The Three Hostages

Today we conclude John Buchan June with the fourth Richard Hannay adventure, a tale of kidnapping, hypnotism, international intrigue—and the beauty of domesticity. The novel is The Three Hostages.

A few years after the First World War General Sir Richard Hannay has retired to a house in the Cotswolds, married Mary Lamington, whom he met and worked with against the plots of Count von Schwabing in Mr Standfast, had a son, and embraced the life of a settled country squire. The detached, drifting mining engineer we first met in The Thirty-Nine Steps is utterly changed, not only by his adventures and the war but by the goodness of marriage and family life. So when two separate visitors arrive on the same day with the same offer of adventure, Hannay, surprisingly for us readers, is irritated.

The first of the visitors is Julius Victor, a wealthy Jewish banker who had emigrated from the United States and helped finance Britain’s war effort. His daughter Adela, his only child, has been kidnapped. Scotland Yard have done all they can do. Hannay is sympathetic but declines to help in the search, thinking he would only complicate and frustrate matters. After Victor’s departure Macgillivray, intelligence chief Sir Walter Bullivant’s aide, arrives wanting to speak with Hannay about the same thing. But it turns out that Adela Victor is only one of three high-profile hostages held by a powerful “combine” or crime syndicate. The others are Lord Mercot, an Oxford student and wealthy heir, and—most painful of all to Hannay and Mary—David Warcliff, a ten-year old boy and the only child of his widower father. The kidnappers have made no demands, only mailed a strange six-line poem to each of the families. Bullivant wants Hannay to pitch in. Hannay, again, refuses.

But Hannay’s conscience will not let him rest—and neither will Mary. In the first of many crucial interventions in the novel, Mary appeals to Hannay’s love for their own son, John Peter, and Hannay’s sense of duty and sharp new fatherly instincts do the rest. He heads to London to begin his own unofficial search.

An analysis of the strange allusions in the poem—blindness, fate, Eden, the midnight sun—lead Hannay into the circle of Dominick Medina.

Medina is a charismatic Irishman and a rising star in London social life and British politics. Civilized, well-educated, charming, athletic, a well-reviewed poet, a sparkling conversationalist, and “the handsomest thing in mankind since the Greeks,” Medina fought in Russia for a White partisan group during the war and has had nothing but success since his return. He seems an unlikely candidate for the leader of an international criminal conspiracy. And Hannay finds himself as charmed as any of the other Buchan familiars with whom Medina associates. Even Sir Edward Leithen is one of Medina’s friends and admirers. Everyone likes and respects Medina—everyone but Sandy Arbuthnot, Hannay’s old friend from Greenmantle. Sandy, a gentleman, a scholar of Oriental languages, and a man more far-travelled and adventurous than Hannay, is deeply suspicious of Medina. Though Hannay thinks Sandy is merely jealous, he still takes note.

But Sandy is vindicated when Medina, after dinner at their club one night not long after they first meet, tries to hypnotize Hannay.

It doesn’t work—Hannay, strong-willed and not given to introspection, as even Mary admits, is a poor target for mind control—but Hannay’s suspicions are aroused. Why would this handsome, successful young man be preying on his peers?

Hannay determines to work deeper into Medina’s confidence by playing the biggest part of his career of playacting. He feigns being under Medina’s sway and becomes more and more a toady to the man, who reveals more and more of his life beneath the glossy veneer of charm, wealth, and sophistication. Hannay discovers a grasping striver, a dabbler in mysticism, diabolism, and manipulation who is not above demeaning and using others to achieve power over them. He also meets Medina’s mother, a blind old woman and an even more powerful hypnotist than her son, and Kharáma, an Indian guru and Medina’s mentor.

But as widely respected as Medina is, Hannay cannot reveal his suspicions without betraying his own plot. He thus takes only a handful of people into his confidence—among them Sandy and, crucially, Mary—and doesn’t even reveal to Bullivant what he is working on.

Hannay’s investigations ultimately take him to Norway, to a seedy London jazz club, to a curiosity shop where nothing is for sale, to a slum where a Swedish masseuse treats patients referred by Medina’s doctor, and to a suspenseful and violent one-on-one showdown among the crags and cliffs of the Scottish highlands.

There is much, much more to The Three Hostages than I can adequately summarize here, and one of the pleasures of the novel is just how much of it there is. With its vaguely foreign villain with an unusual deformity (Medina has an almost-spherical head that he conceals with artful coiffure), its villain’s unclear aims but dangerous and far-reaching plot, its globetrotting, and its venturing from black-tie dinner and manor house to slum and nightclub, it is also the most James Bond-like of the Hannay stories. When reading about Medina I found myself thinking more than once of Auric Goldfinger and Hugo Drax. Last year I broke down the place of The Thirty-Nine Steps in the genealogy of the action or espionage novel. The Three Hostages, which CS Lewis, in a 1933 letter, accurately called “a real modern thriller,” is another clear link to the future of the genre.

One of The Three Hostages’ strengths, and one of the things that surely made it more influential than similar novels like Bulldog Drummond, is the quality of Buchan’s writing, especially in this novel’s plotting and pacing. After the sprawling, loosely constructed, somewhat unfocused Mr Standfast, Buchan here gives Hannay a single straightforward mission that unifies and gives form to every aspect of the adventure, whether flying across the North Sea with Sir Archie Roylance or mountaineering in Norway and Scotland.

Most importantly, the mission to find and save the hostages gives powerful emotional stakes to Hannay himself. Early in the novel, as Macgillvray presents what he knows of the kidnapping plot to Hannay, he says, “I should have made you understand how big and desperate the thing is that we're out against . . . You know as well as I do that cold blood is not always the most useful accompaniment in assessing evidence.” Hannay, always more intuitive a hero than Sir Edward Leithen, must surrunder totally to bone-deep bonds and instincts. What drives Hannay throughout The Three Hostages is not only his duty to England and civilization but his deep, sub-rational—and therefore transcendent—love of family.

This focus on the power and beauty and mystery of domesticity is the surprising key to The Three Hostages. Medina, in kidnapping children, has disrupted three vulnerable families and threatens to destroy them. Whenever Hannay faces renewed difficulty or a new obstacle, Hannay remembers Mary and their son, John Peter. His understanding of what the fathers of Adela Victor and Davy Warcliff are going through motivates him. Mary urges him on and sustains him, and takes no small role in bringing down Medina herself.

I say that this is a “surprising” theme because of what I’ve previously noted about Buchan protagonists. They are often young, unattached men, wandering if not totally adrift, and usually bored of routine. That Hannay has married and settled down and loves the chores and maintenance of his farm was a brilliant change. And Hannay’s resistance to returning to the life of danger and instability born of espionage and undercover work, a resistance rooted not in cowardice but care for the little bit of the world under his stewardship, feels genuine and gives both a new maturity to Hannay and emotional weight to the rest of the novel. The unwanted call to “one last mission” may have become a spy thriller cliché in the 99 years since The Three Hostages was published, but it’s seldom been done better.

The result, in the end, is a novel with the most of the strengths and all of the themes of Buchan’s earlier adventures. It revisits the theme of the crackup or madness of civilization, a vulnerability easily exploited by men like Medina—a theme elaborated as early as The Power-House.

But here the plot is richer and more complex, and Buchan leavens it one extra element that sets it apart: love. Buchan, through Hannay, offers a vision of devotion to family and home, of the strength of a well-matched husband and wife, and of how civilization, though perhaps not saved, can be shored up and passed on through these humble means.

* * * * *

I’m sorry to see this second John Buchan June draw to a close. For various reasons I feel like I’ve only just gotten into the swing of things. So I’m looking forward to next year, especially since I have more Dickson McCunn and even some Buchan short stories arriving later today. I hope y’all have a restful July, and that these reviews have piqued your interest in one of this great old writer’s novels. Give one a look this coming month. Thanks as always for reading!

