The Power-House

We have entered the last week of John Buchan June. Today I’m writing about a lesser-known “shocker,” one first serialized the year before Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that is in many ways a precursor to that most famous of Buchan thrillers, and that introduced the world to Sir Edward Leithen—The Power-House.

Let me begin with this: The Power-House defies easy summary. One can describe this novel, but only in the broadest genre terms. It is a thriller, certainly, and its hero, Sir Edward Leithen, unravels a vast conspiracy and exposes a criminal mastermind just like Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, George Smiley, Jack Ryan, and untold others would later do. The difficulty comes with the novel’s form.

The story is a frame tale in which Sir Edward Leithen recounts how he once had an exotic and dangerous adventure without ever leaving London. (This limit, as he later admits, has one important exception.) The novel begins with Leithen learning of the disappearance of an old acquaintance, Charles Pitt-Heron, who has “bolted” with no warning and no word of his intentions or destination. Leithen takes an interest, and as others investigate and put together a search party that will eventually pursue the man into central Asia, he digs at the mysterious root of the man’s disappearance. Leithen does this through his intuition, sharpened by his work as a barrister, his dogged willingness to investigate, his courage to face the unknown, and through a remarkable series of coincidences that give him the pieces necessary to begin his work.

“It is understood and accepted,” one essayist has written, “that a Buchan plot relies absolutely on a level of coincidence that Dickens would have dismissed as improbable.” This is not fair to all of Buchan’s work, but it not only fits The Power-House but may even be a bit of an understatement. The chief events of the book, in which Leithen stumbles upon clues and into the lair of the villain, are all coincidental. The rest of the “action,” so to speak, is interior—Leithen mulling, putting together information, having epiphanies. And always just in the nick of time.

In her introduction to the edition I read, former MI5 chief and novelist Stella Rimington refers to The Power-House as “a tale without a plot.” The plot, as she goes on to suggest, is not the main attraction the way it is with later novels about Hannay or Leithen. Instead, The Power-House is “pure essence of Buchan.” It relies entirely on pacing, atmosphere, a charming and tenacious main character, and a strong villain to succeed.

The Power-House is the shortest of the Buchan novels I’ve read and moves briskly. I read it in a matter of a few hours across several leisurely vacation days. It is also the first instance in my reading of Buchan’s use of in media res to kick off the action, a technique you can see repeated in thriller after thriller from this point on. (The very first line of both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle sets the tone, gets the plot moving, prepares both the reader and the hero for adventure.)

From the moment one of Leithen’s colleagues tells him about Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, Buchan spreads a series of seemingly disconnected incidents before us and stitches them together with Leithen’s straightforward and thoughtful narration. Not only does Leithen’s voice and intellect hold the novel together, it also draws the reader downward with Leithen into a more and more oppressively paranoid mood. By the midpoint of the novel Leithen sees dangers everywhere—in shops, in his own neighborhood, among the anonymous crowd jostling him in the streets of London—another technique that, as I wrote a few weeks ago, would be exploited to even greater effect in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If The Power-House is not plot-driven but moved along by pure pacing and atmosphere, the main draw must be the central conflict between Leithen and the villain. In this case, the villain is Andrew Lumley, a wealthy, well-connected man of immense intellect—and a strong vision of the future of Europe and the human race. Leithen happens upon him during a drive in the country following Pitt-Heron’s disappearance, and Lumley opens up to him. In expressing his vision, Lumley produces one of the most famous passages in Buchan’s fiction:

“Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?”

“I should have thought it fairly substantial,” I said, “and the foundations grow daily firmer.”

He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but, believe me, you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

Lumley is an anarchist of the kind found in the uppermost echelons of society—an elite educated into arrogant oikophobia, a Nietzschean with an appetite for the will to power. But what makes Lumley dangerous is that he is not just an armchair radical fulminating against the establishment from inside it, but the quiet head of an entire organization dedicated to undermining Western civilization in secret. This organization is called the Power-House.

Only later do we realize that Lumley’s explanation of his perspective was not just a monologue but a seduction, an attempt to recruit Leithen. And that others—like Pitt-Heron—who have resisted Lumley and the Power-House have disappeared or met untimely or embarrassing ends.

