John Burnet of Barns

This first week of John Buchan June concludes with a high-spirited historical adventure set in the hills of the Scottish Borders. This may sound like a familiar Buchan setting until one gets into the specifics. This is his first full-length novel, published in 1898 when he was just twenty-three: John Burnet of Barns.

Taking place mostly in the late 1680s, during a time of widespread unrest and disorder throughout Britain but especially in Scotland, this novel follows the adventures of John Burnet, the scion of an old and respected Border Reiver family from Barns, near Peebles on the River Tweed. Burnet may have rollicking, swashbuckling ancestors but he is a shy, diffident, scholarly sort. Where his aging father crippled himself racing a horse through the hills with other young bloods, John is set for university studies in Glasgow.

But the old yearning for adventure in his blood shows from the very first chapter, in which John, as a boy, skips out on a lesson from his tutor to go fishing in the River Tweed. There he meets the beautiful Marjory Veitch who, like him, comes of old aristocratic stock and, like him, has an imaginative, adventurous streak. They become constant companions and playmates right up until John departs for university.

John is a good student but never fully settles into university life. After a chance encounter in the streets with his arrogant and soldierly cousin Gilbert, who comes riding through town wearing his fashionable best, John decides on the spot to drop out and return home to Barns. To his surprise, Gilbert has beaten him there. To his greater and much less welcome surprise, Gilbert has met Marjory and decided to make her his own.

The encounter in the streets of Glasgow and Gilbert’s intrusion into John’s innocent world back home mark the beginning of an escalating series of confrontations. Gilbert’s attentions to Marjory provoke an epiphany in John—he realizes he loves her and always has, and sets out immediately to propose. She accepts. Soon after, John’s father dies, and he becomes the laird of his family estate much sooner than expected. He delays his marriage to Marjory so he can step fully into his new role.

But he also decides, thinking he has settled the matters of betrothing Marjory and getting his father’s affairs in order, that he should complete his studies—not at Edinburgh, but on the continent at Leyden in Holland. Marjory agrees to wait for him.

In Holland, John meets and clashes with Gilbert again. After John defeats him in a duel, Gilbert departs Holland in a sulk. This seeming victory proves fateful for John. Shortly afterward, John receives word that Gilbert has returned to Tweeddale, has insinuated himself into Marjory’s drunken brother’s company, and is menacing her and the household. Once again he drops his studies and heads home.

But Gilbert has baited him. Upon returning from Holland, he has fabricated documents showing John to be conspiring against King James II. A warrant is out for John’s arrest, and no sooner has he landed in Edinburgh than he flees to the hills to live as an outlaw accompanied only by Nicol, his shrewd and resourceful servant.

The central action of the book follows John through his months of outlawry—falling back from one hiding place to another, encountering numerous colorful characters, passing along secret letters for Marjory, and occasionally surprising and humiliating his pursuers—a condition only ended by distant political revolution. The climax of the novel is a relentless horseback chase across Scotland to Gilbert’s remote estate in the West Country with Gilbert and the captive Marjory always staying just ahead of John and Nicol, who must contend with freezing weather, drunken ferrymen, closed gates, scaled walls, and swordplay among the dangers.

I’ve actually owned a copy of John Burnet of Barns since the first John Buchan June in 2022 but have hesitated to read it. It’s among the earliest of Buchan’s published work and Buchan himself regarded it with some embarrassment, later calling it “immature and boyish” and “a hotch-potch.” In her biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan writes that he thought it “cumbersome and ill put together.” The very first of his novels that I reviewed here, A Lost Lady of Old Years, came out the year after John Burnet of Barns, and though I liked and admired it I noted pacing problems and a passive and slightly dense protagonist. If Buchan himself viewed the even earlier John Burnet of Barns as inferior, how bad must it be?

As it happens, not bad at all. I began it with some trepidation but quickly found myself engrossed. Despite some evident problems that mark John Burnet of Barns as an early and, yes, immature work, it has all of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction and was some of the most purely enjoyable reading I’ve had in a while.

The narration itself is not as tight and economical as is typical of later Buchan. As a narrator, John tends to overexplain, and even interesting incidents sometimes drag on. There are a number of free-floating incidents, like a flash flood on the Tweed that introduces the character of Nicol, that last perhaps too long and contribute too little to the plot. But the biggest weakness of the novel, at least in its first third, is pacing. John narrates his own life, and a real life is episodic, but it takes several chapters for the narrative to gain direction and momentum. The early chapters are unfocused and diffuse. We are a long way from the skillful in medias res openings of similar historical adventures like Midwinter or The Free Fishers.

These are real faults, but they barely detract from an accomplished, carefully constructed, and—most importantly—exciting story.

Technically, despite faults in pacing and overlong start, the novel is strongly written and intricately plotted. Every plot element is set up for later payoff. Considering the reputation Buchan still has for relying on coincidence in his fiction, there is very little of that in John Burnet of Barns. With such care taken over preparing the elements of the climax, the novel’s cross-country chase succeeds brilliantly.

The novel also features great historical detail in vividly and authentically described 1680s settings. Historical elements like the Covenanters and the Glorious Revolution are well integrated into the plot without overburdening it. Buchan also creates tactile, evocative atmosphere throughout. A cave full of outlaws, a lethal swordfight in a snowy forest, a rough crossing in a small ferry, hiding in the tall grass and heather as the enemy searches, and a shallow rocky fishing stream at sundown—all are beautifully imagined. And despite some incidents lasting too long or leading nowhere, others add such color and texture or are so fun and exciting that they’re worthwhile. A chance encounter with another outlaw, a nameless man with a terrible yearning to swordfight with someone, anyone, a man whom John never sees again, is especially wonderful.

But the novel’s greatest virtue is its stock of lifelike and engaging characters, most especially Nicol, Marjory, and John himself. Nicol is a recognizable type, the faithful lower-class servant (imagine a more dangerous Samwise Gamgee from the Scots Borders) but Buchan imbues him with life as a distinct, memorable individual. During his months in hiding John never seems more vulnerable than when he has sent Nicol on an errand, a clear testament to Nicol’s strength as a character.

Modern readers would unthinkingly critique Marjory as a damsel in distress, but this would be to misread a strong, canny woman with a lot of endurance. She’s sharper than John, which makes their awkward courtship sweet and funny, and in staving off Gilbert—right up until he uses his authority as a cavalry officer to kidnap her—she shows great tenacity. John and Marjory may not be Buchan’s best romantic pair—I’d still give that title to Sir Archie Roylance and Janet Raden in John Macnab—but they are well-matched and fun to read about.

But this is John’s story, and whatever the flaws of his narration he keeps the novel interesting and engaging. A recognizable Buchan archetype, the retiring scholar who is forced into action and daring, it is remarkable to see how clearly Buchan has both imagined and realized him so early in his career. Intelligent and learned but also recklessly impulsive, his earnestness, his senses of duty and honor, his friendship with Nicol, and his love for Marjory make him enormously likeable and carry us along with him as he changes. John Burnet of Barns is a coming-of-age story, and John’s flightiness and indecision gradually give way to the steadfastness and determination of maturity.