The Gap in the Curtain

We begin the final week of John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s strangest and most surprising novels. In the introduction to the Authorised Edition I read, journalist Stuart Kelly aptly describes it as “an odd novel—a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration.” And yet, despite this, it is also “the most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.” The book is Sir Edward Leithen’s fourth adventure, The Gap in the Curtain.

The novel begins during Leithen’s visit to the country house of Lady Flambard, an enthusiastic hostess who has gathered a bewildering assortment of people for a Whitsuntide holiday in the Cotswolds. Leithen would rather go riding in the hills than be trapped in her engineered salons, but during dinner one night he notes that the guests, for all their differences in background, profession, age, and political persuasions, fall into two types—untroubled souls who can unthinkingly relax as part of Lady Flambard’s collection of conversationalists, and the melancholy, the preoccupied, the withdrawn. He will have cause to think more deeply about this division with the arrival of one final guest.

The guest is Professor August Moe, a European physicist and mathematician and one of the few on the same intellectual plane as Einstein. Moe, an enormous and cadaverous old man, requests that Leithen attend a private meeting with a few other hand-selected guests. Once all have assembled for Moe’s talk, Leithen realizes that the professor has somehow picked exactly the half of Lady Flambard’s guests he had marked as the somber and pensive. Something is up.

Moe describes a theory of time as a system of coexisting coils, with past, future, and present not separate but overlapping, and reveals that he has discovered a method of peering into the future—scientifically, objectively. Through his method, which is something like remote viewing, the properly trained mind can look across time’s structure and see short glimpses of the future. He wishes them to join him in his first test. With a few days of preparation, including a vegetarian diet, abstention from alcohol, a mild dose of an unnamed drug, and, most importantly, dedicated study and concentration upon a familiar object, a copy of The Times, they will be ready to receive a glimpse of the same object exactly one year on. They will be able to read next year’s headlines.

It works.

But it works because Moe, an ailing man, dies at the moment of the experiment. This is the hidden final part of the formula. When he collapses and breathes his last it sends Leithen’s friend Sally Lamington into a panic and Leithen, in responding to her swoon and to the Professor’s death, misses his glimpse of the future.

But the others get their one-second view of next June’s Times. Arnold Tavanger, a financier with his eye on the market, sees a story about the merger of two major mining corporations. David Mayot, a young politician on the rise, sees an article naming an unexpected new prime minister. Reggie Daker, a wealthy young homebody and book collector, sees an article about his imminent departure for the Yucatán. Sir Robert Goodeve, a promising young MP of an ancient noble family, and Captain Charles Ottery, a veteran of the Great War now working for a London business, see their own obituaries.

The rest of the novel relates what each man does with his scrap of foreknowledge over the coming year. Tavanger, equipped with what he thinks is a foolproof bit of inside dope, sets off on a globe-trotting adventure to buy up shares in one of the companies that will merge in a year. Mayot, an unprincipled political operator, maneuvers to place himself as near the top as possible in the coming change of prime minister. Reggie Daker, who doesn’t even know where the Yucatán is (“He fancied it must be in the East; places ending in ‘tan’ were always in the East; he remembered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Gulistan…”), is convinced Moe’s method was erroneous and lets himself be swept up in a one-sided romance with a ferocious girl and her domineering family, who turn his antiquarian interest in books into an exhausting commercial enterprise. As for Goodeve and Ottery, the knowledge that they will be dead in a year produces radically different effects.

I don’t want to risk giving too much away. This oddest of all of Buchan’s novels may also benefit most from reading it cold, spoiler-free. When the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote that “The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament,” he might have been stating The Gap in the Curtain’s thesis.

Each of the five sections presents a different style and tone of story, all related through Leithen, who chances to run into each of the five men at various points through the political and economic upheavals of the next year. The stories also escalate in seriousness.

Tavanger and Mayot, seeking a profitable deal and political prominence, respectively, prove themselves unserious and worldly. Their stories come across as petty wheeling and dealing when eternity is at stake. Mayot is particularly unpleasant, a self-serving striver and user, a creature of political gossip and the smoke-filled room—a type with which Buchan, as an MP, would have been familiar. Tavanger, at least, has the saving grace of not taking it too badly when his understanding of the future turns out to be incomplete and misleading. Unlike Mayot, he can laugh it off.

Reggie Daker offers a comical interlude. A hobbit-like lover of quiet pursuits, of angling and riding and contentedly browsing his books in an armchair, he finds his life turned upside down. As with Tavanger and Mayot, what he saw in next year’s Times turns out to be true—sort of. The reader sees where Reggie’s story is going pretty quickly; the joy comes in seeing Reggie trying to keep up and finally rushing into his surprising, last-minute fulfilment of what he saw through Moe’s technique. This section shows Buchan at his most playful. Reggie, whom Kelly explicitly compares to Bertie Wooster, could also be one of the kindly but clueless side characters of Evelyn Waugh. His aggressive fiancée and her horrible family are even more Waugh-like.

But the meat of The Gap in the Curtain is in the final parallel sections concerning Goodeve and Ottery. Faced with death, they follow opposing tracks. One man feels himself invincible—at first. Then he succumbs to passivity and despair. The other goes from wrath to resignation before finding a redeeming courage through love. One isolates himself, retreating more and more into himself as the fatal date approaches. The other indulges himself before turning outward, toward another, to face the future together. Through relationship he discovers courage.

The Goodeve and Ottery stories, coming after the dull and laborious self-centeredness of Tavanger and Mayot and the hapless comedy of Reggie Daker, astounded me. As meditations on death and fate, despair and courage, they prefigure Leithen’s final adventure in Buchan’s final novel, Sick Heart River. But juxtaposed as they are in the last third of this novel, they take on an exceptional power. The last section’s love story is one of the best and most surprising in all of Buchan’s works, and lies at the heart of the books hopeful vision.

I wish I could say more and in greater detail but, again, I don’t want to give too much away.

The Gap in the Curtain can be straightforwardly read as a story about fate and predestination. Certainly, the characters themselves argue about what they’ve seen in next June’s Times and debate the meaning of free will—most pointedly in that final story—and the unresolved ironies of the way the predictions are and are not fulfilled is a key part of the novel’s power. The novel also suggests that the certainties of science, with all its pretensions to mathematical objectivity, are illusory, or at best incomplete. The characters who trust most in Professor Moe those driven deepest into greed or despair.

These themes place it in good company among science fiction and time travel stories. But The Gap in the Curtain is also a story about character and virtue. Assuming you could get a glimpse of the future, what would you do with it? Self-advancement, distraction, brazenness and courage, despair and hope—these are responses brought forth and sharpened by knowledge of the future, not created by it. And, most especially in the final section, Buchan dramatizes the necessity of love as a response to whatever the future holds.

The Gap in the Curtain is a bold experiment in concept, structure, and theme, and it’s uncommonly rich for the kind of tale it is. Just note that Leithen and the rest undergo this experiment during Whitsuntide, the Pentecost celebration commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost. But it is also a fun, surprising, and deeply moving novel about something all of us will face, though without Professor Moe’s method—the future, and death. The Gap in the Curtain also suggests the best way to face them.

The Blanket of the Dark

“[Peter] hated him, for he saw the cunning behind the frank smile, the ruthlessness in the small eyes; but he could not blind himself to his power.”

John Buchan June continues with one of Buchan’s late historical novels, a masterfully crafted story of intrigue, paranoia, religious upheaval, dynastic chicanery, and tyranny in Tudor England. The novel is The Blanket of the Dark.

The hero of The Blanket of the Dark is a classic Buchan “scholar called to action,” in this case quite literally. Peter Pentecost is a teenaged clerk at Oseney Abbey outside Oxford on the cusp of taking his vows to become a monk. The year is 1536. Peter, like his mentor, a priest named Tobias, is a faithful son of the Church and a “Grecian,” a humanist scholar of the classics like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who just a year earlier was beheaded for refusing to affirm King Henry VIII’s annulment, remarriage, and authority over the Church. For this, More had been branded a traitor. Peter has, so far, observed all of this passively and with little interest. But as the novel begins, the smothering darkness lying over England comes for him.