Fortunately Leithen proves himself a capable opponent to Lumley. He is also his perfect foil—where Lumley is a wealthy and respected elite, Leithen is a workaday lawyer and politician known mainly to friends. Where Lumley uses a network of likeminded and similarly-placed anarchists to foment the collapse of civilization, Leithen must work. Where Lumley is an arch-rationalist ideologue committed to chaos, Leithen works intuitively within tradition and custom on behalf of order. And, perhaps most fundamentally, where Lumley is ambitious, Leithen is content.

While this confrontation lends to The Power-House a curious excitement and distinctive flavor, it is not my favorite of the Buchan novels I’ve read so far. Though well paced, the framing narrative erases most of the doubts you might otherwise entertain about whether Leithen will succeed. The conclusion, in which Leithen wraps up his story of rooting out conspiracy without leaving London by explicitly contrasting it with his friends who chased Pitt-Heron halfway across Eurasia, ends the story on a witty punchline but also draws attention to the fact that a potentially more interesting and exhilarating story has played out entirely in the background. And while Lumley is a compelling and even frightening antagonist, what he’s actually planning to do is never made clear. This is not necessarily a problem—as long as the reader doesn’t stop to think about it.

Though I enjoyed The Power-House a great deal, it does have its weaknesses and is perhaps more interesting as a trial run of techniques and themes—especially the fragility of the good things civilization has bequeathed us—that would make Richard Hannay’s first adventure such a smashing success. Nevertheless, in introducing Sir Edward Leithen Buchan gave his readers one of his best and most important characters, a more thoughtful and methodical hero who would return in the magnificent John Macnab. The Power-House is worth reading just to make his acquaintance.

Eugenics and Other Evils

One of GK Chesterton’s lesser-known works is the 1922 treatise Eugenics and Other Evils. This is a shame, as it was and is an insightful and challenging polemic on a topic that has changed its rhetoric and outward forms but has grown no weaker in the century since he wrote it. I first read this over a decade ago—I would guess around 2009 or 2010—and revisited it via audiobook in the late spring of 2020. The following is not a proper review, but the notes I posted to Goodreads when I finished. I hope this will encourage y’all to read this book.

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Chesterton at his most lucid and persuasive, arguing forcefully against post-WWI British schemes to establish legal eugenics regimes. (The same thing was going on in the US at the same time, culminating in the Eugenics Society’s notorious 1927 test case Buck v. Bell, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a decision upholding mandatory sterilization laws for the “feebleminded,” a decision encapsulated in one of the most mean-spirited court opinions in the Court’s history, authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chesterton argues that eugenicist advocates are overenthusiastic about an untested and highly theoretical “science,” that they cannot possibly have the iron grasp on heredity that they claim, and that the legal measures proposed for the implementation of their plans will create a division of haves and have-nots more cold blooded and brutal than anything established by the spoliations of late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. Urban industrialism and the cruelties of commercialism have already robbed the poor of their dignity and their private property, he argues, so the plans of the eugenicists to take away even the family and the freedom to choose a mate and be fruitful—one of the only licit pleasures left to the proletariat, he notes—is both of a piece with modern social Darwinism and an unprecedented monstrosity.

If the hubris and cruelty of the eugenics movement are staggering, even more so are their condescension to the poor, whom they propose to help by slowly winnowing them, and their lack of awareness of their own elitism, as they are never the object of their proposed plans but, should they get their way, the autocratic enforcers. Chesterton rightly discerns that the cult of the expert—a fin de siecle obsession that has never really left us—is ultimately about establishing an unaccountable new hierarchy of powerful elites.

Chesterton’s arguments strikingly anticipate the shape of much modern argument about issues like abortion on demand and other bioethical questions—not to mention the rise of divorce, the establishment of intrusive state-mandated medical regulations, and the confiscation of children by the state on grounds of hygiene or ever-shifting psychological criteria—and his arguments against “scientific” interference with birth as well as birth control and the ever more intrusive top-down government control of everyday life feel very prescient indeed.

Not everything in the book is on target. His lengthy tangent on capitalism—a favorite Chesterton hobbyhorse—feels too much like a tangent, but where he strikes home, he’s excellent, and his feel for the larger underlying assumptions of the issues of the day make this lesser known book still shockingly relevant.

I first read this probably a decade ago. I’ve just listened to the excellent audiobook read by Derek Perkins. I recommend it, though a print edition with minor annotations to explain who some of the now more obscure figures of the Edwardian eugenics movement may be preferable.

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I first read Eugenics and Other Evils in Volume IV of Ignatius Press’s Collected Works of GK Chesterton. It is also available as an audiobook—the one I refer to in these notes is a really excellent reading—and for free online at Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. This is a short and punchy book that is still important, and is well worth your while.

