The Power-House

We have entered the last week of John Buchan June. Today I’m writing about a lesser-known “shocker,” one first serialized the year before Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that is in many ways a precursor to that most famous of Buchan thrillers, and that introduced the world to Sir Edward Leithen—The Power-House.

Let me begin with this: The Power-House defies easy summary. One can describe this novel, but only in the broadest genre terms. It is a thriller, certainly, and its hero, Sir Edward Leithen, unravels a vast conspiracy and exposes a criminal mastermind just like Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, George Smiley, Jack Ryan, and untold others would later do. The difficulty comes with the novel’s form.

The story is a frame tale in which Sir Edward Leithen recounts how he once had an exotic and dangerous adventure without ever leaving London. (This limit, as he later admits, has one important exception.) The novel begins with Leithen learning of the disappearance of an old acquaintance, Charles Pitt-Heron, who has “bolted” with no warning and no word of his intentions or destination. Leithen takes an interest, and as others investigate and put together a search party that will eventually pursue the man into central Asia, he digs at the mysterious root of the man’s disappearance. Leithen does this through his intuition, sharpened by his work as a barrister, his dogged willingness to investigate, his courage to face the unknown, and through a remarkable series of coincidences that give him the pieces necessary to begin his work.

“It is understood and accepted,” one essayist has written, “that a Buchan plot relies absolutely on a level of coincidence that Dickens would have dismissed as improbable.” This is not fair to all of Buchan’s work, but it not only fits The Power-House but may even be a bit of an understatement. The chief events of the book, in which Leithen stumbles upon clues and into the lair of the villain, are all coincidental. The rest of the “action,” so to speak, is interior—Leithen mulling, putting together information, having epiphanies. And always just in the nick of time.

In her introduction to the edition I read, former MI5 chief and novelist Stella Rimington refers to The Power-House as “a tale without a plot.” The plot, as she goes on to suggest, is not the main attraction the way it is with later novels about Hannay or Leithen. Instead, The Power-House is “pure essence of Buchan.” It relies entirely on pacing, atmosphere, a charming and tenacious main character, and a strong villain to succeed.

The Power-House is the shortest of the Buchan novels I’ve read and moves briskly. I read it in a matter of a few hours across several leisurely vacation days. It is also the first instance in my reading of Buchan’s use of in media res to kick off the action, a technique you can see repeated in thriller after thriller from this point on. (The very first line of both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle sets the tone, gets the plot moving, prepares both the reader and the hero for adventure.)

From the moment one of Leithen’s colleagues tells him about Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, Buchan spreads a series of seemingly disconnected incidents before us and stitches them together with Leithen’s straightforward and thoughtful narration. Not only does Leithen’s voice and intellect hold the novel together, it also draws the reader downward with Leithen into a more and more oppressively paranoid mood. By the midpoint of the novel Leithen sees dangers everywhere—in shops, in his own neighborhood, among the anonymous crowd jostling him in the streets of London—another technique that, as I wrote a few weeks ago, would be exploited to even greater effect in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If The Power-House is not plot-driven but moved along by pure pacing and atmosphere, the main draw must be the central conflict between Leithen and the villain. In this case, the villain is Andrew Lumley, a wealthy, well-connected man of immense intellect—and a strong vision of the future of Europe and the human race. Leithen happens upon him during a drive in the country following Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, and Lumley opens up to him. In expressing his vision, Lumley produces one of the most famous passages in Buchan’s fiction:

“Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?”

“I should have thought it fairly substantial,” I said, “and the foundations grow daily firmer.”

He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but, believe me, you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

Lumley is an anarchist of the kind found in the uppermost echelons of society—an elite educated into arrogant oikophobia, a Nietzschean with an appetite for the will to power. But what makes Lumley dangerous is that he is not just an armchair radical fulminating against the establishment from inside it, but the quiet head of an entire organization dedicated to undermining Western civilization in secret. This organization is called the Power-House.

Only later do we realize that Lumley’s explanation of his perspective was not just a monologue but a seduction, an attempt to recruit Leithen. And that others—like Pitt-Heron—who have resisted Lumley and the Power-House have disappeared or met untimely or embarrassing ends.

Fortunately Leithen proves himself a capable opponent to Lumley. He is also his perfect foil—where Lumley is a wealthy and respected elite, Leithen is a workaday lawyer and politician known mainly to friends. Where Lumley uses a network of likeminded and similarly-placed anarchists to foment the collapse of civilization, Leithen must work. Where Lumley is an arch-rationalist ideologue committed to chaos, Leithen works intuitively within tradition and custom on behalf of order. And, perhaps most fundamentally, where Lumley is ambitious, Leithen is content.

While this confrontation lends to The Power-House a curious excitement and distinctive flavor, it is not my favorite of the Buchan novels I’ve read so far. Though well paced, the framing narrative erases most of the doubts you might otherwise entertain about whether Leithen will succeed. The conclusion, in which Leithen wraps up his story of rooting out conspiracy without leaving London by explicitly contrasting it with his friends who chased Pitt-Heron halfway across Eurasia, ends the story on a witty punchline but also draws attention to the fact that a potentially more interesting and exhilarating story has played out entirely in the background. And while Lumley is a compelling and even frightening antagonist, what he’s actually planning to do is never made clear. This is not necessarily a problem—as long as the reader doesn’t stop to think about it.

Though I enjoyed The Power-House a great deal, it does have its weaknesses and is perhaps more interesting as a trial run of techniques and themes—especially the fragility of the good things civilization has bequeathed us—that would make Richard Hannay’s first adventure such a smashing success. Nevertheless, in introducing Sir Edward Leithen Buchan gave his readers one of his best and most important characters, a more thoughtful and methodical hero who would return in the magnificent John Macnab. The Power-House is worth reading just to make his acquaintance.