Peter learns that he is, in fact, the only surviving son of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a rival of Henry who was executed for treason fifteen years earlier. Peter’s earliest memories—of being raised by an old widow woman, of being handed off to monks at a rural abbey for his education—turn out to be memories of a life in hiding, the rightful heir being protected until the time is right to return. The disaffected noblemen who approach Peter and reveal his true identity to him believe that time is now. They mean to challenge “the Welshman’s” tyranny and offer Peter their support.

Peter finds himself swept from his well-ordered life of prayer and study to a life of clandestine travel among the men of “Old England,” commoners who sneak him from place to place in the shelter of the woods, and landed aristocrats who shelter him in their manor houses. He also begins a remedial course in kingship, learning to ride and wield weapons properly, and makes the acquaintance of the first noblewoman he has ever known—the beautiful niece of one of his supporters, Sabine Beauforest. As the anti-Tudor conspiracy slowly moves forward and Peter moves from hiding place to hiding place, his desires—for the treasure needed to fund his attempt at the throne, for the power that will come with possessing the crown, for Sabine—grow stronger and stronger.

At first Peter justifies himself. He views his power and position as a means to good ends and intends to use it wisely: to restore the Church and the ancestral rights of Englishmen. But Peter—a bookish student and erstwhile celibate—is also uncomfortable with the worldly rewards being paraded before him, and so his pursuit of the throne also becomes both a pilgrimage and a series of tests.

One by one the chance to fulfil his desires come to Peter and one by one he learns something new about both the world and himself, until the final, climactic temptation—the launch of the coup aimed at kidnapping the King and placing Peter on the throne, culminating in a deadly confrontation with King Henry VIII himself.

The Blanket of the Dark reminds me a great deal of Buchan’s earlier novel of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Midwinter. Both take place during an uprising against a monarch believed by the plotters to be an illegitimate tyrant; both take place largely on the margins of the plot, away from the fighting and seemingly decisive action; and both involve the men of “Old England,” a traditional and continuous community outside the rise and fall of dynasties and world powers. Both evoke their period and locations with great care and attention to detail and feature convincing cameos of real historical figures—in The Blanket of the Dark, Henry VIII and his dread agent Thomas Cromwell. Both are also excellent novels.

But The Blanket of the Dark, through Buchan’s care for what is at stake spiritually, the danger of pursuing power even for good ends, achieves an unusual weight, what Sir John Keegan in writing of The Thirty-Nine Steps called the “particularly elusive” quality of “moral atmosphere.” Buchan’s portrait of England after Henry’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Act of Supremacy, the execution of dissenters under the Act of Treason, and the elevation of Cromwell as Henry’s hatchet man, is pervaded by threat and paranoia. The great threat to ordinary people and their traditional loyalties is chicanery in high places. As one character, one of Peter’s rivals for Sabine’s attentions, puts it: “‘Tis a difficult time for a Christian. . . . If he have a liking for the Pope he may be hanged for treason, and if he like not the mass he may burn for heresy.”

Peter’s pilgrimage toward the throne occupied by Henry places him in the path of the worldly-wise and powerful, and through the testing of his own desires—lust, greed, pride—he comes to see the emptiness and ulterior motives of those who claim to be resisting Henry’s tyranny. Snatched from the cloister and the scriptorium in order to overthrow a heretical despot, he comes to see little difference between Henry and his own supporters. By the time of the attack on Henry, the choice Peter is presented with, both figuratively and, in the person of the King himself, literally, is whether to pursue power or the things his supporters ostensibly want him to use his power to protect.

Perhaps, rather than anything it is used for, the power is the danger. In making his final and greatest choice, Peter does not get everything he desires, but The Blanket of the Dark suggests that he gets something far better.

The Blanket of the Dark was well reviewed at the time Buchan published it in 1931, with praise from CS Lewis and the elderly Rudyard Kipling among others. More recently, the historian of Christianity and biographer of Thomas Cromwell Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a 2019 interview, said of it, “It’s chilling. Brilliant.” With its effortless plotting and pacing, its strong and often beautiful writing, its brilliantly-realized historical setting—with everything from the spoiling of the monasteries to the Pilgrimage of Grace informing the action from a distance—its vivid characters, and its surprising but satisfyingly poignant ending, I strongly agree.

Buchan’s storytelling and craftsmanship alone make The Blanket of the Dark still worth reading. But that this novel also touches on the threats to conscience, tradition, and faith posed by the self-serving and powerful, who may talk about protecting and restoring all of those things but only aim to use them for their own ends, makes it an exceptionally rewarding and still-relevant adventure.

Mr Standfast

John Buchan June continues today with the third Richard Hannay novel, the conclusion to an informal trilogy concerning Hannay and the Great War. The Thirty-Nine Steps detailed Hannay’s accidental discovery of a German plot to start a war and defeat England. Greenmantle followed him across Europe and beyond as he uncovered a new German plot to foment religious upheaval in the Middle East. And this novel, Mr Standfast, traces his total commitment to the war—on both the Western Front and the home front.

Mr Standfast begins with Hannay, now Brigadier General Hannay, recalled from the trenches for a special assignment by his old spy chief Sir Walter Bullivant. Bullivant tasks Hannay with infiltrating a genteel manor house in the Cotswolds frequented by upper crust pacifists, antiwar activists, leftwing literary snobs, and, just possibly, German spies. In order to do this, Hannay must playact again. If you’ve read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle you’ll know that this comes naturally enough to Hannay, but here he meets a serious challenge—he must pretend to be a pacifist.

Despite his revulsion at acting such a dishonorable part and his embarrassment at being perceived as a conscientious objector, Hannay successfully ingratiates himself into the community. In doing so, he meets two crucial characters: Launcelot Wake, a real conscientious objector whom Hannay suspects of treason, and Mary Lamington, a beautiful nurse whom Hannay finds himself falling in love with, and who also turns out to be his handler.

Hannay, on Bullivant’s orders as relayed by Mary, infiltrates another group of pacifists and meets Moxon Ivery, a leading voice of the British antiwar movement. He also meets an old friend, the American John S Blenkiron, who is undercover as a rabble-rousing dove. Blenkiron suspects that Ivery is the German agent they’ve been looking for, “the cleverest devil” and “the most dangerous man in all the world.” The task now is to prove it, stop him, and use his connections to feed disinformation to the Germans.

Hannay’s investigation takes him all over Britain, establishing contacts in Glasgow, pursuing his quarry to the Isle of Skye, fleeing authorities who are convinced he is a criminal, losing his pursuers in the midst of a mock battle staged for a propaganda film, and surviving a Zeppelin raid on London. It is while stalking Ivery during this raid that Ivery lets his guard down and Hannay recognizes him as the German agent who nearly killed him in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He also learns that Ivery has proposed to Mary.

From here Hannay returns to the front but keeps abreast of the situation at home as much as he is able, gathering intelligence from intercepted German newspapers and tracking clues about Ivery’s network near the front. Aided by Mary; by friends like Geordie Hamilton, his Scots batman; Sir Archie Roylance, the young pilot who had flown him out of trouble in Scotland; and by Launcelot Wake himself, who was inspired by Hannay to take a noncombatant role as a laborer on the front, Hannay uncovers more of Ivery’s activities and is enlisted by Blenkiron in a scheme to capture him.

The plan takes Hannay to Switzerland, where he is reunited with his old South African friend Peter Pienaar, now a former pilot who was shot down, severely wounded, imprisoned by the Germans, and released to neutral territory because of his disability. Peter is pleased to see Hannay but bridles at inactivity. As it turns out, that inactivity will not last long.

After the twists and reversals of the Switzerland plot, the climactic action of the novel takes place on the Western Front. Hannay, returned to regular duty and promoted to Major General, uses the intelligence gathered from disrupting Ivery’s spy ring to prepare for the massive German attacks of the spring of 1918. The German offensive tests Hannay’s division—and the entire British and French coalition—and nearly succeeds, but the Allies hold out and all of Ivery’s efforts on behalf of the Germans fail thanks not only to good intelligence but to the heroic self-sacrifice of two brave men.