Greenmantle

Today for John Buchan June, we look at the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel that expands upon everything that made that rousing, fast-paced, and timely thriller successful into a tale that is part spy novel, part man-on-the-run thriller, part travelogue, and part war story—Greenmantle.

Greenmantle begins with hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, resting and recuperating back home in England. It is December of 1915, Hannay is now Major Hannay, and he has been wounded leading an attack on the Western Front. Hannay receives an urgent invitation to meet Sir Walter Bullivant, the man with whom, in the previous story, he had finally been able to find refuge and to confide in after weeks on the run from German spies.

Bullivant tells Hannay that a British agent, staggering wounded into a British outpost in the Middle East, had delivered a message consisting of only three words before he died, three words that Bullivant believes may be clues to German strategic intentions in the east. The agent, Bullivant reveals, was his son, and Bullivant asks Hannay to use the same skills that had helped him unravel the Black Stone’s plot against Britain a few years earlier to infiltrate German intelligence and uncover their plans. Hannay hesitates but, duty-bound and not one to shrink from task just because it’s impossible, agrees.

Bullivant pairs Hannay with John S Blenkiron, an eccentric but brilliant intelligence operative—and an American, and so theoretically neutral. Hannay also asks his brother officer Sandy Arbuthnot, also recuperating from wounds received on the Western Front, to join them. Arbuthnot has years of experience in the Balkans and Middle East gained before the war and is a master of languages and local customs. He will prove a crucial part of operation, though not in any way they could have predicted.

Hannay, Blenkiron, and Arbuthnot agree to split up, infiltrate enemy territory, and reconnect in Istanbul in the new year. Hannay takes ship for Portugal, where he runs into his old friend Peter Pienaar, a Boer hunter and outdoorsman, and together they pass themselves off as German sympathizing South Africans seeking revenge against the British. Clandestinely sent to Germany, they are interrogated by Colonel von Stumm, a brutish intelligence officer tasked with assessing their usefulness. He separates Hannay from Pienaar, and, following a brawl at Stumm’s secluded home in Bavaria, Hannay flees. He is a hunted man once more.

Hannay’s situation is desperate, but he has already begun to decipher the first of the clues Bullivant’s son had revealed—the identity of a dangerous female operative in the Middle East, Hilda von Einem.

At the midpoint of the novel, Hannay, Blenkiron, Arbuthnot, and even Pienaar manage to link up pool the information gathered in their travels. What emerges from their observations and disparate bits of intelligence is the outline of a German plot: Hilda von Einem, acting as handler, has cultivated a prominent Muslim cleric called Greenmantle, a figure prophesied in old mystical poetry and whom the Germans intend to use. The Germans hope that, fired by the simplifying and purifying spirit of revival and following the banner of Greenmantle, Muslims will make a potent insurgent force in the region and decisively shift the balance against Britain, France, Russia, and their allies. In short, they hope to provoke jihad.

Unfortunately for Hilda von Einem, Greenmantle has terminal cancer. His time is short—and so the Germans are moving quickly. This was the information Sir Walter Bullivant’s son gave his life to get to the British.

Hannay and his team travel eastwards, into the heart of the Ottoman Empire and to the headwaters of the Euphrates in the mountains north of Mesopotamia. They travel under cover, with Hannay as a member of Hilda von Einem’s entourage, but are identified and pursued by Rasta Bey, an arrogant and powerful Young Turk whom Hannay has crossed and humiliated several times en route to Istanbul. And as an added threat, the dreaded Colonel von Stumm reappears. This section of the novel is a tightrope walk of aliases and concealed identities, cross-country chases, captures and escapes, and, finally, the brutality of modern trench warfare. Here individual initiative, resourcefulness, and guts confront the overwhelming, indiscriminate destructive power of artillery.

By the end, Hannay and the others have blown their cover and are on the run for a final time, hopelessly outnumbered and desperately trying to deliver details of a forthcoming German and Ottoman attack to the Russians so that they can break the siege, push the Ottomans back, stop Hilda von Einem, and, just possibly, win the war.

Greenmantle has all the strengths of The Thirty-Nine Steps that I wrote about a few weeks ago—strong writing, excellent pacing, interesting characters, thrilling episodes (the conclusion is one of the best last stands I’ve read in fiction), as well as all the genre-defining features that that novel pioneered, especially the plot tied to plausible real-life politics and world events. TE Lawrence, who was in a position to know, later wrote that “Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth.” But it also broadens and deepens what The Thirty-Nine Steps accomplished so masterfully. In this respect it is a true sequel, both building upon and improving upon all the best elements of its predecessor.

