“Disproving” Lord of the Flies

I’m not sure how many people would say William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of their “favorite” novels, but its persistence on school reading lists and its resulting popular familiarity has given it a lot of influence. It has also attracted criticism, especially from those who, in our sentimental age, find it too “depressing” or “pessimistic.” The deeper critics will sometimes invoke a Rousseauian image of man as “basically good” and condemn Golding for his refusal to acknowledge this. I don’t have much to say in response to this; whether you believe in original sin or not, if you can’t see the potential in yourself to succumb to Lord of the Flies-like pressures, Golding’s book is the medicine you need.

A popular recent line of critique I’ve seen—especially on social media—is that a real-life incident from shortly after the book’s publication “disproves” or shows it to be unrealistic. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys ran away from their boarding school in a stolen boat and, after being stranded on a desert island, lived fifteen months. They cooperated in finding food and shelter, established orderly routines, and, when finally discovered by a passing Australian fisherman, were in good health and high spirits.

I first recall seeing this argument around the time this Guardian piece came out in May 2020 (rough timing for someone flogging a “hopeful” history of mankind), but it comes up in cycles on Substack. It is usually presented as decisive, a gotcha for Golding and all the doomers who like his novel or at least found it compelling food for thought.

This is a weak argument and a poor comparison. The situation of the Tongan castaways is only superficially similar to Golding’s scenario—basically the only parallels are the school-age boys on an uninhabited Pacific island. The scale and circumstances are fundamentally different.

Consider: in the real-life incident, six teenage boys from similar backgrounds who were already friends planned and voluntarily ran away from their school. They brought preexisting community and shared goals to the island with them. Both collaboration and negotiation occurred at the level of intimate friendship.

In Lord of the Flies, dozens of boys, only some of whom actually know each other, are thrown together by happenstance when their plane is brought down in an apparent nuclear war. Their ages vary much more, they come from different backgrounds—the class and regional difference evinced by Piggy’s pronunciation of asthma is a significant repeated joke—and the only bonds they share are either created deliberately after the crash, as in the friendship of Ralph and Piggy or the entire community itself, or small preexisting cliques, like Jack and his crew of choirboys. Loyalty to these groups has to be subordinated to the whole, competing interests debated and judged, and peace maintained between strangers and enemies.

Golding is quite clearly concerned with the artificiality of society, which, to rise above the level of a mere organic group of friends, must combine and coordinate multiple such groups. The island setting is both a spoof of Victorian Robinsonades, novels in which decent chaps effortlessly remake civilization on remote islands, and a jab at the Enlightenment “state of nature” idea that undergirded them—and modern optimistic critics of the novel.

There may be legitimate lines of criticism to explore regarding Lord of the Flies—although not regarding its craft or magnificent science-fiction atmosphere—or the philosophical assumptions and worldview Golding expresses in it, but this isn’t one. The real-life Tongan boys’ adventure, as fascinating and dramatic as it is, bears more similarity to Huckleberry Finn than Lord of the Flies.

Sandbrook and Syrett sing Buchan’s praises

I’ve greatly enjoyed The Rest is History’s spinoff show, The Book Club, and the fun but in-depth discussions of its hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tabby Syrett, ever since it launched with a great discussion of The Hobbit. I wrote about that here. I haven’t caught every episode, skipping some, like The Secret History, to avoid even the possibility of spoilers for books I hope to read soon, but the quality of their conversation has not diminished in the ten months since it began.

A few weeks ago they mentioned that The Thirty-Nine Steps was coming up in their schedule. This caught my attention for obvious reasons. I was excited to hear their discussion, but also a bit hesitant. Three years ago Sandbrook’s narrative of interwar Britain, in which he had used Buchan as a byword for anti-Semitic conspiracism, had provoked what has been a consistently popular post, “Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?”

I have no idea if anyone at The Rest is History has ever seen that post but thousands of other people with the same question have found it through Google. I also had it firsthand from a connection in the UK that someone with much more authority in the subject than I had talked to Sandbrook about the anti-Semitism accusation in person. Would this old slander come up on The Book Club? How would they address it? Would they clear Buchan’s name?

Yes. The episode dropped last night, and I’m thrilled to say it’s one of their best. Dominic and Tabby’s conversation about The Thirty-Nine Steps is wonderful and fair, noting its narrative strengths, especially its breathless pacing and beautiful nature writing, and its innovative model, emulated by everything from James Bond to Jason Bourne—one of the examples of the “high-tech pursuit” I used in my recent discussion of the same with Wade Stotts. They justifiably point out its few minor flaws, such as the rushed, last-page climactic action. (I well remember rereading the final paragraphs the first time I read it, trying to divine precisely what had happened.)