The man racing on horseback through sleet and snow in the middle of the night is unimaginable when we first meet him skipping out on school to go fishing, and that unexpectedness, through surprising turns and slow transformation, helps make John Burnet of Barns thrilling—a wonderful opening movement to a great career in storytelling.

The Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.

Memory Hold-the-Door

I ended the very first John Buchan June a few years ago with Buchan’s final, posthumously published novel, the thrilling, beautiful, and poignant Sick Heart River. It only seems right, now that I’ve read it, to end this year’s event with the non-fiction book Buchan was composing at the same time as that final Sir Edward Leithen adventure. The book is his memoir, completed, like Sick Heart River, only a short time before he died in early 1940: Memory Hold-the-Door.

Memoir is the best word to describe this book, but is still not quite right. Though billed as Buchan’s autobiography by his publisher, Buchan himself described the book this way in the short, pointed preface: “This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory.” He confesses that he had considered having the book privately published, but changed his mind when he “reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road.” It was, accordingly, published under the title Pilgrim’s Way in the United States, where it became a favorite book of the young John F Kennedy.

Memory Hold-the-Door is easily summarized. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Scotland, where he spent much formative time outdoors (“My earliest recollections,” he writes, “are not of myself but of my environment”), through his student days at Oxford, his political career in South Africa, Britain, and Canada, his government work in intelligence and propaganda during the war years, and his career in journalism, publishing, and fiction, Buchan narrates his life story in broad outline, with many episodes and memories rendered in striking and beautiful writing. His fiction’s strongest qualities are much in evidence, especially his descriptions of beloved landscapes and in his character sketches of family, friends, colleagues, and comrades, to all of whom he renders the same service as he does the natural world.

What most struck me about Memory Hold-the-Door was its tone. Even before the narrative has taken Buchan from Oxford to the veldts and kopjes of South Africa, a sharp, persistent elegiac note has entered. One realizes quickly how many of those Buchan knew and worked with as a young man were fated to die in the First World War. This book, even though it is a grateful remembrance of a good life by an uncomplaining man, is marked throughout by loss. His publisher and one of his best friends, Tommie Nelson, died on the Western Front, as did his brother Alastair. Of Nelson he writes:

I can recall many mannerisms of his, but it is only by an effort of thought, for they do not run to meet the memory. His presence warmed and lit up so big a region of life that in thinking of him one is overwhelmed by the multitude of things that he made better by simply existing among them. If you remove a fire from a hearth, you will remember the look, not so much of the blaze itself, as of the whole room in its pleasant glow.

And of his brother Alastair:

I remember that when I occasionally ran across him during the last stages of the battle of the Somme I thought him the only cheerful thing in a grey world. He managed to get the best out of everybody, and won a general affection because he himself gave out so much of it. I wonder if the future historian will realise how much of the strength of the British army was due to the boys of twenty who brought the kindly ardour of youth into the business of war and died before they could lose their freshness.

And those were only the dearest lost to him among the many war dead he knew.

His reflection on his brother’s loss points as well to Buchan’s perspective—even when eulogizing men who have been gone a quarter century by the time of his writing, he never loses sight of the big picture their lives and deaths formed a small part of. This in itself adds to the poignancy of the book, as not only the losses but the civilization-shaking repercussions of the war bothered him, filling him with forebodings that would all too often turn out to be right. Even the end of the war, superficially a cause of celebration, augured trouble: “My reason indeed warned me that there was little cause for optimism. The War, the vastest disordering since the breakdown of the Pax Romana, must be followed by decades of suffering and penury.”

But I don’t want to give too dour an impression of this book. Though tinged throughout with loss and sadness, it is still a fundamentally joyful book. Buchan writes warmly of his childhood; of his work; of the books he has enjoyed (e.g. Pilgrim’s Progress, Robert Louis Stevenson, from whom the title comes) and the historical figures he admires (e.g. Montrose, Lee, Cromwell, Sir Walter Scott); of the many places he was privileged to live, in all of which he finds something lovely; and, though this is not a deeply intimate book, of his family. It is striking what a variety of famous people he knew: members of parliament, literary men, generals, presidents, kings. If you’re looking for the link between GK Chesterton, TE Lawrence, and Alfred Hitchcock, Buchan is your man. But perhaps the finest tribute, and one I can personally relate to, goes to Susie Grosvenor, whom he married in 1907: “I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.”

Memory Hold-the-Door is also, like the Greek and Roman classics Buchan best loved, highly quotable. Buchan maintains an aphoristic readability throughout. I read the book in Kindle, the only way I could find it, and eventually saved over 150 highlights (which you can peruse here if you want a generous sample of the book). A few favorites:

• On mining oneself for the purposes of fiction: “A writer must inevitably keep the best of himself for his own secret creative world.”

• On some writing friends, one of whom will be well known to readers of this blog: “With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring I never differed—except in opinion.”

• On staying current and/or “relevant”: “My taste was for things old and shabby and unpopular, and I regarded with scepticism whatever was acclaimed as the Spirit of the Age. I was born to be always out of fashion.”

• On his favorite classical authors (see “relevance” again): “My reading was chiefly in the Latin and Greek classics, which were beyond the caprice of time. I read and re-read Thucydides, for he also had lived among crumbling institutions; Virgil, for he had known both the cruelty and the mercy of life; Plato, above all, for he was seraphically free from the pettinesses which were at the root of our sorrows.”

• On technological progress as exemplified by the First World War: “The War had shown that our mastery over physical forces might end in a nightmare, that mankind was becoming like an overgrown child armed with deadly weapons, a child with immense limbs and a tiny head.”

• On the bind intellectuals of the 1920s had put themselves in: “It was a difficult time for those who called themselves intellectuals. They found themselves living among the fears and uncertainties of the Middle Ages, without the support of the mediaeval faith.”

• On theory and pure reason: “The drawback to a completely rational mind is that it is apt to assume that what is flawless in logic is therefore practicable.”

• On writing fiction for its own sake: “I always felt a little ashamed that profit should accrue from what had given me so much amusement. I had no purpose in such writing except to please myself, and even if my books had not found a single reader I would have felt amply repaid.”

• On the threats facing Christianity in the modern world: “I am of Blake’s view: ‘Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect a synagogue of Satan.’ There have been high civilisations in the past which have not been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that civilisation must have a Christian basis, and must ultimately rest on the Christian Church. To-day the Faith is being attacked, and the attack is succeeding.”

• On the perseverance of Christianity despite it all: “The Faith is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.”

These are drawn pretty much at random from my Kindle highlights. I could provide dozens more.

There are also many wonderful anecdotes. Here’s one from the First World War regarding General Sir Douglas Haig, whom Buchan worked with and admired but who apparently didn’t have the common touch:

He had not Sir John French’s gift of speaking to the chance-met soldier. Once, I remember, he tried it. There was a solitary private by the roadside, whom he forced himself to address. Haig: “Well, my man, where did you start the war?” Private (pale to the teeth): “I swear to God, sir, I never started no war.”

And another in which a fan of Buchan’s thrillers is disappointed by his historical novels:

These were serious books and they must have puzzled many of the readers who were eager to follow the doings of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn. That is the trouble with an author who only writes to please himself; his product is not standardised, and the purchaser is often disappointed. I once had a letter from an Eton boy who, having a taste for a bustling yarn, was indignant at anything of mine which did not conform to that pattern. He earnestly begged me to “pull myself together.”