And like all good sequels, it is also different enough to avoid retreading the same ground. In his introduction to the authorized edition, Buchan biographer and literary critic Allan Massie writes that where The Thirty-Nine Steps is a “chase” novel, Greenmantle is a “quest” novel. I think that’s just about right. Greenmantle is much longer than The Thirty-Nine Steps but maintains the same excitement and brisk momentum. In the first half, Hannay ends up on the run first from Stumm and then from Rasta Bey. He faces personal dangers at every turn and his courage and resourcefulness are sorely tested. In the second, Hannay and his team end up on the run from pretty much everyone. What holds this pattern of infiltration, exposure, and flight together, though, is Hannay’s mission, his quest—to divine German intentions.

But Hannay’s work is not done once they have discovered Hilda von Einem and Greenmantle; the stakes are even higher than in the first half, and Hannay and the others, in true quest fashion, confront their dangers not individually but as a team: Hannay the principled leader and jack of all trades, Pienaar the unflinching survivalist genius, Blenkiron the brains of the operation, and Arbuthnot the heart and soul. They would not succeed without all of them, and all of them is what their mission will require.

John Buchan in uniform, May 1917

Greenmantle is also a more sweeping story than its predecessor. Hannay begins the story in England before traveling to Lisbon and traversing the whole breadth of Europe by rail, on foot, and by river barge before arriving in Mesopotamia. Buchan successfully conveys the scope and intensity of the First World War and not a little of its complexity and pathos.

This pathos is only possible because of Greenmantle’s scope—it is both a panorama of the entire war in Europe and the Middle East and a series of strikingly intimate episodes informed by the experiences of not only of spies but of ordinary soldiers, civilians, tribesmen, sailors, bandits, and the leaders of nations. Buchan’s immense powers of sympathy, which I wrote about when I reviewed Prester John, are on full display. Regardless of which side they are on, almost all of Greenmantle’s characters have admirable qualities, and almost none is presented as irredeemably evil. Even the Kaiser, whom Hannay meets in one of the most surprising and interesting incidents in the novel, is presented sympathetically. (It is worth recalling that Buchan wrote this novel at a time when all Germans, but the Kaiser especially, were quite literally demonized.) Only those like Stumm and Rasta Bey, functionaries so compromised by ideological nationalism and pragmatism and personal cruelty, seem to be beyond hope, but it is they who have given the war the exceptional prolonged savagery that Hannay and his fellows must navigate.

The sympathy with which Buchan writes allows Hannay staunch loyalties while seasoning and softening them. The most striking example comes during Hannay’s flight across Bavaria to the Danube. On foot in the snow, he falls ill and risks capture to ask for help from a German woman living in an isolated hut. She takes him in despite having to care for her three children alone. One night after Christmas, he learns more about her:

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I looked their way, the woman talked. Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a Polish bog and longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. . . . She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

To be “better than the beasts”—for the sake of people like this woman and her children, for the personal honor and character of men like Hannay, and for civilization itself despite temptations to domination, cruelty, and ruthless pragmatism—would work as the guiding principle of all of Buchan’s heroes. And it is ultimately what’s at stake in Hannay’s mission.

I could say much more—alongside its artistic merits, Greenmantle has been credited with predicting the rise of Islamist extremism—but I think what gives this novel its peculiar staying power is the excitement of its plot and action, the involving multidimensional characters and their varying skillsets, and, again, its pathos. Greenmantle takes all that made Richard Hannay’s first adventure thrilling and deepens it. It is not just an adventure of murder, espionage, and the threat of war, but of the testing of the soul.

John Macnab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two good reads on the dangers of whiggishness

One of my special historiographical bugbears is whiggishness in all its forms: whether Whig history proper, with its tidy story of freedom and individual rights and the ebbing tide of tyranny; modern Progressive visions of the onward and upward march of Progress (or the arc of the universe, or whatever); or the generalized assumption, the attitude, that Things are always Advancing. Long ago CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, in their similar but distinct ways, had alerted me to the threat of chronological snobbery—the generalized attitude. But it was Herbert Butterfield who gave me, historian to historian, master to student, an understanding of Whig history as a vision of the past and warned of this vision’s dangers.