As usual, Dominic and Tabby also do a great job putting the book in its historical context, explaining what The Thirty-Nine Steps has in common with the detective story and invasion literature as well as the ways it diverged from these and what has kept it popular, exciting, and influential when ever since.

But their discussion of Buchan the man is also stellar, paying proper tribute to one of the rare genuinely good men among popular authors. It’s a great quick overview of his life up to the First World War, his amazingly varied career, his views on writing, war, and the Empire, and his personal virtues, not least his fairmindedness and generosity.

Crucially, Dominic acknowledges twice that he was wrong about Buchan and corrects the record on Buchan’s supposed anti-Semitism. He points out that Scudder, the ill-fated journalist whose death kicks off The Thirty-Nine Steps’ chase, turns out to be wrong about his Jewish conspiracy, that this was a great narrative trick Buchan pulls on the reader, as well as the fact that Buchan himself was a Zionist and friend to Jews at a time it wasn’t advantageous to be. (The more things change…)

As my wife pointed out, it’s refreshing to hear of someone correcting themselves and owning up to it. I’ve always liked Sandbrook anyway but this speaks especially well of him.

A great episode on a great book. Tabby mentioned her love of Witch Wood, another of my favorite Buchan novels. Maybe we’ll get an episode on that somewhere down the road. I’d love to hear that. In the meantime, definitely check out The Book Club—I’ve embedded this week’s episode in its YouTube format above—as well as the new Book Club Notes newsletter they announced at the end of the episode.

I, Ripper

The scene of the crime in Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” murders

I’ll begin this review with a caution—Stephen Hunter’s I, Ripper is thrilling entertainment but not for the faint of heart. Hunter himself noted, at a booksigning at the time of the book’s release in 2015, that he was concerned about the novel’s violence when he submitted the first chapters to his editor. Her response: “Why don’t you move the violence to the front and really start the book off with a bang?”

He did, and it does. Be warned.

Jack the Ripper killed five women—that we are certain of—in the fall of 1888. All of the victims were occasional or professional prostitutes and most of them were alcoholics who spent the money they earned from their johns—thruppence at a time—on gin and, occasionally, one night in a rented bed in a dosshouse. Whitechapel teemed with such as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe—the latter of which included lots of Jews, political radicals, and Jewish political radicals, all on the run from Tsarist persecution—and a constantly changing mob of sailors and industrial workers. The district’s dense network of shops and rowhouses and unlighted maze of small streets and alleys hummed with activity even during the night, as workers walked to or from late shifts at slaughterhouses and factories and the docks and upper class types went slumming in the pubs or, perhaps, looking for a “judy.”

From the first page, in which Jack, as yet unnamed but in his own voice—a found diary—cuts the throat of his first victim, Hunter evokes the jungly tumult and grime of this world brilliantly. I, Ripper’s authentic atmosphere is one of its greatest strengths.

Another is its structure. Telling the story in alternating chapters of Jack’s diary and a 1912 memoir by Jeb, an Irish reporter working under a penname for the Star, a London tabloid, Hunter pits the two against each other as initially unwitting foes. Jack, roaming Whitechapel and brutalizing the lone prostitutes, is driven by some unexplained mission. Jeb, ambitious and cold by his own admission, breaks crucial news about the first murders and starts to make a name for himself.

Jack, not insane but monstrous, is mysterious only in the sense that we hope to learn who he is and why he is doing this. Jeb is a more complicated creature. He realizes he is taking advantage of Jack’s crimes—and his mutilated victims—to build up his own reputation as a writer but genuinely believes in reporting the facts and castigates himself when lured into helping fake the letter that coins the killer’s name. A fellow reporter on the Star, an American, routinely speculates in print and fixates on anti-Semitic theories early on in the crime spree. Jeb worries that his reporting may cause vigilantism or—if his colleague has his way—pogroms.

Just as he develops qualms about his work, Jeb meets Professor Dare. A linguist and an advocate of what might later be called psychological conditioning, Dare offers to share his theory about Jack with Jeb—the killer is dyslexic, and has experience in the remote reaches of Afghanistan, where the women of the tribes disembowel prisoners in exactly the manner Jack does. Find a man matching this description—they decide to call it a “profile”—and they find Jack.