But as mentioned above, and by Buchan’s design, Memory Hold-the-Door is not an exhaustive autobiography. Buchan states at the outset that he does not intend to use his memoir for the things most memoirists do, especially today. There is no score-settling, no self-justification, no gossip. He writes only of the dead, and then only to praise them—especially those he believes have been unjustly forgotten or remembered for the wrong reasons. Reviewers since its first publication have remarked on its “curiously oblique” approach, on what it covers in detail and what it glances across in a paragraph—or less. Buchan himself, though he states with some embarrassment that he found his manuscript “brazenly egotistic,” disappears from the narrative for long stretches. He prefers always to write about others.

“That said,” remarks biographer Andrew Lownie, “it is a very revealing book, both consciously and unconsciously.” As I’ve already suggested, even where Buchan says little about himself, his character comes through clearly—friendly, pious (in the Roman sense), hardworking, well educated, charitable toward all, firmly rooted in a place loved lifelong, of disciplined and expansive mind, and above all openminded but of firm conviction. The book’s final line offers a strong unifying theme: “Dogmatism gives place to questioning, and questioning in the end to prayer.”

In early February 1940, shortly after Buchan completed both Memory Hold-the-Door and Sick Heart River and having repeatedly refused the chance at a second five-year term as Governor General of Canada when his term ended in August, he suffered a stroke while shaving, fell, and struck his head. Within a few days he was dead, and widely and affectionately mourned. These two final books, the memoir and the novel, would appear over the course of that year. Memory Hold-the-Door sold out almost immediately and was repeatedly reprinted during the war years and afterward.

Though eventually Buchan’s fiction, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps, became his most lasting legacy, his memoir offers a fine portrait of a life honorably and gratefully lived. Memory Hold-the-Door is both intensely and poignantly self-reflective but also generous. It is that strangest and rarest of literary beasts, the humble memoir.

* * * * *

Once again I’m sorry to see John Buchan June end. This concludes the third year in a row that I’ve done this, and I’ve enjoyed it more every time. What started as a bit of a lark, a relief from some of the early summer corporate activism that eats up our screens during my birth month, has turned into a tradition that I relish and look forward to. I hope these reviews—including some of Buchan’s non-fiction for the first time this year—have piqued your interest in his work, and that you’ll check at least a little bit of it out in the coming year.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next June!

The House of the Four Winds

As this year’s John Buchan June draws to a close, we return to the adventures of retired Scottish grocer Dickson McCunn and friends, this time traveling abroad to help a disinherited prince claim his rightful throne. This novel, the final fictional read this year, is The House of the Four Winds.

Before we consider what kind of trouble the redoubtable Mr McCunn lands in this time, we should consider a mostly-forgotten genre: the Ruritanian Romance. Anthony Hope, a twenty-four year old London lawyer, published The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894 to great acclaim. The plot of this novel concerns an aimless English traveler being swept into a foreign country’s succession crisis and being forced—temporarily, at first—to impersonate a king. Hijinks ensue. As I’ve mentioned here before, The Prisoner of Zenda is a favorite swashbuckler of mine.

But what Hope did genre-wise In Zenda was to combine political intrigue, secret identities, well-intentioned conspirators, high-spirited derring-do, the put-upon Englishman in an exotic land, and a little old-fashioned forbidden romance and—crucially—set it in an imaginary central European kingdom. That unlikely formula proved a huge success and spawned decades of imitators, all called by the name of Hope’s kingdom: Ruritania.

Ruritanian politics informed the plot of the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay, which I reviewed earlier this month. In that novel, factions from the Republic of Evallonia slip into Scotland with the aim of interfering with British public opinion via the press. In The House of the Four Winds, a direct sequel to Castle Gay, Buchan embraces the Ruritanian genre form and sends his characters into the heart of Europe. The result is, as we will see, only partially successful.

When the novel begins, Dickson McCunn is taking a doctor-ordered cure at a spa town in southern Germany. Coincidentally, Alison Westwater, the young heroine of the previous novel, is in the same town with her elderly parents, as is frequent Buchan hero Sir Archie Roylance—taking a break from a dull League of Nations conference in Switzerland—and his wife Janet, whom we learn is a cousin of Alison’s. At various points members of the group encounter figures they recognize from their previous Evallonian adventure in Scotland: first Mastrovin, the nefarious leader of the republicans, a man with ties to the Bolsheviks; and second the heir to the throne of Evallonia, Prince John, whom Mastrovin had attempted to kidnap in Scotland in the previous novel. Something is afoot.

Meanwhile, Alison’s love and the real hero of both this novel and the previous one, Jaikie Galt, is taking a walking tour across eastern France and southern Germany. He winds up crossing the border into Evallonia—which, based on context, seems to be somewhere between Salzburg and Trieste—and almost immediately becomes embroiled in the country’s political upheaval. As established in Castle Gay, Evallonia was one of a number of half-baked republics created by the Treaty of Versailles following the end of the First World War, and like all of those enlightened creations is beset with problems.

Evallonia’s unpopular republican government is on the brink of collapse. Everyone expects this; what worries them is what will replace it once it has collapsed. The monarchists hope to restore Prince John to the throne as king. Mastrovin’s republicans have more sinister intentions, though these are never made totally clear. But what most complicates matters is the recent rise of a movement known as Juventus. A populist, nationalist movement oriented toward youth with a powerful and popular “Green Shirt” paramilitary wing, Juventus enjoys nationwide support but is functionally rudderless. Unlike similar populist movements in, say, Italy and Germany, Juventus has no singular figure who can steer it toward an attainable political goal. Until they have one, the Green Shirts are a danger to everyone.

The plot, hatched in the castle known as The House of the Four Winds by Jaikie, Count Odalchini, one of the leading monarchists, Randal Glynde, a circus owner with a long career in Evallonia (and another of Alison’s cousins), and, eventually, Dickson McCunn himself, is to manipulate the Green Shirts into support for Prince John by placing an even more objectionable heir on the throne, the prince’s elderly uncle, an archduke who has been living in exile for decades. This, they hope, will rally the Green Shirts to Prince John, restore him to his throne, and unite the anti-republican factions enough to prevent a pro-Bolshevik turn in Evallonian politics.

It should not be a surprise that the plot succeeds, but along the way the characters encounter plenty of dangers from every direction: kidnapping and torture by Mastrovin and his cronies; bullying and roughing up at the hands of Green Shirts; and dangers like scaling castle walls and leaping from prison windows. Like the other Dickson McCunn novels, The House of the Four Winds is a lark.

This book was published in 1935, between The Free Fishers and The Island of Sheep, two brisk and skillfully executed late novels. Reception for this final Dickson McCunn adventure, however, was pretty poor. Andrew Lownie, in his biography The Presbyterian Cavalier, quotes critic Cyril Connolly’s judgment that The House of the Four Winds represents “a rather low point” not only for Buchan’s fiction but for his entire career. Lownie himself notes succinctly that critics and reviewers since then “have not substantially challenged that contemporary view.” Ursula Buchan is more to the point: The House of the Four Winds “is probably [Buchan’s] worst novel.”

