Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The light on the leaves and so on

An aside about language, especially speech, giving shape to intelligence in a podcast I listened to over the weekend brought to mind the following exchange from “Unreal Estates,” the transcript of a discussion about science fiction between CS Lewis, Kingsley Amis (whose Lucky Jim I finally read back in the spring), and Brian Aldiss. Having brought up Lord of the Flies, which does not at first appear to be sci-fi but takes place in a World War III scenario, Lewis, Amis, and Aldiss continue:

AMIS: ‘Science-fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.

LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science-fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.

ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.

LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.

ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case——

AMIS: —isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out——

LEWIS: The trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life when you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.

I seldom dare to disagree with Lewis’s critical judgment, but I think what he describes as a failure in The Inheritors is actually part of the point. Golding’s Neanderthal characters have alien minds, more passively attuned to nature: observing, scavenging, improvising. The Homo sapiens who wipe them out are active. Their approach is exploitive: they see, control, and make use of.

The third-person narration reflects this. Lok, the viewpoint character for much of the novel, struggles even to see the potential resources that the Homo sapiens use, and then cannot understand how they are using them against him. Cf every instance in which the humans shoot arrows at him, an event he never understands but learns to fear. The “signal” in his signal-noise ratio is easily lost because that is how he perceives the world. His senses are less discriminatory. He is part of nature in a way modern man—who can compartmentalize, think abstractly, and then use—is not.

It’s interesting that Lewis used the example of “the light on the leaves,” given prevailing theories about the human eye’s capacity for differentiating shades of green and the fact that Lok spends the most horrific passages of The Inheritors hiding in a tree, seeing but not understanding. The book’s feverish tone is part of the nightmare.

“Unreal Estates” is collected in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature—an old favorite, and well worth your time. I reviewed The Inheritors here two years ago. It’s a great novel and one I’d very much like to revisit soon. I have to wonder whether Lewis ever gave it a second reading as he was, by his own admission in “Unreal Estates,” much more perceptive of an author’s intentions upon multiple readings.

The Oceans and the Stars

A skilled mariner, gifted with leadership, cunning, and physical tenacity, longs to return home from a long and dangerous wartime voyage. Unaccountable powers hinder and undermine him and his stouthearted resistance brings down their wrath. They throw extra hazards and unreasonable anathemas in his way. Men die. He may never see home again. Meanwhile, the woman he left behind, a woman as smart and tough as him, is surrounded and menaced by men who see little in her but advancement for themselves. And every day they spend apart they grow older, that time together lost irrevocably.

One of the most remarkable things about Homer’s work and the Odyssey in particular is that no matter how familiar it becomes, it is always fresh. The Oceans and the Stars, the latest novel by Mark Helprin, clearly demonstrates that. Though not a retelling—Lord knows we don’t need any more of those—it draws inspiration from the Odyssey in new and exciting ways.

After a short prologue in which the Navy prepares a court martial against Captain Stephen Rensselaer on capital charges, The Oceans and the Stars flashes back to the moment that set him on course for this fate. Fifty-two years old, overdue for promotion to admiral and retirement, Rensselaer has been appointed to a cushy advisory job under the Secretary of the Navy. A SEAL during Operation Desert Storm and commander of a patrol coastal or PC, the smallest class of ship in the US Navy, Rensselaer learns that the unnamed president plans to scrap the PCs simply because they’re small and, in an Oval Office meeting to which his boss has brought him as an expert advisor, speaks his mind. The president has him transferred to New Orleans to oversee the construction of the final commissioned PC. It’s not a demotion, but it’s meant as an insult. Rensselaer takes the job seriously.

It’s in New Orleans that he meets Katy Farrar, a tax lawyer whose husband left her and whose children sided with him. Cut adrift and lonely, she and Rensselaer meet on a streetcar and fall in love. Both intelligent, good at what they do, but abandoned and railroaded into career dead-ends with not enough years left to start over, they are ideally matched. Rensselaer plans to complete this final, cutting-edge PC—which he has named USS Athena—turn it over to the Navy, cut his losses, and retire. Then war breaks out.

Interestingly, as The Oceans and the Stars was published two years ago, the war pits the United States against Iran. With the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean aflame, Rensselaer finds himself with a war command. He takes aboard supplies, ammunition, and a half-squad of SEALs and steams out of Norfolk. He has just enough time before he ships out to ask Katy to marry him.

The bulk of the novel concerns Rensselaer and the Athena’s combat cruise, which I don’t want to spoil by summarizing here. Pitted against an Iranian battleship equipped with new Russian technology, a band of ISIS pirates operating out of Somalia, hazardous seas, inhospitable terrain along the coasts, and a chain of command reaching all the way up to the president who booted Rensselaer from the Pentagon, Rensselaer, the Athena, and her crew are sorely tested. And, as that prologue reminds us, there looms on the horizon a court martial—final judgment.

I led off with the Odyssey and though Helprin models the story on Homer, it is not a slavish retelling or adaptation. This makes his actual use of the themes and rhythms of Homer as well as specific episodes not only feel organic to this modern story but much, much more clever. One example from early in the book: as the ship passes through the Straits of Gibraltar, so many men crowd the port rail to ogle the load of topless women aboard a British millionaire’s yacht that the Athena rocks underfoot. Rensselaer has to call them back to themselves and remember their duties as American sailors. Their unseriousness and lust is a threat not only to good order but to the entire ship—the sirens, transferred effortlessly to our world.

Helprin, a veteran of the IDF, renders the voyages, shipboard life, and military culture realistically. And as in any good war novel, he prepares both his characters and readers so carefully for combat that the action offers a breathtaking release of tension. Athena’s confrontations with her enemies, whether the more powerful Iranian vessel or the more ruthless ISIS pirates and the hostages they take aboard a cruise ship, are intensely suspenseful and both horrifying and exciting once they spill over into combat. I’ve seldom been as absorbed in a character’s situation as I was in Rensselaer’s confrontation with ISIS, whose tactics are accurately and disturbingly portrayed.

Though The Oceans and the Stars is a good war story and treats its military setting and technological aspects seriously, with well-explained detail that doesn’t bog the story down, it is also character-driven in a way that similar novels often aren’t. Rensselaer and Katy (her first name is Penelope, by the way) are the most fully formed characters, but supporting characters like Holworthy, the disgruntled Texan commander of Athena’s SEALs, who nurses a childhood wound that drives his service in the Navy, or Movius, Rensselaer’s Jewish XO, who falls in love with a girl while in port at Haifa on the way to the Indian Ocean, are excellent supporting characters. And looming above and at the edges of the story is the president, a capricious autocrat behind much of the misery Rensselaer endures—and overcomes.

There is politics in this novel, but of a refreshing kind. The president is an almost perfect blend of the worst qualities of the last several, and even his political party is not mentioned. The words “Republican” and “Democrat” are used once apiece, by my count, and in no way affect the plot. Rensselaer’s voyage takes place during an election cycle, and just as the lofty machinations of the gods change things for Odysseus, the election matters in unexpected ways for Rensselaer.