Added to his ambition and his unquiet desire to report accurately and responsibly, Jeb takes on detective work. This will place him on a path to a final collision with Jack the Ripper himself.

I don’t think I can reveal more without giving away too much. I, Ripper’s fictional plot, elegantly interlaced in the imagined diary of Jack and the memoir of Jeb—who turns out to be a real person with a famous name that I don’t want to give away—is solidly constructed and resolves in several good twists, some with surprisingly literary implications. It is one of this grim, gory book’s great enjoyments.

But only one. Another is Hunter’s imagining of the rumbustious world of London journalism. The former movie critic for the Washington Post, his Star newsroom and its combination of jocularity and callousness feels utterly real. A standout chapter is that in which Jeb, goaded into it by his editor and a colleague, forges the first and most famous Jack the Ripper letter. The calculated poetry of the letter and the group effort to get it notoriety is entertaining, convincing—the “Dear Boss” letter has been suspected of fakery since it appeared, but I had never considered its artistic and linguistic character before—and revealing.

“Newspapers,” Jack muses about halfway through. “What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?”

That’s the fictional side of I, Ripper. Another pleasure of the book is Hunter’s attention to the actual facts of the Jack the Ripper case. I’ve mentioned his vivid recreation of the grungy, bestial world of Whitechapel—which is not quite on the same level of depravity as a James Ellroy novel but might still leave you wanting to take a shower—but the crimes, the crime scenes, the victims, and many of the other real people involved are painstakingly imagined without the stiff, lifeless effect of some similarly detailed historical novels. The historical figures have personality, living and breathing as convincingly as the fictional characters.

This is especially important in the case of the victims. Hunter doesn’t soft-pedal their lifestyles or recast them as somehow noble, and yet, though staggering drunk, winkingly offering mortal sin to the passerby, or both at the same time, they feel like real people and worthy of sympathy. Their encounters with Jack evoke dread and pity and his treatment of them as objects, mere matter to be parted and manipulated for his own ends, seems more monstrous as a result.

Hunter committed himself to changing as few known historical details as possible, working around the truth rather than altering it for his fiction. In an afterword, he notes four minute details he tweaked, only two of which actually relate directly to Jack’s actions. An impressive achievement. And if you know the case well, he includes enough detail to pinpoint where his fictional story is weaving into the truth. For example, as Jack approaches Elizabeth Stride, the Swedish-born third victim, he passes a man wearing a deerstalker cap. This was a real man seen in conversation with Stride by the penultimate witness to see her alive, a police constable. This places Jack’s assault in time and in relation to other witnesses like Israel Schwartz, who, based on Hunter’s fictional reconstruction of events, did not actually see Jack.

Real life informs the fiction, which convincingly creates an alternative explanation for the known facts. This is a tricky bit of business for a novelist to pull off, and Hunter does it effortlessly—and, for the reader who doesn’t know their Jack the Ripper lore, invisibly and unobtrusively. His fictional solution, rooted as it is in the facts, offers enjoyable resolution to a real life mystery.

If I have any complaints whatsoever about I, Ripper they are minor: a handful of anachronisms (Belloc’s famous line about the Maxim gun, from 1898, is paraphrased by Jack ten years too early) and some tonal convergence of Jack’s diary and Jeb’s memoir that led me to suspect, briefly, that Jeb would turn out to be Jack (he doesn’t; Hunter is much better than that). I suspected the ultimate culprit early—it’s a whodunnit, or maybe who’s-doing-it, after all—but Hunter successfully obscures, misleads, and distracts so that the final reveal was still satisfying.

Finally—an odd complaint—I, Ripper is simply too good. I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone. This is a gripping, disturbing thriller and a masterpiece of historical fiction, and Hunter’s success in conveying Jack’s horror is what makes it difficult to recommend. But if you’re interested in the case, enjoy a well-constructed crime and suspense novel, and think you can handle a few months in Whitechapel and the company of one of the worst people who ever lived, you should definitely check it out.

Watcher in the Shadows

As I noted when reviewing Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot back in the early spring, Household knew how to open a thriller. In Watcher in the Shadows, another Cold War-era shocker, he sends a postman to Charles Dennim’s front door on page one and blows him in half on page two. The novel barely slows down from there.