I enjoyed this novel more than they did, but it certainly has more evident weaknesses than much of Buchan’s other fiction. Most of them—strangely for Buchan, a master of pacing—are structural. Several chapters in the middle and end of the book begin with abrupt leaps forward in time, backtrack to fill in what has happened, and then awkwardly shuffle forward again. This technique can work; here it mostly doesn’t. (I remember being warned off of it in my undergrad Novel Writing class.) Some plot elements are introduced and abandoned quickly. At one point, Jaikie departs (between chapters) on a motorcycle with the aim of meeting an important Countess, but reappears having not found her only to be immediately diverted into another strand of the story. Finally, Mastrovin and the other villains are defeated too early, leaving an overlong denouement involving the mechanics of extracting a disguised Dickson McCunn from Evallonia.

There are also more contrivances than is usual, even for a writer famous for using the lucky coincidence. Jaikie’s love interest Alison has so many cousins one begins to wonder if everyone in the novel is related to her. Jaikie is also always bumping into people he happens to know. And Glynde and his circus, especially his trusty elephant, are always exactly where they need to be, exactly when they need to be.

But The House of the Four Winds still has its charms. For someone interested in thrillers and adventure stories, the interwar spin Buchan puts on Hope’s Ruritanian form is clever. This is a light adventure in a recognizably shaken up, post-Austria-Hungary central Europe, and reflects not only real currents of disruption, uncertainty, and political revolution, but presages the dangers that could arise from these scenarios. Dangers that, indeed, already had by 1935. Mussolini is mentioned once and Hitler not at all, but The House of the Fours Winds is shadowed by their presence. Could Evallonia in the hands of the Green Shirts, who are presented as misguided and potentially dangerous but fundamentally decent, wind up where Italy and Germany did?

More immediately enjoyable are the characters themselves. Jaikie and Alison’s genuinely sweet romance finally flowers in this novel, and it is good to see Sir Archie and Janet again. (It also makes me want to reread John Macnab, in which they meet and enjoy the best love story Buchan wrote.) And, thankfully after Castle Gay, from which he is mostly absent, we get more Dickson McCunn.

The novel’s final short farewell chapter, in which a band of horsemen hurries Mr McCunn over the mountainous Evallonian frontier by moonlight, is a charming episode devoted entirely to him and his spirit of adventure. That’s how his stories began in Huntingtower, the best of the bunch, and even if Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds never worked as well as that first adventure did, this novel’s conclusion makes a fitting end for this unlikeliest of Buchan heroes.

The Island of Sheep

Today we enter the final week of this year’s John Buchan June by continuing with the “lasts” of Buchan’s fiction career. Last week we looked at his last historical novel, The Free Fishers. Today we bid farewell to Buchan’s most famous hero, Richard Hannay, in the last of his adventures, the book that biographer Andrew Lownie calls “the forgotten Richard Hannay novel”: The Island of Sheep.

After running from German agents provocateurs, crossing the length of war-torn Europe to foil a German plot in the Middle East, surviving the Western Front—among other hazards—and risking his life to save three people kidnapped by a scheming society man, General Sir Richard Hannay is finally and firmly settled in the countryside. He lives contentedly at Fosse, his estate, with his wife Mary and now-teenage son Peter John and journeys into London only on parliamentary business. But, Hannay being Hannay, this peaceful life and comfortable existence feels unearned.

Memories and chance meetings further shake him out of his cossetted torpor. One day in Parliament a chance remark reminds Hannay of Lombard, a driven, ambitious friend from his youth in South Africa and Rhodesia. Hannay has not seen Lombard since a fateful night on the savannah when he, Lombard, and Peter Pienaar had sworn an oath to an elderly Danish explorer named Haraldsen to come to his aid if he ever called for help against old enemies. “More,” Hannay notes, “we must be ready to come to his son's help, for he considered that this vendetta might not end with his own life, and we were to hand on the duty to our own sons. As none of us was married that didn’t greatly worry us.”

On the train back to Fosse after the speech, Hannay realizes that Lombard, now bald, thick in the middle, and much more modest in his goals, is sitting across from him. The two chat pleasantly and discuss meeting and catching up sometime, but Hannay senses that Lombard is embarrassed that he never accomplished his youthful plans and Lombard, we later learn, sensed correctly that Hannay looked down on him. The suggested meeting never comes.

Later, on a holiday to the coast with Mary and Peter John, an avid birdwatcher and falconer, Hannay meets a man traveling under the name of Smith who is clearly foreign. He joins Hannay and Peter John on their hunts but sympathizes with the prey rather than the hunters, and disappears suddenly. A hunted man, Hannay thinks, and turns out to be right.

Because the “Smith” Hannay and Peter John get to know is, in fact, Haraldsen’s son Valdemar, and Hannay and Lombard owe a debt to him based on that long-ago pledge under the African moon.

The elder Haraldsen, it turns out, has died at a great age in a remote corner of East Asia in pursuit of the Old Testament Ophir, and Lancelot Troth, the son of a crooked former business partner—who had tried not only to swindle but to kill Haraldsen the night that Hannay, Lombard, and Peter Pienaar saved him—has come back for revenge. Troth has teamed up with his dead father’s former partner, Erick Albinus, and an investor named Barralty, who seems to be the intellectual of the bunch. Together, they have hounded the unassuming and unworldly Valdemar Haraldsen from his island home near the Arctic Circle to hideout after hideout in the British Isles. Hannay, honor-bound to keep his oath, agrees to host Haraldsen in cognito at Fosse.

Haraldsen’s pursuers don’t allow him to rest for long. Soon Hannay, his family, and Haraldsen have decamped to Scotland and Laverlaw, the estate of Hannay’s old friend and comrade-in-arms Sandy Arbuthnot. Lombard arrives with Haraldsen’s daughter Anna, having barely saved her from kidnapping by Troth’s henchmen and cannily shaken the kidnappers off during a cross-country car chase. Reunited with his daughter and enjoying the company of Hannay and his son, Haraldsen loses the hunted, furtive look he has taken on and becomes bolder and more confident—so much so that he decides, after his enemies discover his whereabouts again, that he must face them directly on his own home turf, the Island of Sheep.

The novel thus takes place across three homes: Fosse, where we first meet Hannay at rest; Laverlaw, where Hannay and Sandy retreat with Haraldsen and his daughter; and the Island of Sheep, where the group meet with the power behind Troth, Albinus, Barralty, and their co-conspirators in a final confrontation.

Though I’ve loved The Thirty-Nine Steps for years, I’ve been surprised to discover, since starting this annual project, that Richard Hannay is not my favorite of Buchan’s recurring heroes. I much prefer Sir Edward Leithen and find Dickson McCunn, though his adventures are nowhere near as thrilling, better company. And after the one-two excitements of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle I found Mr Standfast a bit of a slog and The Three Hostages enjoyable but hardly a return to form. So I approached The Island of Sheep a bit hesitantly. I’m glad to say it was wonderful.

The Island of Sheep is not, however, The Thirty-Nine Steps or Greenmantle. Though exciting and suspenseful this, Buchan’s penultimate novel, the last before Sick Heart River, already has something of that posthumously-published work’s reflective tone. Hannay, older now if not much wiser, is troubled by big questions and new kinds of enemies. The novel begins with his guilt over what he feels to be unearned comfort, and the plot is driven by the unresolved hatreds and loyalties of multiple generations. The ending, which I realized reminded me a lot of the climax of Skyfall, suggests that simplification, a return to basics—old vows fulfilled, old ways preserved, national character embraced—and direct confrontation of evil are the only lasting solutions. Until then, a man must live discontented and ill at ease. “Every man,” Lombard says in the end, “must discover his own Island of Sheep.”