By a happy coincidence, I ran across two good pieces on whiggishness on the same day last week. At The Critic, Jack Nicholson (no, really) argues that Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, the 1931 study that rubbished the unchallenged assumptions behind more than a century of biased scholarship, is overdue a revival, especially as an answer to the vexed question “What went wrong with liberalism?”

Butterfield warned against consigning historical characters on the wrong side of history to the historical trash; he encouraged the historian to engage with them and present their views fairly.

Why “whig”, anyway? The white, male, Protestant Whigs—the political party—were on the winning side of history from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to 1689, in England and beyond. The triumphant Whigs swept aside the royalist Tories and the further marginalised British Catholics.

However, Butterfield saw more than a 18th century political movement—he drew a connection between the Whigs and the modern culture of perpetual and inevitable progress. Blending enlightenment rationalism with Protestant triumphalism, they demonised the “mediaeval” past and fetishised the supposed sophistication of their own era.

Today that attitude lives on amongst academic progressives. Chasing the next orthodoxy, whiggish scholars infiltrate established fields, ultimately draining them of originality. Too many people will say the same things, over and over again, whether they are Whigs or “whigs” in the sense that they commit the same historical sin: present-mindedness on an industrial scale.

Present-minded history narrows and warps, and ultimately renders the study of the past pointless. Butterfield saw the purpose of history as “precisely to rediscover history as a challenge to our present assumptions, thus broadening our political and conceptual horizons.” Present approaches to the past are the exact inverse of this healthier—and humbler—one.

Second, in a short essay for First Things my old acquaintance Miles Smith, a careful and thoughtful historian, warns against the dangers of whiggishness in the specific context of American religion—namely, the much-maligned evangelical community, which has “drunk deeply from the well of Whig history.”

The result in the late 18th century—the period that birthed the Whig disposition and, not coincidentally, the United States—was counterintuitive sympathies: the hyper-religious post-Great Awakening Christians of America taking the side of the Jacobins. This was despite “attacks on French Catholics and Protestants . . . occurring regularly” and the revolutionary regime’s eventual enshrinement of atheism as the new republic’s official religion. Whiggish prejudices were responsible for this odd misalignment: “because American evangelicals believed traditional France was benighted, and that a cleansing of French society was necessary, the fate of French Christians was of secondary importance to them.”

But these prejudices and Americans’ whiggish belief in Progress are still bearing fruit:

In the twenty-first century, some evangelicals still draw upon the same Whiggish reading of history as their eighteenth-century forebears. In the early 2000s, the cause of democracy and regime-change in Iraq trumped the historic stability of Iraqi Christians—much as the cause of progress and revolution in 1780s France trumped the stability of French Christians. Whiggish optimism typified the views of George W. Bush’s evangelical speechwriter Michael Gerson, who proposed unambiguously that “the unity of our country depends on idealism at home.” Attacks on America and American values, he argued, should be countered with “restless reform, idealism, and moral conviction.” Evangelical Whigs confidently know history ends in their eschatological victory through cycles of constant socio-ecclesiastic re-creation.

Gerson echoed Linn’s image of the French Revolution as an uncontrollable blaze of liberty. Only this time, the source of the revolutionary blaze was not Revolutionary France, but George W. Bush’s United States. Gerson helped write Bush’s second inaugural address, which justified the Iraq War in idealistic terms. Because the United States invaded Iraq “in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it.” The United States, according to Gerson, “lit a fire as well—a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Revolutionary France and Bush’s United States both, with evangelical support, marched the fires of liberty to Earth’s supposedly darkest corners at the cost of the lives of many French and Arab Christians.

And what is more, allying faith with a false picture of how history works has left American Christianity supine before the forces of change, and especially Change™. Christians should, Smith argues, “know that freedom is not inevitable, social change is not always good, and civilization is fragile.”

How we think about the past matters.

You can read all of Nicholson’s essay, “Herbert Butterfield: A prophet for our age?” at The Critic here. You can read Smith’s essay “Evangelicals and Whig History” is at First Things here.

I’ve previously written about Butterfield, present-mindedness, and his admonition not to put faith in humanity here, here, and here. For more from Chesterton on chronological snobbery, see here, and for Lewis against “the judgement of History,” see here.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

I’ve christened this month on the blog John Buchan June, and I’m reading and writing about as many of Buchan’s classic adventure novels as I can. Today I tackle what is far and away the most famous of them all—The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In a review of American political philosopher Russell Kirk’s thriller Old House of Fear a few years ago, Douglas Murray wrote that while “there are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table . . . one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.” This doesn’t precisely describe the situation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in John Buchan’s corpus, but it gets close.