Dennim lives a quiet life in a rural English village. He’s an expert zoologist specializing in squirrels and shares the house—now missing most of its windows—with his widowed aunt. What presumably only he, a friend in British intelligence, and the unknown person who sent him a mailbomb know is that he is actually Charles von Dennim, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family and, during the Second World War, a double agent working undercover as part of the SS staff at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Now, ten years on from the war and in his early forties, Dennim prefers not to think about all this. He carries on his research into small mammals and enjoys his leisurely outdoor pursuits, including hunting and horseback riding with Aunt Georgina, an accomplished riding instructor. The abortive mail bomb gives him pause. Perhaps it was meant for someone else, though none of his neighbors strike him as the likely targets of assassination. But a few days later he receives a postcard—a photo of Buchenwald with a X marked over one building, the officers’ mess.

His past is known to someone, somewhere, albeit not in full. Dennim had successfully fed intelligence to the British during his time at Buchenwald and arranged the escapes of several important female political prisoners. He risked his life and his sanity—the moral damage done not only to his mind but to his sense of honor by the secrecy of his role comes up several times—in order to undermine the Nazis, though the nature of his work means neither he nor the British government can acknowledge it.

Dennim investigates and finds that several other men associated with Buchenwald—two officers and a truck driver—had recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances. One was tortured for days, hinting that the killings are motivated by something highly personal. Dennim, not least because he is not guilty of the crimes his enemy apparently seeks to avenge, determines not to be next.

This leads into the bulk of the novel, a series of removes from place to place in the English countryside as Dennim tries to lure the killer into a trap. Thinking of himself as a goat staked out for a hidden tiger, Dennim learns quickly that his enemy is smart, observant, and supremely cautious. A misstep on his own part might send the assassin into hiding for months, long enough to drive Dennim mad or render him complacent, an easy target. He must proceed carefully if he wants to force a confrontation.

Along the way Dennim finds allies in unlikely places—a retired admiral, a pub landlord, a sharply observant working class laborer—as well as, for the first time in his life as a bachelor spy-cum-zoologist, love. Benita, the admiral’s daughter, is no merely obligatory love interest but proves especially important, as by the time Dennim confronts his enemy one-on-one at a remote Cotswolds barn, he has much more at stake in his life than when the hunt began.

Watcher in the Shadows has many of the hallmarks and strengths of the other Household novels I’ve read so far: strong, lean prose, energetic pacing, continuously building tension and suspense, and beautifully realized outdoor settings. But a number of other factors set it apart and make it unusually rich and thought-provoking.

The first is Dennim’s romance with Benita. Household, as I’ve noted about Buchan before him and Ambler, his close contemporary, is not an author one would normally associate with a romantic subplot, but like both he can evoke newly kindled love simply and poignantly, in ways that both enrich the characters and matter to the plot.

The next is the depth of Dennim’s prior experiences undercover. Without giving too much away, Dennim’s secret is known to more people than himself, his enemy, and his few contacts in British Intelligence, and his postwar history is more complicated than his simple career studying squirrels may at first suggest. Buchenwald and secrecy damaged him, and coming to understand this both reveals hidden depths in other characters and plays an important role in learning how to defeat his enemy.

The last is the enemy himself. Again, I want to avoid spoiling the book, but the man trying to kill Dennim has a surprising connection to Buchenwald and to Dennim—that is, to the von Dennim family, now reduced to a widowed aunt and a bachelor squirrel expert but once a powerful noble dynasty. This connection and the mostly vanished world it evokes leads Dennim and his enemy backward in time, past genocide and the amorality of the nation state to the chivalric code of honor shared by those of noble blood. It is blood, in fact, that helps save Dennim’s life at the end.

Plenty of spy novels acknowledge or ruminate on the damage done by the secrecy, deceit, and pragmatism of espionage, but few offer an alternative, much less an alternative rooted in the past. By the end of Watcher in the Shadows, honor and honesty have given two irreconcilable enemies common ground in which to resolve their differences. Dennim’s duel with the enemy moves from the metaphorical—chess, cat and mouse, tiger and goat—to the literal. Their long fight at the barn is a sustained masterpiece of suspense and, thanks to the contrast between old world honor and modern technocratic nihilism running through the book, a challenging moral contest.

I read Watcher in the Shadows for the thrills and suspense and Household, true to form, didn’t disappoint. But the novel reaches a moral and cultural depth I found surprising—and inspiring. This is as good a thriller as any Buchan, Ambler, or Ian Fleming produced, and is well worth reading.