Mr Standfast is difficult to summarize, and I hope you’ll read it knowing that what I’ve written above contains as few spoilers as possible, with a lot of twists and surprises concealed and a whole lot more simply left out. It is the only Buchan novel I’ve read that I would call “sprawling.” It is also the only one that I’ve struggled to finish.

After Buchan successfully scaled the thrills of The Thirty-Nine Steps up for Greenmantle I looked forward to the even more sweeping Mr Standfast, but to my surprise I found it overburdened, awkwardly paced, with a plot that was difficult to track, and with many secondary characters—such as Ivery’s henchmen—who were underdeveloped and difficult to distinguish. I found this surprising because a deft stylistic touch, distinct and memorable characters, brisk pacing no matter how complicated the plot, and a well-developed and intuitive story are all among Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer.

I think this novel simply tries to do too much. At 128,000 words, Mr Standfast is more than three times the length of the Hannay’s first tight, spare adventure. Buchan also wrote Mr Standfast over the course of a whole year, from July 1917 to July 1918, an unusually long time for him. The finished book, as biographer Andrew Lownie notes, “shows signs of being written over a long period,” introducing and dropping characters and subplots haphazardly and being extremely episodic, though without the breakneck pace and clear goals that unified the first two Hannay novels, keeping them moving and easy to follow.

That’s what I found unsatisfying in Mr Standfast. But the novel is not without strengths.

First, though constructed of numerous small episodes that never quite cohere into a well-paced plot, many of those episodes are small masterpieces of thriller writing. Hannay’s pursuit of a spy up a rock chimney and his subsequent fight with a dark figure in a cave on the Isle of Skye, his flight from the authorities in Sir Archie’s unreliable plane, his exploration of a creepy abandoned French chateau by night, his dangerous mountaineering shortcut through the Italian Alps with Wake, his capture by the enemy at a crucial moment—all of these are exciting and expertly constructed.

Second, Mr Standfast brings back several good characters from previous Hannay adventures, most notably Peter Pienaar and Blenkiron, and introduces others like the brave and resourceful Mary. Mr Standfast also features the first appearance of another important figure from the Buchan canon: Sir Archie Roylance. Sir Archie is, by some counts, Buchan’s most commonly recurring character, and its easy to see why. From his first appearance through his roles in Huntingtower and John Macnab he is a charming, disarming, but capable figure with some unusual skills and no lack of guts. I look forward to rereading all of these in publication order someday and charting Sir Archie’s growth from novel to novel.

Third, despite its plot and pacing problems Mr Standfast is deeper and thematically richer than the standard espionage thriller. I’ll consider why in more detail below, but part of it comes down to Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Buchan’s favorite books and an anchor in the swirling plot of this novel. Hannay and Mary use Pilgrim’s Progress to pass coded messages, and Peter Pienaar reads it while recuperating in a German POW camp. Hannay sees himself as the beleaguered traveler Christian, and Peter Pienaar determines to take action against the enemy regardless of his injuries thanks to the example of Mr Standfast, who lends his name to Buchan’s story. Buchan invokes it in ways both bold and subtle, giving the action greater meaning and resonance as a result.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, this novel has the strongest pathos of any of the Hannay adventures so far. The war is not only the single unifying feature of the plot but a predominating fact looming over every action Hannay takes. The passages in which Hannay rejoins his unit at the front are among the strongest in the book, but even on the Isle of Skye or among the labor activists in Glasgow Hannay is keenly aware that enormous loss of life results from every victory of Ivery and his spies. If The Thirty-Nine Steps was the story of one man on the run and Greenmantle the story of a team working to prevent chaos in one region, Mr Standfast is continental in scope—the story of whole civilizations in a death struggle. Even when the plot meanders, the stakes are clear.

Partly this is born of Buchan’s own experiences. Though too old and ill to serve at the front line, he was active throughout the war, writing an ongoing history of the conflict that reached 24 volumes and serving at various times on the staff of General Haig, in military intelligence, and finally in the Ministry of Information, a dedicated propaganda department formed near the end of the war. And like many others in Britain, he lost people. Perhaps the greatest blow fell on April 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, when both his brother Alastair and his old friend and publisher Tommy Nelson were killed. He began writing this novel just a few months later.

But Mr Standfast’s pathos also stems from Buchan’s deep capacity for sympathy. I’ve written about this before in the dramatically different context of colonial South Africa, but Buchan’s ability and willingness to see the other side and to understand even those he disagrees with is a strength of all of his fiction. In Mr Standfast alone Buchan gives us moving, sympathetic vignettes not only of the civilians of wartorn France, the common soldier in the trenches or recovering in hospital, and the patriotic desk jockey, but of people quite unlike himself.

“Rather than indulge in the crude jingoism with which Buchan is often tarred,” Lownie writes, “he in fact tried . . . to present various views of the conflict. . . . [D]espite his own commitment to Allied victory, his sympathies were rather wider than might be assumed.” Buchan includes what must be one of the first fictional descriptions of a man suffering shell shock—at a time when many on the home front were inclined to think of it as malingering or simple cowardice—and one of the surprise heroes of his story is the conscientious objector Launcelot Wake. Though Hannay despises the fashionable pacifists who lend aid to the enemy by undermining the war effort and deriding the British army, he recognizes and comes to respect Wake’s good-faith position. Over the course of the novel Wake demonstrates not only moral courage in an unpopular cause but physical courage as a messenger on the front. As in so many of Buchan’s stories, two dissimilar men learn from and better each other.

None of these strengths quite overcomes the disjointed plot, the uneven pacing, or the contrivances of Hannay’s espionage work, but they deepen Mr Standfast and give it an emotional power beyond what you might expect if you only know Buchan as an adventure novelist. As flawed as I found Mr Standfast, I intend to reread it. I may have missed something. And perhaps, like others among my favorite novels, it will reveal more of itself to me.

The Dancing Floor

John Buchan June continues with an eerie slow-burn thriller that anticipated some of the themes and terrors of Witch Wood. The novel is the third Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Dancing Floor.

Written after but taking place chronologically before Leithen’s poaching lark in John Macnab, Leithen narrates this novel in the first-person, as a series of wide-ranging reminiscences. In the first half, Leithen introduces the reader to Vernon Milburne, a young man of noble family and every advantage who is nonetheless pensive and withdrawn, a haunted man. As Leithen gets to know him, he learns that Vernon has been terrorized annually by a nightmare. Once a year, on precisely the same night, he dreams of someone or something approaching his bedroom though a long series of interconnecting rooms in the family home. Every year it comes one room closer. When the person, or presence, or creature finally reaches his bedroom, Vernon believes, he will come into some terrible destiny. All he can do is wait.

Interwoven with Leithen’s narrative of his friendship with Vernon is how the two of them met Koré Arabin. Beautiful, popular, and rich, Koré is also the only daughter of a legendarily depraved eccentric, an Aleister Crowley type who moved to Plakos, a remote island in the Aegean, where he could research and experiment with the occult and practice his sexual debaucheries with utter liberty. He also, it is darkly hinted, preyed upon the local Greek islanders. But he is dead, and Koré, his only heir, is now the mistress of his house and the most powerful person on the island.

So Koré arrives in England already the subject of salacious rumor. And her personality does not help. When she meets Leithen and Vernon she is brusque, forward, and aggressive. Leithen finds her off-putting. Vernon is offended and deliberately avoids her. But as Leithen almost accidentally gets to know her—and even falls in love with her—she reveals that there is much more to her than her dark family history. Abrupt and ill-mannered owing to her remote and strange upbringing, she nevertheless rejects her family’s occultism and is concerned to help the people of Plakos. Far from using her position to indulge, as her father and ancestors did, she embraces the responsibility she was born into and hopes to make amends.