What matters to Rensselaer is his duty as a sailor, as an officer of the US Navy, and his love for Katy. He is clear about this. (If The Oceans and the Stars has any fault, it is a tendency toward speechifying in the characters—Rensselaer offhandedly lectures his crew on several occasions—but this is a vestige, I think, of that classical imprint on the story.) As with the nonpartisan politics, it was refreshing to read a story in which courage, duty, and love of country were straightforwardly and unironically spoken of an acted upon. Helprin doesn’t explicitly draw a contrast between Rensselaer and his crew and the gods in Washington, but it’s there, and it’s razor sharp.

While I enjoyed The Oceans and the Stars for its sailing, strategizing, and combat, it most moved me in its love story. I just turned forty-one, perhaps too young to be feeling this way, but Rensselaer and Katy’s predicament—alone, adrift, failed, and unable even to look forward to children—filled me with a powerful wistfulness I still find hard to describe. This is the nostalgia of Homer’s original—nostalgia being the pain of longing to go home. Like Homer, Helprin makes us feel it achingly. And like Homer, he brings his characters redemption in surprising and beautifully satisfying ways.

I’ve heard a lot about Mark Helprin over the years but this is the first of his novels that I’ve read. I will read others. Suspenseful, exciting, realistically and disturbingly violent without getting lost in the horror, The Oceans and the Stars is also powerfully moving—one of the most vivid and engaging novels I’ve read so far this year.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.

Contemptuous adaptation

Earlier this month I noted the “fraught” relationship between novels and their film adaptations as exemplified by Elmore Leonard’s struggles to get good movies made from his books—a story that eats up a considerable part of his new biography (which I hope to review in full soon). A lot of Leonard’s struggles were down to the usual Hollywood problems that bedevil novel adaptations: bad casting, indifferent directors, hack screenwriting, producers who don’t understand the material, and budget.

But what about film adaptations of novels that, while they may or may not have these problems, are made with contempt toward their source material? And what if the author, unlike Leonard in the 70s and 80s, is dead?

Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson recently addressed this in a multipart essay on what she thinks are the worst Christie film and TV adaptations. The competition is fierce. Between the flashy but pandering Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies and a string of wannabe prestige BBC adaptations, the last few decades have given us a slew of films that treat Christie’s stories as mere raw material to be chopped up and rearranged at will, the better to load down with fashionable social and political messaging. Read through Thompson’s posts to see just how bad some of these can get.

When Thompson reaches the penultimate of her ten worst, the 2016 adaptation The Witness for the Prosecution (which doesn’t even get Christie’s title right), she notes as a long aside:

What I dislike about these twenty-first century adaptations . . . is how much they seem to dislike the reason that they were commissioned in the first place: Agatha Christie.

They want, they need us to know that they despise her conservatism, her class, her structured restraint, her respectability, her reverence for the facade (almost everybody in these adaptations is openly frightful, which means that the tension between seeming and being is entirely lost: a deep distortion). There is a violent urge to expose, to denigrate, to remove human dignity. Everything looks greasy, grimy, filmy; food glistens repulsively; sex is slathered in deviancy; blood of dirty blackish-red drawls across the screen.

Most art today is politicized, and this is the politicizing of Agatha Christie. Her world is a privileged one, and for this she must be judged. Her characters belong, in the main, to about the only class of person who can be attacked with impunity, and there is no holding back. . . . The actual target of this mockery is Agatha, her Golden Age aspect, depicted as resoundingly hollow alongside the ‘reality’ of these adaptations. Of course she was not real, as such; but when it came to people she was never untrue, as these adaptations are.

This is sharp, not only as an account of what these adaptations get wrong and how, but of what they reveal about the filmmakers.

Sooner or later I’m going to get an essay on the recent spate of “retellings” of famous novels from the villain’s or a secondary character’s point of view. What these novels, especially those that seek to undermine the original, like Wicked or James, or those trying to force a currently correct opinion into an old story—usually feminism, for whatever reason—like Julia or Circe, have in common with film adaptations that approach their source material with open contempt is a fundamentally parasitical relationship with the original. Branagh’s Poirot, which is more insipid than insidious, or the ideological BBC adaptations Thompson more severely dissects, rely on Christie for prestige and name recognition and then abuse her work. The result is artistically diminished, “untrue” both to the source material and to good art. Their contempt has led them to make something contemptible.

But when this approach proves profitable, as it often does when the author has the kind of long-term popularity that Christie still does, the filmmakers do it again. And again. See also Fleming, Ian and Tolkien, JRR.

I realized a few years ago that, for the first time in my life, I live in a period in which I dread the announcement that a book I love is being made into a film. This is why. If it is not treated as mere “content” for the system—the hungry volcano god of that earlier post on Leonard’s Hollywood struggles—it will be hammered into the correct ideological shape by hacks before being turned loose, diminished and untrue.

Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. You can read all three parts of her Christie film adaptation breakdown here (a top 11 best), here, and here. The modern slicing and dicing instinct hasn’t stopped a film adaptations of Christie’s work, of course; her books themselves have suffered as well, as I noted here two years ago.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.

Short, fun, and good

We’ve been traveling for Independence Day but I wanted to put something short together before the weekend. A few recent items that have been on my mind:

• Last month my friend Joel Miller shared “A Brief Argument for Short Books” at his Miller’s Book Review Substack.

• Shortly before that, YouTuber Man Carrying Thing (aka Jake) posted a short video essay on the purported lack of reading among adult men and what may or may not lie behind it.

• Last week, responding to some of the same discourse, Jared Henderson shared a video about “How to Start Reading Again,” with Jake of Man Carrying Thing as a guest.

• Earlier today, Henderson followed that up with his “boring” solution to “the male reading crisis” on his Substack.

All good food for thought, and with an important commonality: the importance of short books. Per Henderson’s Substack essay, an easy either to get back into or to renew one’s love for reading is to “prioritize short and fun books at first.”

My one quibble: I’d strike “at first.” Short, fun books are good at any time of one’s reading life. The following is a list of my own recommendations. All are books I’ve read and enjoyed and would stick up for in a fight, and all are 1) short, 2) fun, and 3) have good literary qualities. I have considered no other factors in selecting them, so if you have some criterion or criteria for a list that you value above 1-3 above, write your own list. The more book recommendations the merrier!

I’ve sorted them into broad categories but, in making these recommendations, I’d also encourage you not to limit yourself to any one category. Again—I’d vouch for all of these.

Familiarity breeds contempt

These are the books that you read—or were supposed to read—at some point in high school. I’m listing these here because despite being on a lot of school reading lists, they’re actually classics and are still being read for a good reason.

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

• The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Thrillers and spy novels

Arranged in chronological order.

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—A man framed for murder by agents unknown must flee both his enemies and the authorities. One of the books most responsible for the shape of the modern thriller and still a lightning-fast read. Long blog review here.

• Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A hunter arrested and tortured by the (unnamed) Gestapo for an attempt on the (unnamed) dictator of a central European German-speaking country must escape his pursuers, who chase him all the way back to England.

