaar manage to link up pool the information gathered in their travels. What emerges from their observations and disparate bits of intelligence is the outline of a German plot: Hilda von Einem, acting as handler, has cultivated a prominent Muslim cleric called Greenmantle, a figure prophesied in old mystical poetry and whom the Germans intend to use. The Germans hope that, fired by the simplifying and purifying spirit of revival and following the banner of Greenmantle, Muslims will make a potent insurgent force in the region and decisively shift the balance against Britain, France, Russia, and their allies. In short, they hope to provoke jihad.

Unfortunately for Hilda von Einem, Greenmantle has terminal cancer. His time is short—and so the Germans are moving quickly. This was the information Sir Walter Bullivant’s son gave his life to get to the British.

Hannay and his team travel eastwards, into the heart of the Ottoman Empire and to the headwaters of the Euphrates in the mountains north of Mesopotamia. They travel under cover, with Hannay as a member of Hilda von Einem’s entourage, but are identified and pursued by Rasta Bey, an arrogant and powerful Young Turk whom Hannay has crossed and humiliated several times en route to Istanbul. And as an added threat, the dreaded Colonel von Stumm reappears. This section of the novel is a tightrope walk of aliases and concealed identities, cross-country chases, captures and escapes, and, finally, the brutality of modern trench warfare. Here individual initiative, resourcefulness, and guts confront the overwhelming, indiscriminate destructive power of artillery.

By the end, Hannay and the others have blown their cover and are on the run for a final time, hopelessly outnumbered and desperately trying to deliver details of a forthcoming German and Ottoman attack to the Russians so that they can break the siege, push the Ottomans back, stop Hilda von Einem, and, just possibly, win the war.

Greenmantle has all the strengths of The Thirty-Nine Steps that I wrote about a few weeks ago—strong writing, excellent pacing, interesting characters, thrilling episodes (the conclusion is one of the best last stands I’ve read in fiction), as well as all the genre-defining features that that novel pioneered, especially the plot tied to plausible real-life politics and world events. TE Lawrence, who was in a position to know, later wrote that “Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth.” But it also broadens and deepens what The Thirty-Nine Steps accomplished so masterfully. In this respect it is a true sequel, both building upon and improving upon all the best elements of its predecessor.

And like all good sequels, it is also different enough to avoid retreading the same ground. In his introduction to the authorized edition, Buchan biographer and literary critic Allan Massie writes that where The Thirty-Nine Steps is a “chase” novel, Greenmantle is a “quest” novel. I think that’s just about right. Greenmantle is much longer than The Thirty-Nine Steps but maintains the same excitement and brisk momentum. In the first half, Hannay ends up on the run first from Stumm and then from Rasta Bey. He faces personal dangers at every turn and his courage and resourcefulness are sorely tested. In the second, Hannay and his team end up on the run from pretty much everyone. What holds this pattern of infiltration, exposure, and flight together, though, is Hannay’s mission, his quest—to divine German intentions.

But Hannay’s work is not done once they have discovered Hilda von Einem and Greenmantle; the stakes are even higher than in the first half, and Hannay and the others, in true quest fashion, confront their dangers not individually but as a team: Hannay the principled leader and jack of all trades, Pienaar the unflinching survivalist genius, Blenkiron the brains of the operation, and Arbuthnot the heart and soul. They would not succeed without all of them, and all of them is what their mission will require.

John Buchan in uniform, May 1917

Greenmantle is also a more sweeping story than its predecessor. Hannay begins the story in England before traveling to Lisbon and traversing the whole breadth of Europe by rail, on foot, and by river barge before arriving in Mesopotamia. Buchan successfully conveys the scope and intensity of the First World War and not a little of its complexity and pathos.

This pathos is only possible because of Greenmantle’s scope—it is both a panorama of the entire war in Europe and the Middle East and a series of strikingly intimate episodes informed by the experiences of not only of spies but of ordinary soldiers, civilians, tribesmen, sailors, bandits, and the leaders of nations. Buchan’s immense powers of sympathy, which I wrote about when I reviewed Prester John, are on full display. Regardless of which side they are on, almost all of Greenmantle’s characters have admirable qualities, and almost none is presented as irredeemably evil. Even the Kaiser, whom Hannay meets in one of the most surprising and interesting incidents in the novel, is presented sympathetically. (It is worth recalling that Buchan wrote this novel at a time when all Germans, but the Kaiser especially, were quite literally demonized.) Only those like Stumm and Rasta Bey, functionaries so compromised by ideological nationalism and pragmatism and personal cruelty, seem to be beyond hope, but it is they who have given the war the exceptional prolonged savagery that Hannay and his fellows must navigate.

The sympathy with which Buchan writes allows Hannay staunch loyalties while seasoning and softening them. The most striking example comes during Hannay’s flight across Bavaria to the Danube. On foot in the snow, he falls ill and risks capture to ask for help from a German woman living in an isolated hut. She takes him in despite having to care for her three children alone. One night after Christmas, he learns more about her:

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I looked their way, the woman talked. Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a Polish bog and longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. . . . She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

To be “better than the beasts”—for the sake of people like this woman and her children, for the personal honor and character of men like Hannay, and for civilization itself despite temptations to domination, cruelty, and ruthless pragmatism—would work as the guiding principle of all of Buchan’s heroes. And it is ultimately what’s at stake in Hannay’s mission.

I could say much more—alongside its artistic merits, Greenmantle has been credited with predicting the rise of Islamist extremism—but I think what gives this novel its peculiar staying power is the excitement of its plot and action, the involving multidimensional characters and their varying skillsets, and, again, its pathos. Greenmantle takes all that made Richard Hannay’s first adventure thrilling and deepens it. It is not just an adventure of murder, espionage, and the threat of war, but of the testing of the soul.