But Leithen is not sure this is possible. Through various means and sources, the well-connected Leithen learns that the people of Plakos, particularly those in the village nearest Koré’s house, have not forgotten her father’s evil. And following a hard winter and bad harvest, the dimly remembered pagan rites of their ancestors have resurfaced. These entail nighttime footraces, a symbolic marriage, and human sacrifice, all played out on the broad plain near Koré’s house known as the Dancing Floor. Leithen suspects—accurately, is it turns out—that the selected female victim of the sacrifice will be Koré.

In the second half of the novel, Leithen assembles a team and journeys to Plakos, aiming to intervene personally and either evacuate or protect Koré. But the locals are more suspicious and hostile than even he expected. Armed men guard Koré’s house and every movement Leithen and his friends make is watched and followed by a mob. Only the tenacious Orthodox priest, damning the locals’ apostasy, offers Leithen aid. But Leithen cannot save Koré by holing up in the village church.

Finally, as the locals capture and imprison or scare off Leithen’s men, as Leithen explores the island by night and wonders what he can possibly hope to do, and as the night of the sacrifices on the Dancing Floor approaches, he detects that he is not the only person creeping around the island by night. Is he being stalked? Or is there someone else on the island with dark and secret purposes?

The Dancing Floor, like Sir Edward Leithen’s debut in The Power-House, is a seemingly rambling personal narrative that slowly lays the groundwork for the tight, complex, and exciting events of the climax. (I’d encourage the reader beginning this novel to stick with it even if it seems to be going nowhere; the first half is Buchan setting the pieces on his chessboard.) But unlike that earlier adventure, The Dancing Floor relies far less on coincidence. It is, if anything, a character-driven thriller—a true oddity but a successful one.

It is successful in no small part thanks to the characters. Despite his infatuation and emotional vulnerability early in this novel, Leithen is his solid and reliable self, a steady professional who won’t back down from a task no matter what the hardships or risks once he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Vernon offers an intriguing departure, a moodier and more phlegmatic character than is typical for a Buchan story. Vernon has good reasons to be so, having spent much of his life as an orphan tormented by nightmares in a vast lonely house, but overcoming this, embracing his inheritance, and stepping into the role he was born to play—going from passively awaiting fate to actively pursuing it—gives him a compelling arc.

That arc also makes Vernon an interesting mirror of Koré, who is inarguably the best character in the book. With her strange and terrible background, her struggle to fit in, and a core of goodness that she is determined to act upon, she is a beautiful woman not only because of her looks but because of her character. She proves a challenge to Vernon, and an important and necessary one.

The other aspect of The Dancing Floor that makes it so successful as an adventure is its atmosphere. With its dream-haunted young men in empty houses, its lonely and desolate woods and cliffs, its dark pagan rites recounted in obscure old manuscripts, its hero creeping through dark landscapes filled with inscrutable and violent enemies, its mob of justifiably angry peasants, and the same peasants’ unjustifiable human sacrifice by firelight under the moon, The Dancing Floor is steeped in the gothic. Even beyond my personal taste—and I am an absolute sucker for gothic atmosphere—the foreboding and gloom, which even the indomitable Leithen struggles to overcome, pervades the novel and gives it weight. I relished it.

Buchan wrote The Dancing Floor the year before Witch Wood. Pagan survivals—relict human sacrifice, nighttime revels, and “elaborate cultural and religious transactions with death” as David Bentley Hart has described them—were very much on his mind. Some critics have suggested the influence of the (now utterly debunked) theories of Margaret Murray. That may be. But it certainly reflects Buchan’s recognition of the fragility of civilization. A bad harvest, a harsh winter, and a truly wicked foreign interloper in the big house on the hill is all it takes to drive people back into blood sacrifice, into the smoke and ash and the shrieking of burnt offerings.

But more importantly, this evil is only a background against which virtue and goodness can be glimpsed more sharply. Koré and Vernon, in complementary ways, demonstrate this. As in Witch Wood, true goodness in the face of evil takes two. And the redoubtable Leithen is our witness.

Having read them so close together, I can’t help but compare The Dancing Floor to Witch Wood. The latter is far better. But as an exercise in the some of the same themes, on a smaller, contemporary scale and structured as a thriller, The Dancing Floor is a gripping, moody, and unusual thriller, and another good entry in Sir Edward Leithen’s adventures.

Huntingtower

For this year’s second entry in John Buchan June, we’re looking at a charming post-World War I thriller set on Scotland’s rugged western coast, the novel that introduced one of Buchan’s best and most popular recurring characters—1922’s Huntingtower.

After a brief and mysterious prologue set in Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution, a prologue in which a boy named Quentin and a girl named Saskia consider the dangers looming over the country, Huntingtower zips away to Scotland to introduce the reader to Dickson McCunn. Fifty-five years old and only one day retired from a long career in the Glasgow provisioning business, McCunn wakes up to find himself—for the first time—with nothing to do. A Buchan protagonist can only tolerate this state for a few minutes, and so Dickson has determined to set off on a Highland walking tour before he has even had his morning coffee.

With his wife out of town taking a leisurely cure at a spa, Dickson has a few weeks to ramble. He puts on his most threadbare tweeds, packs a copy of The Compleat Angler despite never having gone fishing, makes a last-minute donation to a group of local street urchins who want to be Boy Scouts, and leaves Glasgow for the roads, mountains, and heather. As it turns out, all of these decisions are providential.

After a few days on the road Dickson has neared the rugged western coast of Scotland and run into some curious figures—some tramps who rubbish Dickson’s illusions about the noble-spirited lower classes, an embittered veteran of the Great War and wannabe dour modernist poet named John Heritage, a handsome but taciturn foreign traveler whom Heritage takes to be Australian, and a gruff innkeeper who seems determined not to host any guests at the inn in his small, seemingly uninhabited village.

Dickson and Heritage, who despite being at loggerheads over politics and literary taste find themselves thrown together on the road, are especially piqued by the innkeeper. They begin to investigate the area further. And thanks especially to what they learn from Mrs Morran, an elderly widow who takes them in, they look especially closely at the great house standing near the village—Huntingtower. This is the home of the Kennedys, the local lairds, but the family fell on hard times in the war and the current heir, Quentin, is absent. In the meantime, surly men with a curious assortment of foreign accents prowl Huntingtower, keep the inn closed, and try to drive off anyone who comes too near either the house or the village.

This includes Dickson and Heritage, as well as—to Dickson’s surprise—the Gorbals Diehards, the poor Glasgow boys who have used Dickson’s donation to fund a ramshackle scout jamboree. Together, this strange band investigate the men at Huntingtower. They also discover the presence of the princess—Saskia, the Russian girl from the book’s prologue.

Who are all the foreigners occupying Huntingtower? Why have they abducted and hidden Saskia there? What do they intend to do with her? What are they waiting for? And, most importantly, what can Dickson, Heritage, and the boys do to stop them? Having discovered an actual princess imprisoned in a tower, they determine—whatever foul play is afoot—to rise to the occasion and thwart the invaders and their plans by any means necessary.

I don’t want to give away much more. Huntingtower relies on the Buchan mainstays of surprise, coincidence, tenacious heroes, and a fair amount of cunning playacting to bring the reader along to its satisfying conclusion. It’s Buchan at his most playful, using the tools honed through his wartime thrillers and historical novels. And the novel was immediately successful. Only The Thirty-Nine Steps ever outsold it.

Though the plotting and pacing are solid and the settings, as always when Buchan conjures Scotland for the reader, absorbing and beautiful, Huntingtower’s greatest charm is its cast of characters. John Heritage is a special favorite of mine. Partly a parody of the bleak modernist poets teeming in the aftermath of the First World War, Heritage nevertheless has noble qualities and many of the same virtues as Dickson—as well as some Dickson realizes he lacks. The development of their odd camaraderie over the course of the story and the way they sharpen and better each other make Huntingtower an insightful accidental study in male friendship.