• Journey into Fear and Epitaph for a Spy, by Eric Ambler—Two excellent spy thrillers from just before the outbreak of World War II. In both, an ordinary man is caught in the crossfire of international espionage and must contend with his enemies as well as his own ignorance of spycraft in order to survive.

• Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming—Forget the stereotype of movie Bond. The original Bond novel is short, brutal, briskly paced, and brilliantly written. Whether you go on to the rest of Fleming’s original series or not, Casino Royale is worth your time.

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré—A British agent plays a long con on East German intelligence. A Cold War thriller in a deliberately different vein from any of the novels listed above, with heavy emphasis on the intricacies of spying and deception.

Swashbucklers old and new

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope—An English tourist swaps places with the king of a small European kingdom when he gets falling-down drunk on the day of his coronation. Then the king’s scheming brother kidnaps the real king, forcing the bluff to continue. Spawned a whole subgenre of lesser imitators but a rollicking old-fashioned adventure itself.

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson—Another one that’s a classic for a reason. Even if you know the story, it’s hard not to feel a boyish yearning for adventure awaken while reading or re-reading it.

• Salute to Adventurers, by John Buchan—A young Scot embarks on a series of wilderness adventures involving pirates, Indians, and apocalyptic religious extremists in colonial Virginia. Long blog review here.

• Captain Blood, by Raphael Sabatini—An English doctor falsely accused of treason escapes imprisonment and wages a war of piracy against his enemies. Less well-known now than Treasure Island, but one of the canonical pirate tales.

• On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers—The great modern pirate story, combining vividly imagined real-world piracy with magic. An exciting, engrossing read from the first chapter.

Mystery and crime

• The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes and Watson wander into a gothic ghost story. Good mystery, great atmosphere, and sharply and concisely written.

• Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—I’ve enjoyed every Christie novel I’ve read, but the vividly realized ancient Egyptian setting in this one makes it unusual and especially memorable.

• The Moonshine War and Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard—Two good early crime novels from Leonard, one set in Prohibition-era Kentucky and the other in early 1970s California. In both, ordinary men must resist overwhelming odds to do what they think is right. Short, tight, and engaging.

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—Boston crooks scheme, run guns, rob banks, and betray each other to the authorities. A brilliant short crime novel told almost entirely through dialogue.

• The Highwayman, by Craig Johnson—Is a long-dead Indian police officer sending distress calls in an area that is otherwise without radio reception? A short supernatural entry in the Longmire mystery series.

Sci-fi (and adjacent territory)

• The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by HG Wells—Again, classics for a reason. Both brilliantly imagined, well paced, thought-provoking, and very short.

• The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London—An apocalyptic story of an epidemic that wipes out most of mankind as well as the story of one man left in the ruins who must start over. A great surprise from an author I’d previously associated with dog stories.

• The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham—Two great postwar sci-fi novels. In one, killer plants escape and wreak havoc after the majority of mankind is blinded, and in the other, alien invaders wage war against mankind from beneath the ocean. Both brilliant, suspenseful, and surprising reads. Long blog review of The Kraken Wakes here.

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy—Father and son cross a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Again, don’t let its popularity and the Oprah endorsement lull you into contempt. This is a genuinely great and powerfully moving novel.

Westerns

• Massacre at Goliad, by Elmer Kelton—Human drama and action in the Texian Revolution.

• Last Stand at Saber River and Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leonard—Two of Leonard’s best Westerns. As in the crime novels recommended above, both feature principled men seeking restitution against stronger and less scrupulous enemies and monstrous injustice.

• True Grit, by Charles Portis—Whether you’ve seen one or both film adaptations, Portis’s original novel is still better. A masterpiece of tone and voice with a compelling story whether you’re reading it for the first or the fifth time.

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy—Another brilliant novel brilliantly adapted for the screen, but still better than the movie. Not a bad place to start with McCarthy if you find The Road’s post-apocalyptic bleakness daunting.

Other (I dare not say “literary”)

• Shiloh, by Shelby Foote—A great short Civil War novel told from multiple points of view over two days. A great fictional account of real events, beautifully written and rich in detail.

• The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis—The souls of the dead take a field trip to the edge of heaven. Simple, straightforward, but wonderfully rich and powerful. One of my favorites of Lewis’s books and one you can easily read in an afternoon.

• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King—My estimation of King has steadily fallen for the last decade, but this novella remains a small masterpiece and one of the handful of books on this list that I read in one sitting, without stopping. Still one of my favorite reading experiences. I reread it recently and it holds up.

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton—Beowulf retold from an outsider’s point of view. A great adventure, a wry spoof of academia, a shocking horror story, and a lot of fun if you also know Beowulf. Long blog review here.

• Grendel, by John Gardner—Though “Beowulf retold from the monster’s point of view” might sound like a familiar, overdone premise in our age of Wicked and Maleficent and Cruella, Gardner’s novel differs from those in presenting Grendel as sympathetic but still evil and Beowulf as still heroic. A great read with hidden depths.

• The Loved One and Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh—The darkest of dark comedies from a sharp-eyed master of stinging humor. I laughed so hard I cried in both books.

Again, these are just the ones that came easily to mind, and I’m sure I could supply a list twice or three times as long. Whether you’re one of the people described above, someone who wants to become a reader again, or you’re just looking for something to refresh your reading life here in the middle of the year, I hope you’ll find something good in this list.

The Path of the King

This year’s John Buchan June, in which I’ve tried to focus more on Buchan’s short fiction, draws to a close with a book that is both a collection of short stories and a coherent novel and may be my favorite read this month, a sweeping set of interconnected tales spanning a thousand years: The Path of the King.

Beginning in the 9th or 10th century with the son of a Norse king, Buchan follows his descendants through multiple countries and widely varying fortunes. In the first story, the king gifts his son Biorn with a golden arm-ring. Biorn has just come of age to sail to war with his father, and in the year the story takes place famine and bad weather have placed greater than usual pressure on the outcome of their Viking raids. They strike west, avoiding Britain because of the hard-earned vigilance of its kingdoms, and settle on pillaging Frankish lands along the English Channel. When they are ambushed, Biorn is one of the only survivors, snatched out of the fight by a foreigner in his father’s war band and left in the woods. He wanders until he finally begs help at a peasant’s hut, where the story leaves him—alone, bereft, with nothing left to him but his arm-ring and an old woman’s prophecy that a great kingdom would one day arise from him.

The ring reappears in the next story on the finger of one of William the Conqueror’s more principled knights, and then on the finger of an impoverished descendant, a girl who escapes England by marrying a Bruges cloth merchant and making a fortune in commerce. One of her descendants goes on Crusade with St Louis and departs on an ill-fated mission to meet the Mongol Khan Houlagou, a mission from which only his arm—still wearing the ring—returns. One of his descendants hosts Joan of Arc, who convinces her to marry a good knight when she has doubts about the future, and one of their children becomes a Renaissance Humanist scholar and, finally, a voyager with Columbus.