Sir Quixote of the Moors

The first John Buchan June ended with Buchan’s final novel and one of his masterpieces, Sick Heart River. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, this fifth John Buchan June concludes with his first published book—and the last novel I hadn’t read since beginning this event: 1895’s historical novella Sir Quixote of the Moors.

Ten chapters and barely eighty pages long, Sir Quixote of the Moors is a brisk historical romp designed to pose the hero an unsolvable dilemma. I usually avoid major spoilers in these posts, but since this is a brief story aimed inexorably at its climactic chapter, I will reveal the ending. Avoid spoilers if you choose. But it’s a good story and good stories are spoiler-proof, and I’ve tried to leave out some of the details that make reading it rich and enjoyable.

Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1680s, Sir Quixote is a story of “The Killing Time,” when the Scots Covenanters were subject to pursuit and slaughter by forces loyal to King Charles II. The narrator is an outsider: Jean de Rohaine, a French Catholic nobleman who has come to Scotland on the invitation of an old Scottish schoolmate, who had promised military adventure. After days of carousing, Jean departs with his host on their first assignment, which turns out to be burning Covenanter farms and killing women, children, and old people. Jean, his sense of chivalric honor outraged, leaves his host on the spot.

He has acted on principle but his choice proves foolishly imprudent—a dynamic that will return. He doesn’t know his way back to the port where he entered Scotland and gets hopelessly lost on the moors. He is betrayed by an innkeeper working as an informant for the authorities and only the honorable conduct of one of his pursuers allows him to escape. Lost, hungry, on the run, and exhausted by the wind, cold, and rain, he throws himself on the doorstep of the next house he comes to.

This proves providential. Jean has cast up at the manse of an aged minister of the persecuted Covenanter church, who lives there with his daughter Anne and her fiancé, a laird named Henry Semple. They care generously for him in his distress but no sooner has he begun to recover than the minister and Henry are forced to flee into the wilderness. They leave Jean to protect the house and Anne, trusting in the sense of honor that first brought him to them.

Jean is as good as his word, driving off a party of government thugs hunting for Henry in one scene and attempting, through his charm and skill in the courtly arts of music and dancing, to help Anne pass the time while she awaits Henry’s safe return. The latter has an unintended effect, though. In trying to help Anne cope with Henry’s absence, he wins her over, and he feels himself falling in love with her as well.

When Henry reappears, starving and crazed, on the run again after his hiding spot has been betrayed and with news that Anne’s father is nearing death, Jean reaches a crisis. He cannot honorably act on his feelings for Anne, and remaining with her will only deepen the affection and attraction growing between them. But leaving her orphaned, her likely future a marriage to a madman—if Henry even survives—seems to be a failure in his duty to take care of her. Memories of his own lost love arise to accuse him, and in the final pages he makes his terrible decision. He flees.

There is more to it than that, but that’s the main arc of the story. In her introduction to the edition I read, Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald interprets Sir Quixote as a story about religious extremism. I think that’s a necessary element of the setting but not Buchan’s point. Jean’s dilemma pits his passion against his honor, the opportunities his situation opens to him against his constancy and good faith, his feelings for Anne against promises made to the one she, in turn, had promised herself to.

If this story were told today—and it has been, over and over—it could only end, with utter, tired predictability, one way. Buchan does something more interesting, but without comforting platitudes. Jean’s honor runs deeper than slogans, and when he makes the hard and unsatisfying choice Buchan does not ignore or conceal the pain of his decision: “‘But honour is more than life or love,’ I said, as I set my teeth with stern purpose.” And, in the next paragraph: “though all my soul was steeled into resolution, there was no ray of hope in my heart—nothing but a dead, bleak outlook, a land of moors and rain, an empty purse and an aimless journey.”

Virtue may be its own reward, yes, but that reward is not gotten lightly. Buchan makes the reader feel it. This, as with so much else in Buchan’s work, was surprising and refreshing.

Sir Quixote of the Moors is clearly an early work. The twenty-year old Buchan’s style has not yet balanced the sturdy clarity, archaism, and dialect he so skillfully intermingled later, and the characterization is—unsurprisingly in a book of less than eighty pages—thin. The characters are believable but not deep. But Sir Quixote also foreshadows much of the mature Buchan’s strengths as a writer: fast pacing that doesn’t feel rushed, smoothly incorporated historical detail, the palpable “moral atmosphere” praised by Sir John Keegan, and, most especially, beautifully and vividly described settings. The Borders locations familiar from so many of his other novels have never felt colder, more miserably rainy, or less forgiving.