Huntingtower also gives us Dougal and his scout “troop” of Glasgow street boys, the delightful Mrs Morran—a more lighthearted and gutsy version of Isobel, the Rev David Sempill’s housekeeper in Witch Wood—and the dastardly gang of Bolsheviks at the heart of the plot against Saskia. It even gives us the second appearance of one of Buchan’s favorite and more frequently appearing characters, Sir Archie Roylance, who would go on to play a key role in the plot of John Macnab.

But the star of Huntingtower is Dickson McCunn, who is both a classic Buchan hero and a delightfully atypical, unheroic one. I’ve noted before that Buchan’s novels often begin with the protagonist, a capable man of action, becalmed, frustrated by the tedium of peacetime and day-to-day life. Richard Hannay at the beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Edward Leithen at the beginning of John Macnab complain of needing something to do—anything. So with Dickson McCunn, who finds inactivity as intolerable as either of the others.

But unlike Hannay the South African mining engineer or Leithen the lawyer and MP, McCunn is an old, comfortably prosperous shopkeeper, an elder of his church with good connections and an excellent relationship with his bank. Respectable and businesslike. In his very first scene he reflects with satisfaction on his new safety razor, and his modest ambitions, good sense, and contentment remain with him throughout the story. It is Saskia’s peril, the pluck and tenacity of the Gorbals Diehards, and the transformation of Heritage that stir Dickson to embrace the danger and virtue of adventure, the kind of thing he’s only enjoyed read about.

This gives Dickson an endearing hobbit-like quality that contrasts strikingly with the ruthlessness of his opponents. Here’s how Heritage describes the dreaded leader of the men who have imprisoned Saskia:

He’s the only thing on earth that that brave girl fears. It seems he is in love with her and has pestered her for years. She hated the sight of him, but he wouldn’t take no, and being a powerful man—rich and well-born and all the rest of it—she had a desperate time. I gather he was pretty high in favour with the old Court. Then when the Bolsheviks started he went over to them, like plenty of other grandees, and now he’s one of their chief brains—none of your callow revolutionaries, but a man of the world, a kind of genius, she says, who can hold his own anywhere. She believes him to be in this country, and only waiting the right moment to turn up. Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust. There are a hundred ways by which that kind of fellow could bamboozle all our law and police and spirit her away.

Not only does this set up the villain and broaden the novel’s scope, it introduces an important theme—the fragility of the good things made possible by civilization and the danger, in the modern world, not only of destroying them but of losing them altogether. The right kind of villain can manipulate the system, outmaneuvering its law-abiding defenders. It takes canny and determined men to defeat that kind of threat.

This theme recurs in Buchan’s fiction almost as often as a character like Sir Archie. It is the central pillar of the first Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Power-House, and crops up over and over in the Hannay novels and serious historical fiction like Witch Wood. But Buchan expresses it more subtly and effectively in Huntingtower by making it less central to the story’s action.

And it is more effective because of those delightful characters. Who will save the princess from the Bolsheviks and civilization from the revolutionaries? An aging grocer, a frustrated poet, a lame aristocrat, a widow who cooks a mean scone, and a gaggle of barefoot scouts.

Writing about his work in historical fiction years later, Buchan noted how seldom he was asked about his historical novels relative to his thrillers. The average reader always wanted to know when the next adventure of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn would come out. Having now made Dickson’s acquaintance, I can see why. Light, brisk, humorous, dangerous but never grim, and elegantly contrived (in both senses of the word), Huntingtower is, in the words of one of Buchan’s biographers, “ridiculous but fast-paced and witty.” In a word, fun. Novels like Huntingtower are the reason people read adventure fiction.

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

Sick Heart River

Today is the last day of John Buchan June. All along, my plan has been to end the month by reading and reviewing Buchan’s final novel, the posthumously published Sick Heart River, which he completed only days before his unexpected death in the early weeks of 1940. In keeping with the best of his work that I’ve written about this month, this novel tells of a rousing adventure undertaken by a stalwart and upright hero in a beautiful and dangerous landscape, and in keeping with the end of a beloved project, it is a profoundly moving and melancholy story. Buchan’s final novel may just be his best.

Sick Heart River begins with Sir Edward Leithen, now a quarter century past his first adventure in The Power-House and fifteen years on from his poaching exploits in John Macnab, settling his affairs in London. He has learned he is dying. Lung damage incurred when he was gassed during the war—the last war, as Europe is edging closer and closer to another war as the story begins—has belatedly turned into tuberculosis, and his doctors have given him a year to live.

Leithen has taken stock of his life. He has a London flat and a country house, a personal library of 20,000 books, a thriving law practice, and a good reputation. But he has no wife, no children, no close living relations. He has friendly but strictly professional relationships with his colleagues at his legal practice. Even his handful of real friends—old allies like Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot and his confederates in the John Macnab escapade, Charles Palliser-Yeates, Sir Archie Roylance, and the Earl of Lamancha—he finds himself refusing to inform about his illness. He is alone, dying, in a world in which he has achieved every kind of success but that has become suddenly unrecognizable to him. How will he face death, and what is his death—after all these years and adventures and all this worldly success—to mean?

All Leithen knows is that he will not waste away in a nursing home. He wants to die “standing up.” That, in itself, will mean something. To him.

He refuses to take his club friends into his confidence, and so by chance he receives a visit from John S Blenkiron, the American intelligence operative and former comrade-in-arms of Hannay. Blenkiron notes that Leithen is not well but can’t draw him out, and so tells him about bad news of his own—his niece Felicity’s husband, Francis Galliard, an industrious, successful, and wealthy French Canadian transplant to the high society and banking worlds of New York City, has disappeared. Leithen, sensing his opportunity, asks to know more.

Thus equipped by Blenkiron with a mission that will give his final days purpose, allowing him to die “standing up” and perhaps even “making his soul,” Leithen travels to America. He interviews Galliard’s friends, associates, in-laws, and wife, and intuits a familiar malaise in Galliard, a dissatisfaction and despair that cannot be assuaged by worldly success. From New York he travels to Quebec, to the ancestral Galliard lands overlooking the St Lawrence River, and hires Johnny Frizel, the half-Scottish, half-Indian brother of the guide who was last seen leading Galliard northward, toward the Arctic.

Together, Leithen and Frizel travel thousands of miles by boat, plane, dog sled, and on foot in their quest to find Galliard. As they travel, it becomes clearer and clearer that Galliard and the elder Frizel aim to reach the remote, unmapped, nearly mythic valley of the Sick Heart River in the most rugged mountains of the Northwest Territories. In addition to adventure, exploration, and survival, mystery pervades this first half of the novel. Why has Galliard fled his life, and what is driving him—or, as seems more likely the more Leithen follows them, his guide—so relentlessly toward the Sick Heart River? To reach this valley might kill Galliard. Following Galliard, trying to catch up to and convince him to return to civilization and his wife and friends, is killing Leithen.

I read Sick Heart River in three days. A gripping, beautifully written, well-paced but introspective novel, it is perhaps Buchan’s finest achievement. He based the landscapes and the journey closely on some of his own travels in the northwest as Governor-General of Canada, and the book reflects clearly the immensity and variety not only of Canada’s landscapes but its peoples. Buchan’s keen eye and descriptive powers make the forbidding mountain and wilderness settings, as well as Leithen and the other characters’ struggles, so vivid and involving that, as with John Macnab, when I set the book down I felt as if I had really been somewhere else and that not only my attention by my body and spirit would need time to adjust to my return.

That feeling proved even more profound owing to Sick Heart River’s confrontation with mortality, which is the real point of the novel. Melancholy suffuses the novel from the first page, and one feels with Leithen the spirit of Ubi sunt? felt so keenly by those whose own civilizations have passed them by, not always to the better. Despite or perhaps because of their successes, the characters have become detached and sick at heart—Leithen through the clarifying moment of his diagnosis; Lew Frizel, the elder brother of the pair of guides, through the madness of the North; and Galliard through the slow effects of his deracination, his removal from his roots and the people and places who made him. All of them sense their need to atone and to return to something; all of them come up short.