A generation on, the ring returns to England with an aristocratic Huguenot refugee following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, is on the hand of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s men during one of Raleigh’s last voyages to Virginia, and on the hand of one of the regicides who signs Charles I’s death warrant at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

This marks the beginning of a descent in the line, and the next generations we meet are skulkers and spies. One, the regicide’s grandson, works half-heartedly as a Catholic spy in England and, fearing he will be exposed by a judge who has discovered his secret, has decided to murder him when someone else does it first. Caught in an arcane plot, he is himself killed and used as manufactured evidence of a Catholic plot to invade England. His grandson, spying on the Jacobites for the Duke of Marlborough, is caught by Jacobite agents and forced to admit that, though he comes “of an ancient house” it is “somewhat decayed.” The ring is his only proof.

Spared, he vows to change his way of life, though the decay of the house seemingly continues. The next story finds one of his descendants in the wilderness of Kentucky with Daniel Boone. Like the ancestors who populate the previous stories, he is bold, intelligent, and restless. Also like them, he is ill-fated. Boone retrieves his ring and we next find it, in The Path of the King’s next-to-last story, in the possession of Nancy, a dying frontierswoman in a rickety cabin. In her final day of life, her beloved son Abe loses the ring while using it as a sinker on a fishing line and she has a vision of all the boys through her ancestry who had desired and proudly worn the ring. Whatever the ring signified, she decides, has reached its end.

The final story, told in four vignettes spanning four years of war and upheaval, follows her son Abe as President of the United States.

The first story in the first book covered this month, “The Green Wildebeest” in The Runagates Club, is introduced by Richard Hannay as a meditation on the way ancient things survive and recur in groups of people. The Path of the King is a book-length elaboration on this theme as well as many other familiar Buchan motifs, especially providence. Denied his father’s throne, Biorn and all of his descendants nevertheless keep the kingliness of their blood alive, and all of their actions and decisions—from the Conquest, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years’ War to the Reformation, English Civil War, and the American frontier—prepare the way for the man who will close the circle and fulfil the promise made to Biorn, ruling as “the last of the Kings.”

But as I’ve written before, a theme by itself is nothing. The power of a theme grows from particularity, the concrete specifics with which an author dramatizes it. The great strength of The Path of the King lies in Buchan’s vividly imagined historical vignettes. Each is populated by distinct characters in well-realized historical scenes that, despite their brevity, breathe the spirit of each story’s age strongly and authentically. It is totally absorbing. The book’s thematic connecting tissue, much like the ring itself, is always present but never the point, which gives The Path of the King both subtlety and a staggering cumulative effect.

Also crucial to this effect is the elegiac tone of much of the book. Though a few of the stories at the beginning and end span years and are long enough to be subdivided into chapters, many of them are vignettes—single historical moments. Most of them concern death. The stories, small instances in the thousand years of this family line, are moments of handing over and transition. Epiphany plays an important role, especially as the family’s fortunes rise and fall—and fall and fall—and more than one character has a deathbed vision, a glimpse of past and future. All of this, rooted as it is in the lifelike detail of the individual stories, creates a profound sense of the passage of time and the brevity of life. Ubi sunt?

I could quibble with a few things. The historical tone in places is a bit whiggish, but Buchan, ever fair-minded, does not present a straightforward progressive picture of upright Protestant modernizers triumphing over the backward. The Puritans and Parliamentarians of the Civil War and the anti-Catholic Whigs of the Restoration come off looking especially bad and Buchan presents the Jacobites, as in A Lost Lady of Old Years and Midwinter, as noble, principled, but doomed—more obsolete than evil. A bit more galling is the celebration of Lincoln as a ruling like a king. For a Southerner and an Anti-Federalist sympathizer, this is not the endorsement Buchan thinks it is.

But those are quibbles. The final story about Lincoln is of a piece with the others in its imaginative qualities, in its portraits of real people—Lincoln’s story is told from the perspectives of Edwin Stanton and William Seward, who are as vividly drawn as St Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Cromwell, Titus Oates, and Daniel Boone in others—and in its emotional strength. The scenes of Lincoln’s death, at least when Stanton is not opining on his majesty, are a fittingly moving conclusion to the story.

Perhaps my favorite stories in The Path of the King were the first two, “Hightown under Sunfell” and “The Englishman,” which is unsurprising since they’re set in my beloved Early Middle Ages. Buchan imagines the Viking Age and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England brilliantly. “Eyes of Youth,” the Crusader’s adventure into Central Asia, and “In the Dark Land,” with Daniel Boone, offered the most adventure of the lot, with men striking into vast wildernesses full of alien dangers. The two spy stories, “The Marplot” and “The Lit Room,” offer some quality Buchan espionage in a historical vein. The most moving, for me, may have been “The Maid,” in which a young noblewoman who has just rejected an offer of marriage receives a visit from Joan of Arc and, a year later, has a vision of her on the day of her martyrdom. Buchan’s Joan is refreshingly both pious and human, an earthy farm girl in armor fired by love of God and France. And the penultimate story, “The Last Stage,” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln is gifted a vision of her ancestors and her son’s future, has a similarly mystical power.

The Path of the King was serialized over a year from the fall of 1920 to 1921 and published in book form in 1921. It was Buchan’s first historical fiction since Salute to Adventurers before the First World War and would be followed not only by more great thrillers but by the best of his historical novels—Midwinter, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, and The Free Fishers. Elegantly constructed, rich in meaning, and beautifully imagined throughout, The Path of the King is a fitting beginning for the peak of Buchan’s literary career.

* * * * *

Thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June. I’ve greatly enjoyed the four years of this project, most especially because of the people it’s brought me into contact with. I’m looking forward to next year, though with twenty-nine books under my belt—including the overwhelming majority of Buchan’s novels—I’m already trying to plan what to read. I may have read all of his most famous books by now, but as The Path of the King, The Watcher by the Threshold, and John Burnet of Barns show, there is still plenty of wonderful reading among the more obscure Buchan.

I hope y’all have a pleasant July, and that these posts can guide you toward something good to read in the long hot evenings. As always, thanks for reading!

The Courts of the Morning

This year’s John Buchan June enters the home stretch today with one of Buchan’s later thrillers, a South American adventure featuring filibustering European adventurers, American big business, kidnapping, regime change, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and two favorite recurring characters—The Courts of the Morning.

After a introduction by Richard Hannay in which he explains some of the background to the novel’s events, The Courts of the Morning picks up with Sir Archibald Roylance and his new bride Janet as they begin an overdue honeymoon. They decide to visit the small, prosperous Republic of Olifa on South America’s Pacific Coast. Meanwhile, Sandy Arbuthnot, now Lord Clanroyden, has grown restless in peacetime Britain—always the first tremor of adventure in a Buchan novel—and set off into the wild as a knight errant.

Olifa impresses Archie and Janet. Economically booming thanks to its copper deposits, the republic boasts a thriving capital city with both picturesque Latin American charm and every modern convenience, a smooth, charming president with modern ideas, a modern transportation network, and a modern, motorized army and air force staffed and advised by officers collected from around the world. Modernness—their guide insistently emphasizes it.

