Prester John

This month on the blog, a month I’m calling John Buchan June, is dedicated to reading and writing about as much of author’s classic adventure fiction as I can. Today’s entry proved one of his first great successes, a 1910 thriller of exploration, veld-craft, religious apocalypticism, empire-spanning conflict, and sheer tenacity entitled Prester John.

Prester John begins with its narrator, a young Scot named David Crawfurd, reminiscing about an odd childhood episode. After skipping out on a service at the local Free Kirk, at which a black African minister was visiting to talk about about missionary work, Crawfurd and his friends roam the shore far past dusk. There, in the darkness below the cliffs, they spot a bonfire and a solitary man. It is the visiting minister himself, John Laputa, engaged in inexplicable but demonic-looking rites. The boys attempt to flee, Laputa spots and chases them, and Crawfurd and his friends escape, terrified.

Years later Crawfurd, his family having fallen on hard times, takes a job with a British company and is assigned to manage the trading post at Blaauwildebeestefontein, in one of the most obscure and difficult to reach quarters of South Africa. On his voyage south, he finds himself sharing the ship not only with one of his childhood friends, a fellow witness to Laputa’s nighttime ecstasies, but Laputa himself. The minister is traveling in the company of a suspicious-looking Portuguese man named Henriques, with whom he confers secretly. Crawfurd and his friend are disturbed to see Laputa again after so many years and suspect some untoward reason behind his travels, but simply avoid him until they reach port.

Once in South Africa, Crawfurd takes his place in Blaauwildebeestefontein alongside a British schoolmaster given charge of a colonial school and tries to get on with the established local representative of the company, a drunkard whose groveling behavior with native customers strikes Crawfurd as not only degrading but sinister. Slowly, as Crawfurd settles into his role and sets out into a yet remoter corner of the region under orders to set up a new store, Crawfurd meets more unusual characters—among them Captain Arcoll, a British scout who is a master of disguise—and observes strange changes in the landscape and its people: the school empties of native students, the locals behave oddly, strange rumors pass his way, his coworker shows clear signs of involvement in diamond smuggling, and both the Henriques and John Laputa reappear.

What Crawfurd and the authorities gradually uncover is not only a network of the illicit diamond trade, but a plot to overthrow the British Empire in this place and set up a new pan-African kingdom under Laputa. The minister, traveling under the guise of Presbyterian evangelism, has claimed the name and authority of the mythical Christian king Prester John for himself and preaches a mystical gospel of destiny and liberation. With the warriors of tribes from all over sub-equatorial Africa streaming into the area and Captain Arcoll scrambling both to divine Laputa’s intentions and muster the strength to resist his massive coalition army, Crawfurd finds himself taking more and more important roles in the conflict and getting closer and closer to Laputa.

Though swept up in events far greater than himself and seemingly beyond his ability to influence, Crawfurd does not shy from any of the severe tests that come his way, even as the uprising begins and Laputa becomes not only a political danger to the Empire but a personal danger to Crawfurd.

It was mere happenstance that led me to read Prester John shortly after A Lost Lady of Old Years, a novel published just over a decade before this one, but it proved an instructive example of how a skilled writer can grow and improve. Prester John has brilliantly sketched characters, a solid and believable plot, beautifully described settings, excellent episodes of action and suspense, and, above all, superb pacing. Prester John is a slow burn, with Buchan steadily building suspense and tension throughout its first several chapters. A sense of foreboding hangs over the early passages, so that even as Crawfurd manages a frontier store or hires natives to help with construction the reader senses that all is not well, that something big is coming. And unlike A Lost Lady’s Francis Birkenshaw, David Crawfurd has a significant and meaningful role to play in the story’s events all the way through, his importance growing along with the stakes of the plot.

Crawfurd himself is a large part of what makes Prester John so compelling. Young and inexperienced but not naïve, upstanding but not priggish, clever but not guileful, capable of fighting but not bloodthirsty, and always willing to embrace hardship and danger uncomplainingly, he is a hero in the mold of David Balfour or Jim Hawkins. And his first-person narration is a masterful piece of work, tonally perfect from chapter to chapter and always conveying exactly the right amount of menace, surprise, danger, or humor.

Crawfurd is also, much like Buchan himself, openminded—though not in the wishy-washy modern way of Oprah relativism and hashtag affirmation. Writers as diverse as Ursula Buchan, John Buchan’s granddaughter and one of his most comprehensive biographers, and the late equal opportunity gadfly Christopher Hitchens have noted Buchan’s powers of sympathy, of imagining himself in someone else’s shoes and represent them fairly. Crawfurd displays the same trait throughout Prester John and combines it with the moral rectitude and exacting religious belief (Crawfurd explicitly owns up to the fatalism of his Scottish Calvinism) that also animated Buchan.

These traits together make Crawfurd a man who can see both the deep differences between himself and his enemy Laputa as well as Laputa’s good qualities, even his greatness as a thinker and leader. Crawfurd’s loyalty to the Empire and his belief in what he sees as its civilizing mission is uncompromising but not uncritical, and does not preclude respecting and evening admiring a leader as gifted and courageous as Laputa proves himself. The end result—without giving too much away—is a victory over Laputa that is tinged with and softened by sincere regret.

This, the clash of honorable men whose virtues are intelligible to each other across those things that divide them, made Prester John especially refreshing for me.

I haven’t sought such opinions out, but I can easily imagine Prester John being faulted for its imperialism, colonialism, exoticism, et cetera ad nauseam. Such criticism writes itself these days. But what I found interesting about the cross-cultural and imperial conflict imagined in this book was, again, the respect accorded Laputa by Crawfurd and the story; relatedly, the story’s utter lack of jingoism, cynicism, or self-flagellation; and, on a purely historical level, the way Buchan predicts the advent of non-Western nationalist revolutionaries motivated by purely European pathologies. Laputa—with his rigorous European education, his borrowing and repurposing of its ideologies, his syncretistic and political Christianity, and his twinned senses of grievance and destiny—prefigures many mid-twentieth century anticolonial leaders. Buchan even contrasts him with earlier, purely tribal leaders like the Zulu king Cetshwayo in order to underscore the new breed of threat to imperial order that Laputa represents. He is a worthier and more dangerous opponent as a result.

This level of nuance only enhances the believability of what could have been a potboiler of imperial adventure peopled with caricature ethnic villains. There are plenty of old books like that. Prester John isn’t one of them.

Finally, I’ve called and seen Prester John elsewhere called a thriller, but that’s not exactly right. It sits not only chronologically but also stylistically midway between Robert Louis Stevenson and Ian Fleming, an important point for the adventure, action, or thriller genre—a broad point in the stream before it narrows into other branches. As in so many of Stevenson’s adventures, a young man goes abroad and finds adventure and danger and endures it with bravery, tenacity, and unsullied honor. As in so many of Fleming’s, the danger stems from a foreigner’s ingenious plot to suborn the empire and aggrandize himself, and the hero even falls into his clutches more than once. But the combination of the two in Prester John is pure Buchan.

But all of that, as Buchan would be the first to say, is beside the point. What Prester John offers is a good story, well told, full of excitement and danger and characters made all the more compelling by the fairness and roundness in which they are rendered. Prester John may have appeared over 110 years ago, but it’s one of the most enjoyable and imagination-stirring novels I’ve read this year, and that, for Buchan, was the point.

If you’re looking for a story offering high adventure, good characters, and gripping action this summer, you could do much worse than Prester John. I highly recommend it.