The novel is thus thematically rich, but it is also technically excellent. Though written over a busy year and “finished with difficulty” according to Buchan himself, it has none of the pacing problems of Mr Standfast or The Three Hostages, and though—looked at objectively—Hannay does not actually do much in the novel, one is not aware of this as the story unfolds. The early chapters in particular, which are full of flashbacks and stories-within-stories, are especially well paced, and broaden the scope of this adventure through Hannay’s memories of Africa and Sandy’s recounting of journeys in the Far East.

Most of the characters will be familiar to readers of the other Hannay stories, but the newcomers stand out, especially Peter John, last seen as an infant in The Three Hostages, and Anna Haraldsen. Andrew Lownie, in his introduction to the edition I read, compares Peter John and Anna favorably to the young heroes of Robert Louis Stevenson. They are handsomely matched, both in temperament and expertise—Peter John the falconer, hunter, and bird expert, Anna the relict Viking girl, a powerful swimmer and kayaker. One wonders what Buchan might have made of them had he lived longer. The ultimate villain, whom Sandy first infers is behind the plot against Haraldsen, returns from The Courts of the Morning, a novel I haven’t read, though I didn’t find that this hurt my reading of The Island of Sheep. It certainly didn’t make the climactic showdown—which involves fire, cliffs, harpoons, whaling, a terrible thunderstorm, and the legendary berserkr rage—any less suspenseful or dramatic.

As a final note, this novel features some of Buchan’s strongest and most beautiful nature writing. The landscapes range from remembered African hills and savannahs to the marshes of the Solent and the cliffs and lochs of the Faroe Islands—thinly disguised as “the Norlands”—as well as the English countryside and the Scottish Borders. Buchan, always skilled in describing places, is in rare form here, and excels not only at his descriptions of places but of the people who live in them and their many folkways. Here’s a passage from the sheep shearing on Sandy Arbuthnot’s estate that I stopped and read aloud to my wife for pure pleasure:

We all attended the clipping. It was a very hot day, and the air in the fold was thick with the reek of sheep and the strong scent of the keel-pot, from which the shorn beasts were marked with a great L. I have seen a good deal of shearing in my time, but I have never seen it done better than by these Borderers, who wrought in perfect silence and apparently with effortless ease. The Australian sheep-hand may be quicker at the job, but he could not be a greater artist. There was never a gash or a shear-mark, the fleeces dropped plumply beside the stools, and the sheep, no longer dingy and weathered but a dazzling white, were as evenly trimmed as if they had been fine women in the hands of a coiffeur. It was too smelly a place for the women to sit in long, but twenty yards off was crisp turf beginning to be crimsoned with bell-heather, and the shingle-beds and crystal waters of the burn. We ended by camping on a little hillock, where we could look down upon the scene, and around to the hills shimmering in the heat, and up to the deep blue sky on which were etched two mewing buzzards.

The Island of Sheep is not, strictly speaking, the end of Richard Hannay. He is mentioned off-hand in Sick Heart River, the very last of Buchan’s novels, as a member of Sir Edward Leithen’s club and a picture of “serene contentment.” But this final adventure is a worthy one, the best since Greenmantle, and one that, in honoring old promises, vanquishing evil, and saving a soul, earned Hannay the peace in which Buchan left him.

The Free Fishers

Today John Buchan June continues with Buchan’s final work of historical fiction, the 1934 novel The Free Fishers.

Set in Scotland and the North Sea coast of Norfolk, during the Regency and at the height of Napoleon’s powers over the Continent, The Free Fishers begins with Anthony “Nanty” Lammas leaving a meeting of a secret society. Despite his position as professor of rhetoric and logic at St Andrews, Lammas grew up among the fishermen and sailors of the Fife coast and is an initiate of the Free Fishers, their underground fraternity, a network connecting its members to thousands of others all over Britain. This evening, Lammas learns that one of his former students, Jock Kinloch, has also joined the group.

Kinloch complains to Lammas that his attentions to a young lady named Kirsty Evandale are not being reciprocated. Miss Evandale only has eyes for Harry Belses—another of Lammas’s former students—and Harry, in his turn, has an apparently unhealthy interest in a mysterious Mrs Cranmer. This lady, whose husband is a wealthy aristocrat, lives on a remote moorland estate called Hungrygrain. She is also rumored to have outspoken Jacobin sympathies. All of which frustrates the volatile Jock and bewilders Lammas.

Shortly thereafter Lammas receives a special assignment from the college: under cover of traveling to London to beg funds from one of the school’s benefactors, Lord Snowdoun, he must save Snowdoun’s son from an impending duel concerning a lady. The son is Harry Belses. Harry’s challenger is the terrifying Sir Turnour Wyse, an excellent shot with a pistol. The lady is Mrs Cranmer.

Lammas, disconcerted to be sent on such a mission, consults the leader of the Free Fishers, Eben Garnock. In addition to smuggling and the usual duties of a guild or secret society, the Fishers occasionally conduct deniable intelligence work on behalf of the crown. Mrs Cranmer, Lammas learns, is rumored to be a Jacobin spy working on behalf of Napoleon. Already Lammas’s task has taken on more serious dimensions than sorting out a young man’s love life.

Lammas sets out for London and almost immediately meets Sir Turnour, a handsome, physically powerful, and arrogant man obsessed with matters of honor who is also a master horseman. Lammas also learns during one stop on his route that Harry, who had been locked up by his own family in London until Sir Turnour could be placated, has escaped and headed north, presumably homing in on Mrs Cranmer. Lammas changes his plans. He must stop Harry and keep him away from Sir Turnour.

As The Free Fishers nears its midway point, Lammas and Jock, with the aid of Eben Garnock and the Fishers, as well as Harry and Sir Turnour independently, all converge upon Hungrygrain and Mrs Cranmer. There they will encounter hostile locals, a suspiciously empty public house with an unhelpful landlord, and a small army of henchmen patrolling the grounds of Hungrygrain. They will also discover the truth about Mrs Cranmer and her husband, and that a plot is in motion to assassinate the Prime Minister.

I can’t summarize much more of The Free Fishers without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that its plot falls into two halves.

In the first half, Lammas leaves St Andrews on his mission and encounters person after person whom he regards, largely on the basis of hearsay, as an antagonist only to find that, not only do they have good qualities, they are ultimately on the same side. This half charmingly reminded me of The Man Who was Thursday, Chesterton’s breakneck thriller in which, one by one, the hero discovers that all of his enemies are actually friends. The second half of The Free Fishers is a suspenseful cross-country race by an unlikely team to stop the assassination and protect an innocent person from being framed.