And yet, the more Archie and Janet see of Olifa, the more unease they detect. It takes enormous effort to get permission to tour the copper mines in the arid Gran Seco region near the mountains, as if someone is hiding something, and the presence of the mining company’s paramilitary guards and police forces strikes a discordant note. Castor, head of the mining conglomerate and de facto ruler of the Gran Seco, strikes Archie and Janet as superficially charming and cultured but cold, methodical, and ruthlessly pragmatic toward his workers, who sometimes end up in cities looking like the used up husks of human beings. The old families of Olifa, people who can trace their ancestry back to the soldiers of Pizarro, are unhappy. They resent the protection of a class of international mercenaries, and Castor’s mining has gained the unwelcome attention of the United States, which has begun to throw its weight around in Olifa in order to protect its interests in the mines.

Olifa sits poised between two fates: to become a commercial satellite of the United States or to become a vestigial attachment to Castor’s mining company.

Sandy and another old Buchan stalwart, the American spymaster John S Blenkiron, reappear. They’ve been spying on Olifa and Castor both as outsiders and, having infiltrated Castor’s operation, from the inside. They have uncovered extensive abuses by the company, which has functionally enslaved the local Indians and used a powerful local narcotic to keep employees like Castor’s bodyguards compliant, as well as Castor’s personal ambitions: to sweep away “the debris of democracy” in Olifa, establish himself as ruler, and use economic power to sow discord in the divided, restless United States.

With this intelligence in hand, Sandy and Blenkiron convince Archie to join them in a plot to foil Castor and shore up Olifa’s independence through revolution. Having kidnapped Castor and whisked him into protective isolation in the remote coastal plateau known as the Courts of the Morning, Blenkiron leads the mines and the Gran Seco in open revolt to Olifa’s government while Sandy takes to the hills and wages a guerrilla war with the help of the Indians. Castor, watched over by Janet and Barbara Dasent, an old acquaintance from America who has fallen for Sandy, bides his time, waiting—and slowly being transformed.

Even this thin summary covers only the first part of The Courts of the Morning. The civil war sparked by Sandy and Blenkiron goes on for weeks and becomes more and more complex. Castor’s drug-addicted “Conquistadors” reenter the story, kidnapping Janet Roylance in one of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, and become the most dangerous, unpredictable element in the plot against Castor. This is a rich, detailed, busy novel.

Perhaps too busy. Buchan’s fictional Olifa is convincingly imagined—much better than the Evallonia of his later, more straightforwardly Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds—and the war unfolds plausibly. An extended passage late in the book in which Olifa’s commanding general surveys the military situation is thoroughly thought-out and casts what we’ve already read of Archie and Sandy’s adventures into realistic relief. But, as multiple Buchan biographers, the John Buchan Society, and contemporary reviewers have pointed out, this level of detail sometimes overwhelms the novel. JB Priestley, in his review at the time, captures exactly my experience of the novel:

It begins very well indeed with a convincing South American republic, mysterious copper mines in the mountains and a first-class villain on the grand scale. Somewhere about halfway through I found myself losing interest. To begin with, there is no longer any mystery. Then the villain begins to change character, and nobody effective takes his place. And the long and involved accounts of guerrilla warfare that take up most of the later chapters seemed to me below the usual Buchan level of interest. In many ways this is a more ambitious tale than most of his old ‘thrillers’ but it does not seem to me so successful.

With the outbreak of the revolt, the mystery and espionage end, and the novel follows parallel tracks of war and spiritual transformation. It is good—I was not as disappointed as Priestley professed himself earlier in that review—but does not fully deliver on the promise of the absorbing opening chapters.

I’m struck that Buchan returned so often in his later fiction—here, in Castle Gay a year later, in The Blanket of the Dark a year after that, and in A Prince of the Captivity in 1933—to the kidnapping of a villain as a plot element. In all of these stories there is some hope that, cut off from their power and networks of cronies and henchmen, the villains can reconnect with something they have forgotten and repent and use their gifts for good—transformed by the renewing of their minds.

It doesn’t always work. In The Courts of the Morning it does, but this development is only partly convincing. Would Castor, under the influence of a woman like Janet, really turn from his greed, ruthlessness, and lust for power and embrace the cause of Olifa? I have my doubts, but was carried along by the story despite them. Others have flatly rejected it. You’ll have to read The Courts of the Morning for yourself to decide.

And read it you should. Despite the ponderous campaigning of the second half and its debatable conversion of Castor, The Courts of the Morning is good entertainment. There is intrigue and action aplenty, kidnappings and rescues, airplane crashes and sabotage campaigns, and many near misses. And however convincing one finds Castor’s change of heart, the climactic chapter, a nighttime assault on an old Olifero family’s home and a showdown between the last remaining groups of antagonists, is suspenseful and moving.

The Courts of the Morning is, in its way, a fantasy novel, and Buchan’s attention to sub-creating Olifa is one of the book’s joys. Discovering the country alongside Archie and Janet in the first chapters of the novel is almost as fun as the emerging mystery itself. And this vivid, realistic account of Olifa gives weight to the struggle in the majority of the book—whether Olifero nationalists who wish to wrest control of their homeland back from both the mining tycoons and the Yanquis, the Indians who wish to be left alone, or even the déraciné, mercenary henchmen of Castor’s company, the stakes are clear and important. It matters who wins.

The story is also thematically rich. The characters at various points discuss the laxness that comes with affluence, the dilution or corruption of national cultures by wealth and globalism, the abuse of power when centralized in a single man, the fleeting, fallible natures of all governments, and, as mentioned, the need not only for political but for spiritual transformation. Without the latter the former will mean nothing.

But my primary interest in this book, and perhaps the best reason to read it beyond enjoyment, is to see two favorite characters as the protagonists of their own novel. One of the delights of reading through Buchan’s vast body of fiction is the large cast who drift in and out of each other’s stories. Archie and Sandy are two of the most frequent supporting characters. Both appear in Richard Hannay’s First World War adventures (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast) and Archie plays a crucial role in the Sir Edward Leithen adventure John Macnab, which is where he meets and falls in love with Janet.

Blenkiron also appears and others are namedropped, but Archie and Sandy, so often side characters, did not disappoint. Archie and Janet turn out to have a much more eventful honeymoon than they could have imagined, with their devotion to each other as well as their courage tested, and Sandy again proves himself a master of disguise, of irregular warfare, and—for the first time—of a woman’s heart. He also faces a challenge he has never faced before: the allure of earthly power.

The Courts of the Morning has its flaws, but it is an engrossing adventure with enough suspenseful set pieces to satisfy any Buchan fan. It may not be top-tier Buchan, but it is entertaining, and it offers a rare glimpse of two favorite characters on their own, embracing danger, and emerging triumphant and beloved.

A Prince of the Captivity

John Buchan June enters its second half today with one of Buchan’s lesser known works, a sprawling tale of a man’s spiritual journey through shame, prison, war, espionage, and politics, ending with a final showdown between himself alone and the agents of a group clearly meant to be the Nazis. This is the 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity.