And all of this is dramatized in Leithen himself. Leithen is a dying man, and Sick Heart River, in three stages, tells of his wrestling with this fact, of the paradox of how he saves his life.

In the first third, Leithen determines to die “standing up,” facing the inevitable and embracing his fate with a resolve and courage hardened by reason. Closed off, implacable, reliant entirely on his own (failing) strength, protected only by what another character calls “the iron armour of his fortitude,” he is a Stoic with all the courage and coldness of the ancients.

In the second, having found the wounded and desperate Galliard, pursued Galliard’s maddened guide Lew Frizel into the valley of the Sick Heart, and almost died in the attempt, Leithen finds himself awed into a reflection of not only the infinite power but the infinite goodness of God and trusts himself to his care. Wintering in the mountains, nursed by the Frizels and slowing getting to know and understand Galliard, Leithen not only survives his trek to the Sick Heart but even begins to recover. For the first time since his diagnosis he finds himself entertaining thoughts of the future, of reuniting Galliard and his wife, returning to his practice, buying back his country house… But, should he fully recover, is this really what he will have survived the Sick Heart for?

The last third presents Leithen with his final crisis. As Leithen, Galliard, the Frizel brothers, and their Hare Indian crew work their way back down from the mountains, they learn that the Hare tribe has also been afflicted, like Leithen, with an outbreak of tuberculosis and, like Galliard, with despair. They will not act to help themselves, and they die in droves at their camp near a Catholic mission. As with so many of Buchan’s heroes in the best of his stories, it comes down to a choice. Should Leithen pass on and return to the world and to the success of his mission, or stay and help other sick and despairing creatures like himself?

Leithen stays. The final word is given to Father Duplessis, one of the French priests ministering to the Hares, who speaks Matthew 10:39 as both Leithen’s epitaph and the theme of the book: “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Sick Heart River is much more than an adventure novel; it is, as Buchan’s granddaughter and biographer Ursula Buchan puts it, “a spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada.” It is in many respects very similar to Leithen’s lark into Scotland in John Macnab, but with far greater dangers and higher stakes than being caught poaching and forced to pay £100. Not only is Leithen’s life on the line, so is his soul.

Even by the standards of the other novels I’ve reviewed this month, Sick Heart River is an engaging, well plotted, well paced, and surprising adventure with a strong cast of characters in brilliantly realized settings. It is also an uncommonly rich and poignant philosophical and theological story. That it moves so briskly despite the depth of its themes and ideas and that the themes harmonize so well with the action is a testament to Buchan’s skills, and that meditates so profoundly on life, death, and grace makes it not only a fitting end to my John Buchan June, but to the great man’s life as well.

Thanks for reading along this month! I hope y’all have a pleasant and restful July, and that these reviews and recommendations will give you something good to read.

Midwinter

This penultimate entry in John Buchan June concerns the second of Buchan’s novels to be set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a novel that in many ways mirrors aspects of 1899’s A Lost Lady of Old Years but with lessons learned from more than two decades of fiction writing since, including several immense successes. The novel is 1923’s Midwinter.

Midwinter tells the story of Alastair Maclean, a Scots mercenary who has previously fought for the French and been wounded at Fontenoy. Having recovered, he has returned to Britain to work for Bonnie Prince Charlie as the Jacobites prepare an invasion of England aimed at gaining the throne for the prince’s father. When Midwinter begins, it is late fall and Maclean is traveling through England as a spy and courier, delivering messages and assessing the preparedness of the prince’s English supporters.

In the midst of his travels, Maclean has a strange run-in with a gamekeeper and a boy poacher. Through Maclean’s intervention in the beating the gamekeeper is administering, the boy escapes and introduces Maclean to a band of seeming outlaws. Dwellers in swamps, woods, and byways, relicts of what they call “Old England,” they call themselves the Spoonbills, and their leader is an ungainly but charismatic old man named Midwinter. Midwinter tells Maclean about “Old England” and the Spoonbills’ secret network of allies and how to summon their aid. Having sheltered and fed him, Midwinter and his men help Maclean on his way.

Maclean’s next stop brings him into contact with both Whig and Jacobite nobles, as well as another ungainly figure, an awkward middle-aged tutor who searching for a runaway student, Claudia, a teenaged girl who has eloped with one of Maclean’s aristocratic contacts. The tutor is a loud, twitchy, ill-dressed, but loquacious and wise man named Samuel Johnson.

From here, Maclean travels northward. But his work becomes more dangerous—he senses he is being followed, he escapes traps and capture by men with an uncanny knowledge of his movements, and he learns that there are traitors among the prince’s men in England. In the terms of a modern spy novel, he uncovers a mole. Two, in fact.

Meeting Johnson’s student Claudia, now married to one of the prince’s English supporters, complicates matters further. A convinced Jacobite, she befriends Maclean and wholeheartedly offers her support. Maclean is smitten. Unfortunately for him, as he discovers with harrowing and near fatal consequences, one of the moles is most likely someone in her circle.

Time is short. The invasion is coming, the King of England’s army is moving north to meet it, and Maclean knows not only the identity of the mole but also what the mole has done to sabotage the invasion. Maclean also feels a sense of personal betrayal and the need to satisfy his and others’ honor by confronting and killing the traitor.

Go to the prince and let the traitors escape? Or catch and punish the traitors and risk the success of the revolt? As the armies close in on Derby in early December, Maclean—with Midwinter and the Spoonbills as hard-to-find help and Johnson in tow as friend, mentor, and little-heeded counselor—must choose.

I don’t want to reveal much more of the plot. Midwinter is a sprawling high adventure across beautiful and dangerous landscapes, with all the familiar aspects of the spy thriller thrown in and made fresh by the novel’s well-realized historical setting. Like A Lost Lady of Old Years, the Jacobite Uprising adventure Buchan wrote during college, Midwinter wears its research lightly and is strongly written. Unlike A Lost Lady of Old Years, this novel is excellently paced, with Maclean’s mission and backstory carefully doled out bit by bit as he continues on his dangerous work, and—as I hint in the paragraph above—Maclean himself is an active, engaged, canny character whose decisions matter.

Midwinter is also peopled with well-realized characters, not least two real historical figures. I chose Midwinter for this project when I learned that one of the real people in this novel is General James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia and a personal hero of mine. At the time Midwinter takes place, Oglethorpe had only recently returned from fighting the Spanish in Georgia and he appears in the novel as a noble English officer mustering troops to repel the coming Jacobite invasion. He only appears in a handful of scenes, but those scenes are crucial, vibrantly written, and capture a great deal of the energy, rectitude, and guts of the man. Pitting the fictional Maclean against him heightens the tension, especially as the two men, though divided by politics and the war, come to like and admire one another.

But the standout in the novel is Samuel Johnson. This Johnson is not yet Dr Johnson, being a tutor in his mid-30s with great knowledge but humble prospects. He cannot even afford to live with his wife, he tells Maclean near the end, and is treated as a figure of fun by some of the other characters in the early going. (And Johnson does offer genuine comic relief; his attempt to start a fistfight near the beginning is hilarious.) But Johnson’s intelligence, wit, insight, staunch belief in virtue, and insistence on doing right make him stand out even among his more polished aristocratic betters. He proves both a frustration and a boon to his friend Maclean. Witness this exchange as Johnson presses Maclean toward self-knowledge about his mixed motives:

Alastair had a sudden flame of wrath. “Do you accuse me of lying?” he asked angrily.

Johnson's face did not change. “Sir, all men are liars,” he said. “I strive to make you speak truth to your own soul.”

Johnson is not merely a real person stuck into a fictional story, but the heart and conscience of the novel.

All of this makes Midwinter both the best kind of adventure and the best kind of thoughtful novel. Only as I have worked on this review have I begun to understand the novel’s parallel secret networks—the political network of Jacobites and the traditionalist network of Spoonbills—and its deep themes of divided loyalties and undivided truth. It is, as so much of Buchan’s fiction is, seemingly effortless, but rewarding not only to read but to reflect upon.