This is an enjoyable romp and a piece of juvenilia most writers could be proud of—or at least not embarrassed by. But Buchan himself consistently denigrated it, beginning with the pre-publication proofs, which he found unsatisfying to read. Thirty years later he attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent its being republished. Part of his attitude toward Sir Quixote may be the result of lessons learned. No good author looks back at early work without seeing tics and habits one is grateful to have grown out of. Buchan similarly dismissed his next book, his first full-length novel, John Burnet of Barns.

But another, more intriguing dimension of Buchan’s attitude toward this book may be the path it took to publication. Buchan, a young author (an “intimidatingly precocious” one, per Macdonald), had his title changed by the publisher. Originally called Sir Quixote, they added of the Moors and the cumbersome subtitle Being some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. Buchan also complained of the poor binding.

That’s bad enough, but then the American edition—which may have been pirated, though the details are still murky 130 years later—added two sentences to the final page. In this extra paragraph, Jean reverses himself and heads back for Anne.

This addition, apparently meant to give the book a happy ending, must have come from an illiterate editor because it completely undoes Jean’s story and misunderstands Buchan’s purpose behind it. At least one biographer has suggested that Buchan may have been asked to provide the extra lines, but it’s impossible to imagine Buchan accepting this change. With all this in mind his later attitude toward the book is suggestive.

The book’s background is interesting, and it also reveals a young author with enough tenacity to weather a bad first experience in publishing and keep going, but Sir Quixote of the Moors is still worth reading for its own sake. Simple, short, not especially deep but emotionally involving, and with many of the virtues of its author’s later work, it is more than a curiosity. It’s a fun and moving short story and, knowing as we do what treasures its author would gift us over the next forty-five years, an invitation and a preview. Sir Quixote is a worthy final read in this five-year journey.

* * * * *

Thanks again for another great John Buchan June. It’s both fun and a little melancholy to read the last unread Buchan novel after five years. As I said recently in a podcast interview about this project, if I had planned to read and write about all of them I never could have done it. But this has been a wonderful five years and, with all of the novels read and a handful of the non-fiction, I need to decide how to continue.

Likely I will read Buchan’s major biographies. As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, I had intended to read Oliver Cromwell but daily life impinged and I didn’t have time. That may be a good place to start for next year. I may also revisit the small handful of books I found underwhelming—Mr Standfast, The Courts of the Morning, The House of the Four Winds—and give them another shot.

But be assured, John Buchan June will return. Thanks for joining me. Your readership, notes, and e-mails have meant a great deal. I hope y’all have a good July and can enjoy at least one of the books I read this year!

The Long Traverse

This year’s John Buchan June enters the homestretch with another curiosity. When I wrote about The Magic Walking Stick two weeks I go I was careful to note that it was Buchan’s only children’s book published during his lifetime. That’s because, at his untimely death in February 1940, in addition to having just completed his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door and his final novel, Sick Heart River, he was working on a new children’s book: The Long Traverse.

The young hero of this novel, Donald, is the son of a Canadian mining engineer. When the story begins, he has just left school on holiday and is excited to reach his family’s cabin in the forests of Quebec. His parents have given him permission to go a week early to prepare for their stay, which means a week of riding, hunting, fishing, playing in the woods and streams with his friends Simone and Aristide, local Indian children, and hearing stories from their uncle, Father Laflamme.

Donald is especially excited because he hates school. He resents his Latin lessons and finds history confusing and boring. He prefers the outdoors or, failing that, the movies.

When Father Laflamme learns about Donald’s lack of interest—especially his indifference to history—he discusses it with the family’s beloved Indian hunting and fishing guide, Negog. Descended from the priestly caste of the Cree, Negog thinks Donald should be open to learning from his ancestors and knows a secret method for commanding attention and teaching the stories of the past.

Every evening, after the day’s adventures, Negog ensures that Donald is near a body of water. As the sun sets, the fish rest, and the waters still to a mirror the cloudless golden sky, Donald experiences La Longue Traverse—visions of past events.

Day by day Donald meets the heroes of early Canadian history. He sees Jacques Cartier on his expedition to explore the St Lawrence River, Adam Dollard and his companions holding out against the Iroquois at the Battle of the Long Sault, voyageur Jean Cadieux and his last-stand against Indian attack, forgotten trappers, explorers, missionary priests, prospectors and miners, and ordinary people. My two favorite chapters concerned—unsurprisingly—the Norse exploration of the Canadian coast, in which Donald witness the long, hard expeditions of the fictitious Hallward, and a chapter set in the plains far from European settlement, where an Indian tribe, faced with enemies newly armed with the horse, trade for a yet deadlier weapon: the gun.