The story begins just before the First World War. Adam Melfort, an honorable officer whose life is devoted to the army, is drummed out of the military and tried and imprisoned for forgery. It is clear to those in the know that he has taken the fall for his wife, a fashionable spendthrift who tried to extract more than her usual allowance from a wealthy uncle. Their imprudent marriage ends when his wife, as a final thank you for covering for her, divorces Adam during his prison sentence.

Adam’s loss of his commission and his imprisonment rob him not only of time but purpose. In prison, he ruminates. He retreats into memories of his son Nigel, he and his wife’s only child, who died of a fever at age five. He imagines Nigel and himself on a favorite island off the west coast of Scotland—visions that will grow more vivid and more powerful over the next years.

After prison, war comes. Adam, adrift, desperately wishes to be of service but cannot return to the army. A friend connects him to the intelligence service, and after being tested in both body and mind by eccentric figures like the elderly Mr Scrope or Macandrew, a man with a Scottish name who is clearly a European Jew, he is sent to Belgium, behind German lines, as a spy. He excels at his job and by the time of his hairsbreadth escape from German counterintelligence he has established a vast network feeding vital information to the British.

The end of the war casts Adam adrift again. When Jim Falconet, an American millionaire with an interest in exploration, goes missing in Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, Adam sets himself the task of finding and rescuing him. He does so at enormous risk and through massive, arduous effort, with the two men—eventually all that is left of either Falconet’s original expedition and Adam’s rescue team—alternately nursing one another back to health through the long march southward.

Falconet, once returned to civilization, agrees to Adam’s request to downplay his role in the rescue. He will prove valuable ally to Adam in what lies ahead.

After this first third of the book, A Prince of the Captivity settles into politlcal and business intrigue. Adam’s experiences in the war and the near-death of his Arctic rescue mission convince him that what the world needs is strong, principled leadership to save it from the barbarism left in the wake of the war. When friends suggest that he is the one most suited to the leadership role he so wishes to see filled, he disagrees. His job, as he sees it, is to midwife the man or men who will help save civilization.

He sets his sights on three—Kenneth Armine, a young aristocrat and old friend, a people-person whose wife, Jackie, comes to love and respect Adam; Joe Utlaw, an up-and-coming Labour politician; and Frank Alban, Jackie’s brother, a young Anglican churchman with a powerful gift for speaking and persuading. All three, representatives of the aristocracy, the workers, and the Church, with their natural gifts, good character, and connection to the people have enormous potential to become exactly the leader Adam hopes to see set the world right.

And yet Adam, despite enormous efforts on their behalf, finds himself stymied at every time. His plans and hopes for all three, through various circumstances, come to nothing. Present in each failure and intimately involved at some crucial point is a man Adam has known about for years, Warren Creevey.

An admired and much-sought-after public intellectual and a well-connected and fantastically successful businessman, Creevey has interests everywhere, travels widely, and seems to know everything. Scrope, Adam’s mentor from his intelligence days, predicts early in the novel that Adam and Creevey will find themselves on opposite sides of some great contest and will be forced into confrontation. Adam, who naturally enough dislikes Creevey—and the feeling is mutual—tries to avoid and ignore him. By the final act of the novel, that strategy has become impossible.

The final portion of the story involves German politics, which one need not be reminded were unstable during the 1920s. Hermann Loeffler, the intelligence officer who came closest to capturing Adam during the war, has slowly emerged as a leading moderate and unifier but is opposed by the Communists on one side and, on the other, a group called the Iron Hands. Both desire “short cuts,” but the Iron Hands develop a special reputation for unscrupulous tactics and violence. When they become a clear danger both to Loeffler and to Creevey, Adam lays plans to intervene.

The climax of the novel, taking place at a high Alpine retreat to which Creevey has been kidnapped and smuggled for his own safety, brings the two rivals together for their long-anticipated confrontation. Present also is Jackie, who will turn out to have an important role to play, and slowly closing in from all directions are the henchmen of the Iron Hands.

A Prince of the Captivity is one of Buchan’s longer novels, with a plot playing out over about a decade and sprawling across wartime espionage, Arctic survival, practical politics, and social commentary on the dislocated world of 1920s Britain. Each component part is well done. The sections on Adam’s recruitment into the world of espionage—more grounded, unglamorous, and harder-edged than the seat-of-the-pants amateur adventures of Richard Hannay—feels very much like a precursor to John le Carré and are especially good. Adam’s rescue mission to the Arctic is perhaps my favorite section of the novel, and one of the most dramatic and compelling in any of Buchan’s novels. And the climactic struggle in the mountains, in which Adam’s story is brought full-circle and the longings created by his deep wounding at the start of the story are finally fulfilled, is powerfully moving.

But between these episodes, the middle sections, in which Adam very deliberately works his way through the social fabric of Britain in search of his new leaders, felt not just like a change of pace but a bit of a letdown. Most of Buchan’s contemporaneously-set novels of the 1920s and 30s, when he was serving as an MP, involve the nitty-gritty of practical politics at some point, but seldom does it dominate their plots the way it dominates A Prince of the Captivity. While all of the characters are finely drawn—especially Jackie and Utlaw—and the story intricately and believably plotted, it drags.

This is probably intentional. Adam’s work is laborious and Buchan conveys this vividly. But it is not as fun or compelling as the earlier chapters. Only as Adam’s plans begin to unravel and he is once again placed on the backfoot does the pace revive.

That is the only criticism I can level against A Prince of the Captivity. The plot, after all, is secondary to Adam’s character. The language I used in the introduction, of Adam undertaking a “spiritual journey,” comes from biographer Andrew Lownie. What Adam is searching for, in a metaphor introduced by Macandrew, a staunch Zionist who hopes the war will provide an opportunity for his people to reestablish their homeland, is a personal Jerusalem. The story is therefore one of pilgrimage.

Having honorably taken the blame for his wife’s crime and lost everything, Adam spends these years searching for purpose and belonging, taking on bigger and bigger tasks—from simply being useful in the murky, disreputable world of spies to saving a man’s life to saving civilization. Only in the final pages, in developments I don’t want to spoil, does he find the peace that has eluded him and everyone around him for the entire story.

Even as I read A Prince of the Captivity I was aware that Buchan was doing a lot more with this story than was immediately detectable on the surface. Though I’m not confident I grasped everything in Adam’s rivalry and final contest with Creevey, it moved me and has stayed with me. I see more and more in it and it continues to escape me. A Prince of the Captivity is not my favorite of Buchan’s novels, but it has several episodes as gripping as anything in his best novels and is the one I feel most compelled to revisit, and soon.

Keep reading, stupid

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts for the audiobook of Mr Majestyk, one of Elmore Leonard’s leanest, grittiest thrillers from his early days of crime writing. Having wrapped that up yesterday, I caught up on a promising-looking episode of The Charles CW Cooke Podcast posted on my birthday earlier this month, in which Cooke interviews Christopher Scalia about his new book 13 Novels Conservatives will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

They have a fun, wide-ranging discussion, but late in the episode they turn to the question of why so many people don’t read now, in the course of which they talk about Silas Marner. Cooke wonders whether he didn’t enjoy it because it was assigned in school. Scalia agrees:

“That’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it.”