Midwinter is neither Buchan’s best nor most famous novel, but it is a rich and well-paced historical adventure with good characters and two striking historical portraits, and for those reasons it is well worth reading. For myself, I plan to return to this one soon.

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.

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.

John Macnab

John Buchan June, my personal project to read and write about as many of the great author’s classic adventure novels as I can, continues with a novel I hadn’t heard of until fairly recently, but that many Buchan fans regard as one of his absolute best: John Macnab.

It is striking, reading this many of Buchan’s books in such close succession, to note how many of his heroes are smart, capable, energetic men who suffer intolerably when they have nothing meaningful to do. They begin the book bored—utterly, irremediably bored. Thus Richard Hannay begins The Thirty-Nine Steps, which I wrote about last time, “pretty well disgusted with life,” so disgusted he tempts fate by challenging placid, affluent London to give him something interesting to do within twenty-four hours.

But imagine three such men—all smart, all capable, all energetic, none with any kind of meaningful work to do. Imagine that they learn of each others’ horrible ennui. Imagine that, unlike Hannay, nothing stimulating presents itself. Imagine, then, that they take curing their boredom into their own hands.

John Macnab begins with lawyer and politician Sir Edward Leithen receiving bad news from his doctor: nothing is wrong with him. Not physically. Leithen ennui is a symptom of peacetime (this novel was written and takes place in the early 1920s) and, moreover, success. Britain won the war, Leithen is good at his job, everything is right with the world—and it is completely enervating. The doctor’s prescription for Leithen: steal a horse. Leithen needs to challenge himself, to do something dangerous, something he might fail at, something that is mildly illegal. That, the doctor suggests half-ironically, will get the blood pumping.

Leithen scoffs, but the advice sticks with him. That evening, still listless but now frustrated as well, he cancels his dinner plans and goes to his club to eat alone. There he runs into two friends: John Palliser-Yeates, a banker, and Charles Lamancha, a nobleman and politician. Leithen tells them about his boredom and his doctor’s unhelpful prescription, and Palliser-Yeates and Lamancha reveal that they, too, feel the same affliction. At this point a fourth friend, the young war veteran and aspiring politician Sir Archie Roylance, who owns an estate in the Scottish highlands, tells them a story: a man called Jim Tarras, similarly struck low with boredom before the war, “invented a new kind of sport.” Tarras, Roylance says, would send anonymous notes to the owners of large highland estates announcing his intention to poach one of their deer, and the excitement of both stalking game and evading the landowners’ gamekeepers proved exhilarating.

Archie, who is young and brave (he limps painfully from a wound gotten in the war) but a bit oblivious, thinks that this story will amuse his friends. It does not have the intended effect.

Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and Lamancha make a pact on the spot—they will undertake the same “new kind of sport,” as Tarras, sending notes to three highland estates near Archie’s announcing their intention to poach two deer and a salmon and challenging them, defying them, to stop it. If the three friends succeed, they will present their game to the landowners with £50. If caught, they will forfeit £100. They draft the letters and adopt a collective pseudonym: John Macnab.

Archie is chagrined by all this but, having given his friends the idea, agrees to host them at Crask, his somewhat shabby home near the three great estates they have chosen as targets—Glenraden, a well-forested tract which has been in the Raden family for nearly a thousand years and has a barrow reputed to be the tomb of a Viking warlord; Strathlarrig, where an American amateur archaeologist is staying while he excavates the barrow at Glenraden; and Haripol, the new faux-Tudor manor home built on staggeringly rugged land by the vulgar nouveau riche Lord Claybody.

The three men known as John Macnab reconnoiter from Crask and gain intelligence not only on the lay of the land and the obstacles they will face on the hunt but, perhaps more importantly, the character of the opponents. Colonel Alistair Raden is a tough old Scot who views himself as the steward of his land and responded to John Macnab’s letter with brusque defiance. Acheson Bandicott, the American, is too busy with his digging and cataloging to worry much about poaching, but his smooth young son seems a bit too cheerfully keen to stop John Macnab. And the Claybodys, upon receiving their note from John Macnab, contacted their lawyers.

And so Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and Lamancha lay their plans, ready their guns, practice their casting and fly-tying, and keep a weather eye on local events. And Archie, having met Janet Raden, one of the Colonel’s daughters, finds himself falling for her—and wondering what to do about John Macnab now.

This is a lot of setup. It is a testament to Buchan’s grace and skill as a writer that only in trying to explain the story have I realized how complex the novel is. All of this occurs before John Macnab’s hunt begins, and all of it is handled with artful characterization and brisk pacing. The introduction of Janet to the plot is only the first of several wonderful complications; eventually Bandicott’s excavations, local politics involving Archie and Lamancha, and a legion of reporters impinge on John Macnab and his sport. What begins as a more genteel and sporting version of “The Most Dangerous Game” builds in intensity and complexity as it goes, both the hunters and those trying to stop them improvise and change course as the situation changes, and nothing turns out as you might expect. It is a wonderfully written and surprising novel.

The two great strengths of John Macnab—beyond the expert pacing—are the characters and the scenery. When I posted on Prester John I noted Buchan’s extraordinary capacity for seeing things from others’ perspectives; that trait is clearly on display in John Macnab, as he renders every character distinct, well-rounded, and understandable. They are also fun, the whole lot of them. Particular favorites of mine were Sir Edward Leithen, who gets the plot rolling and gamely essays every impossible new task that comes John Macnab’s way, the put-upon but well-meaning Sir Archie, and Janet Raden, one of the most arresting and attractive female characters I’ve encountered outside Jane Austen. Archie’s infatuation with Janet begins as comedy but ends with a genuinely sweet, fun, and surprising romance—as well as delicious plot complications.

But Buchan’s ability with character is not limited to giving his characters charming personalities or quirky character traits, and his evenhanded attention to each character’s opinions, priorities, and beliefs proves a key part of the story. Even the comic characters, like the coarse and litigious Claybodys, are treated fairly, and the way their personalities inform their choices makes a difference to the story. These characters feel like real people. Indeed, character—as in ethos, as in personality, virtues, and vices—matters as much to the plot as any event or deed. I’ve seldom seen it done so well.

The characters also deepen the plot, adding meaning, thematic resonance, and pathos in unexpected places, as when Janet tells Archie that Colonel Raden will be the last of the Radens, that Glenraden, the land he loves so much, must inevitably pass out of his family since he has only two daughters. Archie (and the reader) knows these things intellectually, but Janet gives them meaning. While the two look for John Macnab, they reflect on the way civilization kills the people that build it, softening them, robbing them of fighting spirit, turning them into vegetables that merely exist and consume. The old must make way for the new, unless the old shows it still has the strength to fight. It’s a delightfully multi-layered passage, the thematic key to the whole book, but it is made fun and memorable by arising from two good characters.

Second, when I write that scenery is a great strength of John Macnab, I really mean scenery. Buchan describes not only the geography of the plot’s action but the visual splendor of Scotland beautifully. Buchan was no mean outdoorsman and loved to tramp through the hills and wilderness, and his keen observation and firsthand knowledge of this kind of environment give the hunting and fishing scenes—or even a simple scene of a young man and woman walking through the countryside and talking—a vividness and immediacy often missing in more recent fiction. Each time I set John Macnab down, I really felt as if I were returning from somewhere else. This fictional region of Scotland is engaging while you read it. By the end you’ll have come, like the Radens, like Archie, and, in his own way, like John Macnab, to love it. When you finish, you’ll miss it.

With an intriguing premise, lively and surprising characters, an expert mixture of humor, action, and suspense, and just the right touch of thought, John Macnab is a richly imagined and beautifully written story and a joy to read. It may not be the most famous of Buchan’s novels—again, that’d be The Thirty-Nine Steps—but it may well be his best.