I mentioned above that The Free Fishers was Buchan’s last historical novel. It is neither his best nor his most famous story but it shows all of his skills and experience as a writer in peak form. Comparison with an earlier historical novel like Salute to Adventurers is instructive. There, an extended prologue gives way to a sprawling, convoluted plot taking place over years, and though the mystery steadily builds in tension, the reader will win no prizes for guessing the identity of the villain. The Free Fishers, on the other hand, is light, high-spirited, and wittily written, unfolding at a fast, steady, expert pace over just a few days and revealing new surprises in every chapter. I greatly enjoyed both books but The Free Fishers is formally superior and, most importantly, more exciting.

Much more. The climactic action of The Free Fishers is suspenseful and the conclusion to Lammas’s story thoroughly satisfying. Though its plot and themes echo many of Buchan’s earlier historical novels—especially the call of a bookish minister to action and danger in Witch Wood and the benevolent workings of an ancient secret society in Midwinter—this is Buchan’s best executed exploration of them. If it has any shortcoming, it is that preventing the assassination of a now lesser-known Prime Minister gives the book lower stakes. The Napoleonic threat does not feel quite as eminent as it perhaps should. Still, The Free Fishers is a wonderful adventure, and I’d rate it just below Buchan’s historical masterpiece, the rich, eerie, and oppressive Witch Wood.

I could say more. The characters are strongly developed and surprising. Buchan proves especially adept at manipulating the reader’s sympathies, the best example being the haughty Sir Turnour Wyse. And Buchan evokes the world of royal roads, mail coaches, and wayside inns—whether in the hills of the Borders or the fens of Norfolk—with effortless vividness. This is the bustling highway world just out of sight of Jane Austen’s Regency.

Shortly after the publication of The Free Fishers, Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada, a position in which he served until his death. This appointment, his move from Elsfield in southern England, illness, and affairs of state slowed his writing of fiction, and he produced only three more thrillers—the final adventures of Dickson McCunn, Richard Hannay, and, most movingly, Sir Edward Leithen—before he died in 1940. But if he produced no more historical novels, at least this part of his writing career ended on a note of adventure, brotherhood, and swashbuckling fun.

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work

Today marks a first for this blog’s observance of John Buchan June: the review of one of Buchan’s non-fiction books. Though now primarily remembered for thrillers like The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan also wrote many, many works of non-fiction, including biographies, legal analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and a history of the First World War begun while the war was still in progress and eventually totaling 24 volumes. Take a look at his bibliography sometime to get a clearer sense of the breadth of his literary career.

Following the end of the war and through the 1930s, Buchan wrote several biographies of figures he admired—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, Montrose—as a way to recuperate from both the strain of his duties during the war as well as recurrent illness. Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is the first and shorter of two that Buchan wrote about Scott (1771-1832). Originally published in 1925 as The Man and the Book: Sir Walter Scott, part of a series of short authors’ lives from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, this book is more an introduction to Scott’s life and a brief critical appraisal of his work than a full biography.

Buchan begins with a capsule overview of Scott’s background, ancestry, childhood in Scotland, and education, covering as well Scott’s career in law, through which he gained a position that made his literary work possible. After this introduction Buchan closely examines Scott’s writing, beginning with his poetry. Scott started off as the author of long narrative verse and an anthologizer of Scots border ballads, two activities that established Scott’s reputation as a poet and national folklorist and raised interest in Scots poetry and culture more generally.

Scott’s turn from verse to fiction—and his virtual invention of the genre of historical fiction—marks the most important event of his career, and Buchan spends the greater part of the book on Scott’s novels. Appropriately so, as these are the works for which Scott is still read and remembered. Visit a bookstore of your choice and, if they have Scott in stock, it will almost certainly not be Glenfinlas or The Lay of the Last Minstrel but Waverley or Ivanhoe or Rob Roy.

It is easy to see why Buchan admired Scott. Both were of Scottish extraction, deeply educated, and naturally gifted storytellers; both rose from relative obscurity through talent and hard work and moved among the great names of their day; and both produced exciting fictions marked by an idealistic but fundamentally patriotic traditionalist vision of the world. Buchan is no hero-worshiper, however. He bluntly acknowledges deficiencies in Scott’s work—pacing problems in Waverley, for example, or unnecessarily melodramatic speeches in Rob Roy or “the weak and careless ending” of Heart of Midlothian. But Buchan also makes it clear that these flaws are only flaws, that they count little against the craft, insight, and delight of the best of Scott’s work. I’ve written here before about Buchan’s assessment of Scott’s basic tools as a novelist, but he also praises Scott for his skill at describing landscapes, his ability to evoke the spirit of long-gone times, and for his characterization of familiar Scots types, including, amusingly, “the greatest alewife in literature.”

Following his overview of Scott’s long and successful career as a novelist, Buchan turns from “The Sunshine of Success,” the period following the 1819 publication of Ivanhoe, “which had a more clamorous welcome across the Borders than any other of the novels” and “marked the high-water point of Sir Walter’s popularity,” through the prolific output of the 1820s to “The Dark Days,” Scott’s final years—years of decline and near financial ruin.

Given how thin this book is on the details of Scott’s life, I found this penultimate chapter especially interesting. Having invested heavily in his publisher but not taken care to oversee how the business was run, Scott was left responsible for enormous debts upon the firm’s collapse. Rather than declare bankruptcy, which Scott viewed as cheating his creditors, he worked like mad despite his failing health to see that they were all paid in full. Buchan presents this as the admirable action of a principled and honest man, but he notes that not all of Scott’s contemporaries saw it this way. The historian Thomas Carlyle described Scott’s refusal to accept bankruptcy as desperate pride: “Refuge did lie elsewhere,” he wrote, “but it was not Scott’s course or habit of mind to seek it there.”

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is a short book and much of the middle is taken up with long quotations from Scott’s novels—many of them twenty pages long, with one coming in at thirty pages—but in the interstitial critical commentary and chapters of straight biography Buchan offers a concise, vivid, well-rounded portrait of the man. Much of the finer detail of traditional biography is missing, but by the time Scott meets his end, on September 21, 1832, “breath[ing] his last in the presence of all his children,” the reader still feels he knows him and is sorry to see him go. He is also—if I can speak for myself—eager to revisit Scott’s novels, or to read the many he has never gotten around to.

As mentioned above, this was only the first of Buchan’s books on Scott. The second, Sir Walter Scott, a full biography praised for its research and readability, arrived in 1932. I hope to read that sometime in the future. In the meantime, Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work, offers a good introduction to both the man and the poetry and fiction he left behind, as well as a good glimpse of Buchan himself through this sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of one of his literary heroes.

Buchan and Sabatini (and Freeman)

Something that piqued my interest while reading Salute to Adventurers but that I couldn’t work into my John Buchan June review, which I posted yesterday:

Early in Salute to Adventurers, which begins in Scotland in 1685, the narrator encounters a heretical preacher with revolutionary burn-it-all-down politics named John Gib. Gib is arrested and deported as penal slave labor “to the plantations” in the colonies, specifically Virginia. This punishment, taking place in this period, and the later involvement of pirates in the plot reminded me of Rafael Sabatini’s great swashbuckler Captain Blood, which I read once many years ago. At the beginning of that novel, Dr Peter Blood is unjustly arrested and transported to the colonies in penal servitude, in this case to Barbados. I looked Captain Blood up to refresh myself on the details and this also takes place in 1685, during the Monmouth Rebellion.