I think that’s what it was for me. I have no memory of it. It’s possible—I know I was assigned it—and I know what it was about but I don’t have memories of a specific passage or anything like that. And I think that’s why it’s important for people to keep reading, to keep reading fiction later in life, because you are stupid in high school. Let’s just face it. Novels don’t change, but your reactions to novels change because you learn more, you have more experience and, yeah, novels that went over my head when I was younger mean much more to me now. Of course, I can’t think of a single example at the moment, but I’m sure that’s the case. Even novels you’ve always loved you love for different reasons when you go back to them.

Straight talk, and certainly true. Having not read The Great Gatsby until my late thirties, for instance, I had to wonder upon finishing it what a high schooler was supposed to get out of such a story. I gather the usual focus is on obvious symbols—the eyeglass billboard, the green light—and, of course, Themes. But the heart of the novel, a story of hidden pasts, severed roots, lust, and mountains of regret, depends for its resonance on similarly long, difficult experience—precisely the thing high schoolers don’t have.

The novels typically assigned in high school are likely chosen 1) because of the perception that they’ll meet teenagers where they are and 2) because they’re easily teachable and testable. Books subjected to this are diminished in one way or another, whittled and sorted and oversimplified. I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye in many years, but I suspect Salinger’s work in Holden Caulfield’s narration is much more ironic than usually understood. Ditto Grendel, which is usually presented as a straightforward deconstruction of heroism when it is really a stripping away of the self-serving illusions of nihilism. A high schooler would get none of that.

Going in the opposite direction—and it gives me no pleasure to say this—having revisited All Quiet on the Western Front many times since high school, I’ve gradually recognized more and more its essentially juvenile perspective on war, politics, and suffering. And yet it is often the last word on the matter for high schoolers who, again, have no other perspective on the subject.

That doesn’t mean that challenging books shouldn’t be assigned in school. Students need that challenge in order to grow. Per Tolkien, “A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one’s age group. It comes from reading books above one.” How much more so for intellectual and spiritual preparation? But we should be alive to the unintended consequences of assigning books and the inevitable consequences of dumbing down their interpretation.

As for Scalia’s last point, that even novels you love mean more and mean them differently the more you read them, that’s indisputably the case, and one of the only tried and true methods of determining whether a book is good. Even a thriller with no literary pretensions, simply a good story written at the height of its author’s craft, like Mr Majestyk, changes and reveals more of itself upon a second reading—or a third or a fourth or…

A few other books with which I’ve had that experience:

• No Country for Old Men and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• The Great Divorce and That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• True Grit and Gringos, by Charles Portis

• The Iliad

• Beowulf and, as mentioned above, John Gardner’s Grendel

• The Divine Comedy, by Dante

The Road stands out particularly strongly in this regard. This harsh, minimalistic survivalist tale from the master of the unflinching stare into darkness became a completely different book after I had children. I wasn’t stupid anymore. At least not completely. I wrote a little about that experience here.

Check out the episode of Cooke’s podcast and Scalia’s book at the links above. The discussion is fun and worthwhile, and the novels Scalia selected for his book are nicely varied, ranging from Dr Johnson and Scott to Waugh and PD James. And, to Scalia’s last point, keep reading!

The Watcher by the Threshold

Today John Buchan June continues with our second short story collection of the month, Buchan’s early anthology of weird fiction set in Scotland, The Watcher by the Threshold.

Buchan published these five short stories and novellas in magazines—four of them in Blackwood’s—between 1899 and 1902, as he was developing his greatest strengths as a writer. I called the stories “weird fiction” above, but they are hard to categorize. Buchan’s dedication perhaps best expresses what unites them. Addressing the stories to fellow Scot Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan invokes a Scotland they know well that lies behind the stereotype of “kirk and marketplace,” of a land of hard, business-minded Calvinists: “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

Literal remoteness and inaccessibility are crucial elements of the first story, “No-Man’s-Land.” In this novella, an Oxford linguist named Graves, a specialist in the ancient and medieval languages of the Celts and Norse, embarks on a long hike through rough and desolate sheep country in search of good fishing. He decides on a small mountain loch as his destination but, when he tells the old shepherd who hosts him, the shepherd warns him off of that area. Graves presses for details but the shepherd refuses to explain why he should stay away.

Superstition, the educated Graves concludes. The old shepherd and the sister who lives with him are in the grip of old beliefs about brownies, small creatures that harass the locals and occasionally spirit children away. This would also explain to Graves’s satisfaction the strange recent killings of some of the shepherd’s lambs. They were found “lying deid wi’ a hole in their throat.” The shepherd superstitiously blames this one demons and, Graves notes, refuses to believe it was sheep thieves.

Despite the recent events and the shepherd’s dire warnings, Graves sets off for his fishing hole. Before long he is lost in the rugged terrain and the dense mountain fog, where, slowly, he realizes that something is in the fog with him. He gets one glimpse—a short, man-like figure covered in hair—before he is captured by a mob of the creatures and taken to the cave where they live. There, in the midst of a throng of small, squat, hairy, powerful creatures, he has the second great shock of the day: he can understand some of what they’re saying to each other. Far from fairytale brownies, these are the last remnant of the Picts who lived in Scotland before the Scots.

He learns some of their terrible story. Driven underground centuries before, they have survived through theft and murder and have reproduced by kidnapping women and girls from nearby settlements. Horrified, Graves seizes his first opportunity to escape. He barely makes it to the shepherd’s hut. Afterward, back at Oxford, but can’t make use of his discovery and can’t shake the feeling that he has left something undone back in the hills. He returns to Scotland to discover that the old shepherd has abandoned his cottage following the disappearance of his sister in the night. Graves, the only man who understands what has actually happened to her and knows where she has gone, decides that it is up to him to rescue her.

The remote “back-world of Scotland” is even further away in the supernatural story “The Far Islands.” In this short story, young Colin Raden grows up in a family pulled inexorably westward. Ancestors who disappeared on voyages to the west are many and legendary.

Colin has, from his early days, dreamlike visions of being in a boat at sea, looking to the west, but with his view blocked by a wall of mist. This vision recurs throughout his life—at school, at university—with Colin always yearning to see beyond the mist but unable to approach it. Gradually new details intrude: the sound of waves on a beach just out of sight beyond the mist, the scent of apple blossoms. He learns from a friend of an old story in Geoffrey of Monmouth about an “Island of Apple-trees” far to the west, reserved for heroes to “live their second life.”

After university, Colin joins the army and is sent to the desert. There, his visions reveal more and more of the world beyond the mist, and reach their final, fateful consummation.

Buchan develops overtly supernatural moods in the title story, “The Watcher by the Threshold,” another novella that is less plot-driven than “No-Man’s Land” and more of a character study. Henry, the narrator, is called upon for help by Sybil, the wife of an old school friend named Ladlaw, and travels to their home on the Scottish moors. The wife, anxious and drawn, is obviously distressed, but Ladlaw must be drawn out. Gradually he reveals that he believes himself haunted by a devil. There is a shadowy figure, he says, always just out of sight on his left-hand side. He begs Ladlaw not to leave him alone, even for a moment.