In The Long Traverse, Buchan combines the magic of his earlier children’s book with the story-made-of-stories setup of The Path of the King. Each story is engaging and exciting, and in the frame story that structures them Donald slowly learns more—and takes more and more pride and ownership—of his and his country’s past. Though he forgets the visions as soon as they end, the stories stay with him. In flash-forwards, his parents are astonished by the things he knows.

The subject matter is the stuff of adventure, but the true star of the book is the Canadian landscape. As with the best of his adventure fiction, Buchan conjures vivid settings and realistically describes them. The forested hills and lakes of Quebec are the most frequent locations, but the canyons and whitewater rapids of the Canadian Rockies, the endless plains, and the frozen coasts of Arctic islands also feature. Buchan describes all of this beautifully but does not leave out the unpleasant: heat, avalanche, dangerous rapids, and clouds of biting black flies. (The cover of the first edition, above, shows Donald sheltering by a lakeside fire built by Negog to keep the flies at bay.) The wildness and scale of the country, the hardships of daily life, and the hazards of travel—on foot, by horse, by canoe, by longship—demanded heroism of the people who lived there, and Buchan makes both feel real.

The Long Traverse ends suddenly after the story of a missionary priest’s eerie encounter with the Toonit, a population of relict prehistoric people not unlike the Picts of Buchan’s early short story “No-Man’s-Land.” Buchan was almost finished with the book when he died, and though the individual stories are wonderfully absorbing and readable—I read the book in two days—Donald’s story is left unresolved. A note by Buchan’s widow, Lady Tweedsmuir, explains the original conception and purpose of the book and a little of what Buchan left in outline at his death.

During his time as Governor-General of Canada Buchan came to love the country, not only its vast and varied landscapes but the peoples who lived there. (This comes across quite clearly in this 1937 New Years’ greeting.) He found its history fascinating, full of romance and figures worthy of emulation, and Canadian schools’ methods of teaching that history abominable. The textbooks, as he saw it, were more likely to kill than to encourage interest in the past. One sympathizes.

Donald is Buchan’s imaginary typical Canadian schoolboy, full of talent and potential but lacking direction and already let down by the schools. Negog and Father Laflamme sense that Donald is vulnerable, that, on the verge of manhood, his character is at a crucial moment in its growth, and that the cities and movies strive against the rootedness in the past that Donald and all of us need. Negog, as a Cree a figure of the past and as a Christian Canadian a figure of the present, puts him directly in touch with that past. Understanding one’s history, Buchan forcefully shows, is not only a duty but an important step in moral formation.

It is also interesting and fun. The stories Donald sees in The Long Traverse are all exciting, and Buchan envisioned them as a way to awaken the imaginations of young students. Thus awakened, they would be open to instruction. (It certainly worked on me; I learned a lot either reading or reading about the subjects of these stories.) He rightly understood that telling interesting stories about the people of past beats any state-approved textbook. The imagination must come first—a lesson still worth learning and remembering.

Latitude and the borders of the possible

For Father’s Day my wife gave me a gift card to a brand-new local bookstore. I used it to pick up, at long last, a copy of AS Byatt’s Possession, first recommended to me years ago by my best friend at Clemson. The novel’s epigraph, a passage from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables, struck me:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

“Romance” here hewing closer to its original medieval meaning of “adventure.”

As it happens, just yesterday I finished rereading The Thirty-Nine Steps for the fifth or sixth time—and the first time I’ve revisited a book for John Buchan June. Buchan’s dedication, to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, includes this oft-reprinted explanation of the kinds of books Buchan liked—and wrote:

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.

There’s that word romance again.

Just the other day I saw an ordinarily thoughtful Substacker assert that condemning TV while reading “plot-driven genre fiction” was hypocritical, as the latter was no different from the former; the reader just holds his head in a different position from the TV viewer. This is not the stupidest thing I’ve seen online recently but it wasn’t far off.