I read Captain Blood about the same time as The Curse of Capistrano (1919) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and associated it with those, so I had only a vague sense of when Sabatini lived, but it turns out that he and Buchan were exact contemporaries, born just four months apart in 1875. Both started publishing fiction around the turn of the century, though Buchan found success much earlier, Sabatini’s career in fiction only really taking off with the back-to-back successes of Scaramouche and Captain Blood in 1921 and 22. Sabatini outlived Buchan by almost exactly a decade, dying in February 1950—two days after the tenth anniversary of Buchan’s death.

There’s an interesting comparison of the two men’s lives and careers waiting to be made here, but unfortunately I have only read Captain Blood. I remember enjoying it. I’ll have to make time for more Sabatini down the road.

Salute to Adventurers’ Virginia setting also reminded me of Buchan’s broader interest in Virginia history. I’ve briefly mentioned this story here before, but in the 1920s Buchan made a trip to Virginia during which he made a fascinating literary acquaintance. Here’s Ursula Buchan’s account in Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps:

It was a thrilling ten days for [Buchan], especially as he had long had in mind writing a biography of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader for whose generalship he had the greatest admiration. But when at Richmond, he met the journalist and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who guided them over the country of the so-called ‘Seven Days Battles’, from the [Chickahominy] River to Malvern Hill, he backed off, because Freeman had already begun his magisterial four-volume study of Lee.

Andrew Lownie, in his biography, quotes Buchan as saying that he “would rather write that life than do any other piece of literary work I can think of.” Lownie goes further, writing that it was Buchan who first suggested the Lee project to Freeman, but Freeman had already been approached about it by a publisher long before the two met.

One imagines Buchan and Freeman would have gotten along well, both being devout, high-minded patriots with a keen historical sense and a frankly unbelievable work ethic. (Here’s a summary of Freeman’s daily routine.) Freeman’s four-volume RE Lee is a classic, but I would certainly have appreciated Buchan’s perspective in a shorter life of Lee.

Salute to Adventurers

This year’s John Buchan June continues with an earlier Buchan story, his first novel after the success of his colonial South African thriller Prester John in 1910 and one that sees him in his finest Robert Louis Stevenson historical high adventure mode: the fittingly titled Salute to Adventurers.

The narrator of Salute to Adventurers is young Andrew Garvald, the descendant of a once-prominent aristocratic Scots family that, by the 1680s, has fallen on hard times. When the novel begins in 1685, Garvald is a young student at Edinburgh on his way back to the city from his home in the hills nearby. After first getting lost and being helped on his way by a beautiful young woman and then happening upon an ecstatic outdoor prayer service led by a crank preacher, the massive and frightening Muckle John Gib, Garvald finds himself unjustly thrown into jail with Gib and his followers. The girl he had earlier met, whose name, he learns, is Elspeth Blair, helps secure his release. Gib will be transported to the colonies in penal servitude. Garvald returns to his life.

Following this prologue, some years go by in which Garvald joins his uncle’s trading business in the city and agrees to make a trip to the colonies on his behalf. Not long after arriving in Tidewater Virginia he realizes he must go into business for himself, and his hard work and rapid success pose a threat to the mercantilist concerns that have monopolized Virginia trade. Garvald finds himself commercially indispensable to the merchants and planters of the colony but socially shunned and even threatened. He catches arsonists at work on his property and, mysteriously, the pirates that prowl the coast consistently target not only his ships but his merchandise specifically.

Garvald consults the colonial governor but, finding a friendly ear but little help there, seeks out a man he had once run into in Edinburgh—one Ninian Campbell, who Garvald now learns is the notorious pirate Red Ringan. On the basis of their brief connection in the old country, Ringan agrees to help Garvald. He also confirms Garvald’s suspicions that the colony, a thinly populated agricultural region hugging the coast and still clutching its lifeline to Britain, is vulnerable to Indian attack. Garvald, acting on his own initiative and with the advice and contacts of Ringan, travels the settlements of the colonial backcountry constructing a private militia network for the colony’s defense.

Meanwhile, Garvald also reconnects with Elspeth, who now lives on a plantation with a wealthy uncle of her own. More ominously, he catches one brief glimpse of John Gib, now working a tobacco field dressed in rags. But the man recognizes Garvald and slips away.

Busy with trade and business, working against his unpopularity with the snobs of the planter class, striving to build a network of protection along the frontier, shyly trying to prove himself to Elspeth, and less shyly defending himself from aristocratic challengers for her hand, Garvald is already preoccupied when he learns of a serious threat on the frontier. But this turns out not to be the aggressive bands of Cherokee raiders that he initially suspects and fights with, but a much larger, more formidable, more terrifying and bloodthirsty force no one has seen or heard of before. And, as these circumstances unexpectedly converge, Garvald realizes that only he knows about the danger.

Salute to Adventurers is hard to summarize, partly because it is so uncommonly rich for an adventure story. It takes much of what worked in Prester John—the tough-minded but inexperienced Scottish youth, the faraway colonial setting, the dangerous environments, the fanatical hidden antagonist—and expands upon it, mingling in the high-flown dramatic sensibilities of stories like Kidnapped and Treasure Island—pirates, duels, Indians, colorful sidekicks, quests for buried objects, hopeless sieges in wilderness stockades, trial by combat, torture, and heroic sacrifice. The complicated plot uncoils smoothly and with a maximum of suspense, helped as always by Buchan’s sense of pacing. Salute to Adventurers was published the same year as The Thirty-Nine Steps, a much shorter book, and both are masterpieces of pacing in their respective genres.

Another of Buchan’s strengths, setting, also proves crucial. Buchan has been lauded by many readers and critics for his attention to geography and his ability to make imaginary landscapes visible and understandable to the reader, and that is especially true of this rare New World adventure. And, of course, the ways the land and its history shape its people matter, too. Here’s Garvald’s pen-portrait of Virginia as he knew it in the 1690s:

He who only knew James Town and the rich planters knew little of the true Virginia. There were old men who had long memories of Indian fights, and men in their prime who had risen with Bacon, and young men who had their eyes turned to the unknown West. There were new-comers from Scotland and North Ireland, and a stout band of French Protestants, most of them gently born, who had sought freedom for their faith beyond the sway of King Louis. You cannot picture a hardier or more spirited race than the fellows I thus recruited.

In Salute to Adventurers Buchan brings to life whole worlds: the thriving, striving, and rumbustious land of tobacco planters and merchants on the Tidewater; the hard-bitten frontier of small farmers, hunters, and fugitives; and the unimaginable wilds of Indian territory beyond.

This is not to say that Salute to Adventurers is historically perfect. Buchan introduces teepee-dwelling Sioux in a few places in Virginia and the Carolinas and Blackbeard plying the Atlantic about twenty years before his time. But what he realistically captures is the spirit of the age and every manner of person living in the chaotic social grab-bag of Virginia at the time. I’ve hardly mentioned it, but Salute to Adventurers even works as a comedy of manners or class drama in some early chapters.