Henry complies and notes the odd changes in Ladlaw from the man he knew at university, most notably an intense interest in esoteric scholarship and a fixation on Emperor Justinian. He comes to believe that Ladlaw is haunted by a “familiar” from the ancient world. His presence helps ease Ladlaw’s mind, but when Henry is called away on urgent business he recruits the local minister, Mr Oliphant, to look after him. Oliphant is the modern, openminded kind of minister who both balks at talking about the devil and also thinks his Christianity rules out the existence of the pagan supernatural (“Justinian was a Christian,” Henry reminds him) and wonders whether Ladlaw is simply a drunk. Ladlaw is not in the best of hands, but Henry must go and returns as quickly as he can.

When he does, he finds Ladlaw’s house empty. Oliphant, terrified of the man he was asked to help, has fled, and Ladlaw has taken to the moors, raving. Henry joins the search, which ends in a dramatic hilltop fight that doubles as an exorcism.

The next story, “The Outgoing of the Tide,” is a historical tale of forbidden romance and witchcraft set on the West coast of Scotland. Alison Hirpling is an old woman reputed to be a witch and a devil worshiper—a rumor that turns out to be true. By contrast, Ailie Sempill, a young girl who lives with her and is probably her daughter, is as devoted to Christ and the Kirk as she is beautiful.

One day the swaggering, ne’er-do-well laird Heriotside, in his regular ride through the countryside, sees Ailie and falls in love with her. He strives to woo her but she, knowing his reputation, is standoffish and hesitant. Gradually she falls for him, too, and Alison seeks to use their love to bring about their destruction and damnation. She sows doubt in both their minds but holds out the offer of magic as a way to seal their love. A midnight tryst on Beltane’s Eve, she tells each of them, at a particular spot along the coast where a river flows into a bay will bind them to each other forever.

Ailie and Heriotside find this hard to resist. What they don’t realize, however, is that for Alison this time and place are sources of immense satanic power as well as treacherous tides that have claimed more than one life. Whether Ailie and Heriotside will realize what Alison is up to and what kind of danger—both physical and spiritual—they have placed themselves in drives the suspenseful conclusion of the story.

“It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

— John Buchan

The final story, “Fountainblue,” has no supernatural elements but nevertheless depicts a haunted man. The main character, Maitland, comes of Scottish stock but has spent years in business in the south. Hard, distant, and ruthless in his dealings, he has achieved fame and immense wealth through his disciplined, machine-like work and has returned to his late aunt’s castle, Fountainblue, with one object in mind: pay court to the beautiful Claire Etheridge and convince her to marry him.

Despite his difficult personality—those who don’t immediately dislike him still can’t make up their minds whether they actually like him—Maitland nurses fond memories of his childhood on the coast, adventuring among the rocks and learning the ways of the sea. This deeply buried imaginative sense and yearning for the wild comes in handy as he attempts to woo Claire, though not for the reasons one might expect.

On a boat trip along the coast with Claire and Despencer, another young man he correctly views as a competitor, Maitland is caught in a terrible storm. Only his knowledge of the tides, currents, isles, and rocks can save them. But his heroism at the tiller of their boat and in the wreck afterward will not have the consequences Maitland hopes for.

Read about The Watcher by the Threshold in Buchan’s major critics and biographers and the recurring theme is that the stories, while entertaining, are mostly noteworthy for prefiguring his later themes and preoccupations. There is some truth to this. It’s hard, having read so many of Buchan’s later novels, not to be reminded of Witch Wood when reading “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or of The Dancing Floor or The Gap in the Curtain when reading of the intrusion of the supernatural into the chummy world of late Victorian England in “The Watcher by the Threshold,” or of A Prince of the Captivity, with its hero’s cherished dream of a peaceful island, when reading about Colin Raden’s visions in “The Far Islands.” Both Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan, in their biographies, note in “Fountainblue” the foreshadowing of Lumley’s speech about the fragility of civilization in The Power-House. Lownie further notes in the same story the theme of the emptiness of worldly success which, he reminds us, animates Buchan’s great final novel, Sick Heart River, almost forty years later.

But while it is interesting to note the way the stories provide early riffs on ideas and concerns that Buchan developed and explored more fully in his later work, the stories are also worth considering on their own terms.

These stories are early Buchan, and Buchan himself, when mailing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold to Susie Grosvenor, the woman who would become his wife, described them as “pretty crude.” As with his embarrassed assessment of John Burnet of Barns, I think he’s underrating himself. Susie would agree. Writing to thank him for the book, she said that she had “just finished devouring” it: “I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting.”

This is certainly true. The later short stories in The Runagates Club may be more polished, but in The Watcher by the Threshold Buchan shows all the strengths of his later work and few of his earlier weaknesses. The Scottish settings are beautifully and evocatively described, presenting a picture not only of places but of their moral import—their atmosphere. One feels this most pointedly in the darker stories like “The Outgoing of the Sea” and especially “No-Man’s Land,” with their oppressive, desolate landscapes haunted by incomprehensible dangers.

The pacing of the stories is also good. Graves’s escape from the troglodyte Picts in “No-Man’s Land” is as suspenseful as anything in the Hannay novels, and “The Far Islands” flows with ethereal, dreamlike ease through an entire life. The stories are also, like Buchan’s entire body of work, wonderfully varied. What unites them is his intense interest in the relict, atavistic, and uncanny hidden just below the smooth polished surface of modern life—most obviously in “No-Man’s Land” but through the collection from beginning to end—and the palpable atmosphere he creates around the stories.

Where The Watcher by the Threshold’s stories differ most from his later work, I think, is in their interiority. All five take place largely inside a single character’s head, and hidden worlds that belong to or effect a single individual are a repeated motif. This is most extreme in “The Far Islands” and “Fountainblue,” which are entirely about the imaginations and ruminations of their main characters and whose plots turn on moments of revelation and self-knowledge—metanoia, in theological terms. These epiphanies lead, more or less directly, to Maitland’s and Colin Raden’s deaths, but also to the fulfilment of their longings. In the other stories, these hidden worlds are overtly threatening and the characters must be saved from them, whether the Picts of “No-Man’s Land,” the schemes of a devil-worshiping crone in “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or demonic possession in “The Watcher by the Threshold.”

My personal favorite from The Watcher by the Threshold was “No-Man’s-Land,” a genuinely scary and suspenseful story. Last night I started to summarize the story for my kids. My wife stopped me—it was too close to bedtime and even she was creeped out. My kids begged to know what happened. A useful test of a story’s power. (Reflecting on Buchan’s choice of The Watcher by the Threshold to send to Susie Grosvenor, Ursula Buchan writes, “Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine.”)

The Watcher by the Threshold is a strong early sample of Buchan’s work that I found immensely enjoyable. Not only good entertainment, they are also well-written and richly imagined, with thematic depth as a wonderful bonus. For anyone wanting a small dose of Buchan or a glimpse of Buchan working in a decidedly different mode from his thrillers and much of his historical novels, this is an indispensable read.