First, there is nothing wrong with reading for entertainment. I’d even argue, as I will momentarily, that a book should at the very least entertain, whatever its subject. But the romance, the story that stays “just inside the borders of the possible” and for which the reader must—but most often quite gladly—grants “a certain latitude,” need not be mere entertainment. A good plot and a little excitement open the imagination to truth and argument better than any bluntly stated thesis. If genre fiction is nothing more than brainrot, why have our most gifted writers turned their hands to it over and over for centuries? Why did Jesus tell pointed, engaging, and surprising stories in popular forms?

Per CS Lewis, for whom the fantasy stories of George MacDonald “baptised” his “imagination” long before the arguments of his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson could reach him, “every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less.”

Buchan and Hawthorne could hardly be more different, but I appreciated the consonance between their explanations of what the novelist who aims for something more striking than kitchen-sink realism—Hawthorne’s “very minute fidelity”—dull modern or postmodern rumination, or pure didacticism must do. The reader willing to grant that latitude and march with the author on the ragged edge of believability should, if the author knows what he’s about, be amply rewarded.

* * * * *

Our new bookstore is a small local brand of M Judson of Greenville. Check them out here. I reviewed The Thirty-Nine Steps for the very first John Buchan June in 2022. You can read that here. Last year I reflected on the duty of the good writer—in this case, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming—to entertain as a prerequisite to doing more here. And yesterday I recorded a podcast with a longtime reader about Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps specifically, a conversation I’m excited to share with y’all. Be on the lookout.

Machine Man and the danger of AI

Max Barry is an Australian sci-fi novelist. My friend JP Burten introduced me to Barry during college when he recommended Jennifer Government, Barry’s satirical near-future comedy in which the world is governed (more or less) by big businesses. I fondly remember reading Barry’s followup, Company, another satire in which an office drone discovers that the company he works for produces nothing—it’s a lab for the publisher of business management books to field-test new techniques. I still think about some of the scenarios Barry came up with for that one.

But the novel that both amused and moved me is Barry’s 2011 Machine Man. The following is a more detailed version of an appeal I made to some of my online students earlier this summer.

Machine Man concerns Charles Neumann, a scientist developing advanced cybernetic prosthetics. One day he loses a leg in a lab accident and, after recovering, builds himself a sophisticated robotic leg. The leg proves so good and, Charles thinks, so superior to his biological leg that he voluntarily amputates the other and replaces it with an identical model.

This begins a cycle of Charles replacing his organic body parts with seemingly more powerful, efficient mechanical ones, tinkering and tweaking as he goes. His physical therapist and love interest, Lola Shanks, looks on in mounting apprehension. In Charles’s final “improvement,” he dispenses with his physical body entirely and ends the novel as a small black box with an output screen for text. LOLA I MISS YOU, he says through the text output. But of course he has sacrificed the gift of embodiment—everything he needs even to touch Lola.

Barry wrote Machine Man when the transhumanist movement, which, in most forms, sought to “improve” humanity by shedding the limited, physical, and human, had temporarily peaked. This is a comedy and Barry has some thematic fun with the names: Charles (from Karl, “man”) Neumann (German: “new man”) and Lola Shanks (an archaic word for “legs”). There is also some corporate satire that I probably scoffed at at the time but that feels increasingly realistic, perhaps even too optimistic.

That Machine Man starts off funny makes the tragedy all the more pointed. I remember the agony of reading Charles’s voiceless LOLA I MISS YOU vividly. I’ve thought about Machine Man a lot since I read it over a decade ago, but never more often than in the last few years as more and more of the writing I grade is instantly recognizable as AI generated. The pity and horror of Charles’s descent fits just as well in the age of increasing AI dependence.

The intellect, I told my students, is one of the things that makes us human. If you’re religious, it is one of the most important parts of the Image of God from Genesis. And every time you outsource your judgment to AI instead of using it to think and learn and remember, you sacrifice part of your intellect. Inevitably, whether, as with Charles’s robotic legs, it seems easier or more powerful or you buy into the cutting-edge allure of the technology, you give up more and become dependent. Sooner or later, depending on your reasons for using AI in the first place, the dependence is so strong that you give up your intellect voluntarily, bit by bit, and replace it with a bot. By the time you realize you miss it, it may be too late.

And if you use AI to cheat, you only compound the intellectual damage you do to yourself with vice and dishonesty.

Barry’s Machine Man is an excellent and prophetic warning. I take a hard line on AI in my courses not because I’m a spoilsport or a Luddite—though I can certainly be both in other areas—but because I don’t want to see that happen to anyone. Making things easier, faster, or more efficient is not always an improvement, and certainly not with the things that make us human, our bodies and minds.

The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.