But what holds the novel together is not just its plotting and pacing and beautifully realized setting, but its characters. Garvald, the narrator, is a solid example of a common Buchan narrator—young, driven, manly, and principled but self-reflective enough to doubt himself or wrestle with fear, not to mention honorable to a fault. Elspeth is less vivacious and outdoorsy than Buchan heroines like Janet Raden or Alison Westwater, but is tough, whip-smart, and as principled as Garvald, which makes her stand out from the striving Virginia elite and complicates their romance. Garvald’s allies Red Ringan and the mysterious Indian exile Shalah prove excellent allies, as does an initially antagonistic young planter named Charles Grey, who is jealous of Elspeth’s attentions. Grey in particular has a good character arc, passing from childish antagonism toward Garvald to principled loyalty in the face of danger.

And of course there is Muckle John Gib, the heretical preacher and would-be revolutionary. It should not be a spoiler to mention that, after Garvald’s two brief run-ins with him, Gib returns to the story in an important role. Gib is a case study in Buchan’s concern about fanaticism, but what Buchan presents in Gib—unlike, say, the ideological Laputa of Prester John or the German agents sowing religious violence in the Middle East in Greenmantle—is the fanatic as the man of principle run amok. In this way, Gib is a counterpart to Garvald rather than an opposite, and it is not through force of arms that Garvald eventually triumphs over Gib and his plot, which I don’t want to spoil, but through reason and moral suasion. Even if you can predict that Gib will return, you cannot predict the nature of their final confrontation, though it is suspenseful and thematically perfect.

Salute to Adventures proved a pleasant surprise for me. It is not readily available now (there is no John Buchan Society-authorized edition from Polygon, unlike so many I’ve read so far) and is not today one of Buchan’s better-remembered books. But it deserves a place among the best of his historical fiction and especially his early work, and was a most enjoyable adventure.

Castle Gay

Today marks the beginning of my third annual John Buchan June. I started this blog series two years ago in an effort to reclaim my birth month from other themed celebrations and turn it in a more fun, wholesome, and adventurous direction. As it happens, the Buchan novel we’re starting this year’s festivities with fits that description perfectly—the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay.

Buchan introduced Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow grocer with a businesslike mind and a romantic heart, in 1922’s Huntingtower. Castle Gay picks up six years after his retirement and first adventure as he hosts two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, the young scouts from a Glasgow slum who had assisted him in routing Bolshevik agents and saving a Russian princess. Now grown, Jaikie Galt is a Cambridge rugby star and Dougal Crombie a reporter for one of the largest newspaper chains in Britain. McCunn, who had taken the boys in after the events Huntingtower, is justifiably proud of them, and sees them off on a walking tour of Scotland ahead of Jaikie’s return to Cambridge.

But this being a John Buchan novel, not long after setting out Jaikie and Dougal fall headlong into a plot that slowly grows more complex and dangerous the more they discover about it. First, they happen upon Dougal’s wealthy employer, Thomas Carlyle Craw, under apparent house arrest deep in the countryside. It turns out that local students have kidnapped Craw as a prank, mistaking him for an older student running for rector of their university, and the befuddled landlady is holding him there. Dougal and Jaikie offer to contact Craw’s staff and the outraged Craw sends a letter with them announcing his predicament.

When they arrive at Craw’s vacation home, Castle Gay, they discover the gates locked and barricaded and reporters from rival newspaper chains skulking the grounds. With the help of a spirited local girl named Alison Westwater they enter the castle and learn that not only are reporters snooping the countryside trying to find out why Craw is missing, but an envoy of agents from the eastern European republic of Evallonia are in the neighborhood, hoping to meet him. Craw, in the high-minded editorials he dashes off from the seclusion of his homes around the country, has taken a hard pro-monarchy stance on this distant country’s politics in the hopes of preventing its takeover by Bolshevik-aligned radicals.

At first Jaikie, Douglas, Alison, and Craw’s staff assume that the visiting Evallonians are republicans hoping to kidnap or otherwise harm Craw for his influential opinions. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the group represents the monarchist faction, and that the heir to the Evallonian throne himself may be among them.

But the republicans are not out of the picture and, as Jaikie shuffles Craw through the countryside and Dougal works to prepare the way for his boss’s return following his strange absence, they learn that this faction is also present in the area, that they’re watching the land around Castle Gay closely, and that their intentions are much more sinister than those of their monarchist rivals.

And so Jaikie and Dougal find themselves saving a newspaper magnate from one kidnapping plot and trying to foil another, meanwhile guarding Craw’s reputation as well as his life by dodging rival reporters from London and Bolshevik spies from eastern Europe, facilitating a nighttime escape by sea, and even managing a costume ball in which real European royalty appear in disguise, all leading to a dramatic final confrontation in the stately library of Castle Gay. Along the way, Dougal comes into his own as a reporter, Craw reconnects with the real world, and Jaikie falls in love.

Castle Gay is not as good as Huntingtower, which benefited from a simpler plot with the lovable Dickson McCunn at its heart, but it is greatly enjoyable. No less a reader than Evelyn Waugh praised its masterful handling of tones that should clash—the thrilling, the romantic, the comic. Buchan has a lot of fun at Craw’s expense, with Jaikie dragging the put-upon media mogul through the rain and mud and cold of the Scottish countryside. And while fun and often funny, Buchan also gives Craw a clear character arc. This fussy, picky, detached newspaperman, who lives in carefully controlled comfort, has his expensive suit ruined and his impractical shoes destroyed on what to Jaikie is an unremarkable walk through the hills, but once he has gotten past his outrage and his discomfort he discovers real physical courage and, Buchan suggests, rescues his soul.

Buchan also plays with irony and mistaken identity, not only in Craw’s initial kidnapping, in which he is merely the victim of a student gag, but later, when one of the reporters finally gets into Castle Gay and has a surprising interview with the reclusive Craw—not knowing that it is actually Dickson McCunn. When the interview is published in a rival paper, Craw is furious at the very McCunn-like opinions ascribed to himself, but can’t disavow them.

All of which is humorous, but it also hints at Buchan’s genuine concern with the influence of the news media. Buchan wrote Castle Gay while recovering from an illness in 1929 and published it in 1930, a time when central and eastern Europe were still in a tumult as a result of the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles. Opinions on foreign politics were hotly debated in the Anglophone world, which was often a point of resentment in the countries in question. The influential Craw, stumping for monarchy in a republic presumably carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Evallonians’ names are all scrupulously polyglot, making Evallonia impossible to pin down as a stand-in for any specific country), attracts the wrong kind of attention from both parties in Evallonian politics, both of whom wish to manipulate British media coverage to their advantage. The fact that the coverage is exposed as often wrong, as when McCunn’s opinions are breathlessly reported as Craw’s to a stunned readership—and a stunned Craw—is not only funny but subtly shows how dangerous this influence can be. As biographer Ursula Buchan points out, Buchan “perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news.’”

But while this is an interesting and, Lord knows, still-relevant theme, the joy of Castle Gay is in the complicated maneuverings; the slapstick discomfiture of Thomas Carlyle Craw; the shy love of Jaikie for Alison, one of the most attractive of Buchan’s female characters, rivalling John Macnab’s Janet Raden; and the stir of chivalrous romance in the end as Dickson McCunn, brought into the plot by Jaikie and Dougal, gets to participate in an adventure like something out of a book again—the thing he’s always desired.

Castle Gay may not be my favorite of Buchan’s adventures, but it has many touches of his best fiction and is an enjoyable romp through the Scottish hills. Not a bad way to begin John Buchan June.

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.