Buchan wrote this novel while recuperating from an illness in the late summer of 1914, during the early weeks of the First World War. In his dedication to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, who would later die on the Western Front, Buchan writes that he had run out of a supply of “that elementary type of tale which Americans call the ‘dime novel’ and which we know was the ‘shocker,’” a genre toward which he had “long cherished an affection,” and with an indefinite amount of time to while away until his recovery, he decided to entertain himself by writing his own. This genre, “the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible,” we now know as the thriller, and the novel Buchan wrote as he battled illness and the world went to war helped more than any other to give the thriller its earliest definitive shape. Twenty years later, Alfred Hitchcock’s very loose film adaptation would stamp the same imprint onto the cinematic thriller. It would not be until Ian Fleming and Casino Royale in the 1950s that another novel, another hero, and another author would exert such a stylistic and tonal force on the genre.

Fortunately, in addition to being successful, recognizable, and influential, the most famous of all of Buchan’s two-dozen novels and scores of books, The Thirty-Nine Steps is also really, really good.

The novel introduces us to Richard Hannay, a Scots mining engineer who has lived in South Africa since the age of six. Now 37, he has returned to what is notionally his homeland but feels ill-suited to life in London and has come to hate it. He vows to give the capital one more day to give him something interesting to do before he abandons it for the colonies, never to return.

It is that day that he meets Franklin P Scudder. Scudder intercepts Hannay at his front door, and Hannay recognizes the nervous, voluble man as his upstairs neighbor. Scudder tells Hannay that he’s a freelance spy, that he’s been digging into the “subterranean” networks of powerful people manipulating Europe and the world, that he’s dug deep, that he’s dug too deep. He has intelligence of vital importance and a looming deadline—June 15, the day only a few weeks hence when an organization called the Black Stone will assassinate a crucial European leader during his visit to London, pin the blame on a rival power, and drive all sides into war.

Hannay finds himself liking Scudder but still treats his claims with polite skepticism. He allows Scudder to lie low in his flat for a few days and carries on with his own business, right up until the night he comes home from dinner to find Scudder dead: “a long knife through his heart . . . skewered him to the floor.”

Scudder’s murder presents Hannay with a quandary: at least some of what Scudder had told him has turned out to be true, and the powerful people Scudder feared have proven powerful enough to find Scudder at Hannay’s flat, and it is the clear intent of whomever killed Scudder to frame him for the murder. Hannay flees.

But before he flees, embarking upon weeks of adventure, he finds Scudder’s encrypted notebook hidden in his tobacco jar. If this notebook was important enough to get Scudder killed, it’s important enough for Hannay to preserve. So he goes to ground in Scotland, the place in the British Isles still wild and empty enough to give him, with his decades of frontier experience and veld-craft, some kind of advantage over his pursuers. And Hannay is pursued—by the police, by locals, by a foppish old acquaintance from whom he steals a car, and by mysterious men who speak perfect English but confer among themselves in German.

What else is coming? How can he prove that he didn’t murder Scudder? What will happen on June 15? What do the coded messages in Scudder’s notebook mean? What else did Scudder discover that was so dangerous? And what can Hannay do about it?

The Thirty-Nine Steps is still tremendously engaging and exciting to read. This is thanks in great part to Buchan’s usual strengths as a writer—good strong prose, briefly sketched but believable characters, continuously escalating tension, and perfect pacing—now honed after two decades of professional writing to the tools of a master craftsman. But several elements distinguish it as a masterpiece even from the rest of his own work, and help us understand why it has had the success and influence it has in the century since.

First, Buchan helped establish the place of modern technology in the thriller. Hannay has to contend not only with hostile and inscrutable enemies but with the advantages that technology gives them. He is tested continuously by the speed with which his enemies can pursue and even anticipate him. The technologies in question—the airplane, the telegraph, the automobile, the submarine—may seem quaint now, but it is impossible to imagine a similar thriller today that doesn’t involve a hero working against the latest in transportation and communications technology.

Second, Buchan roots the plot in recognizable real-world politics. This, too, has become a commonplace of the thriller, but Buchan avoids making the story so dependent on the nitty-gritty of his own day that it’s unintelligible to later readers. The geopolitics is not really the point. It’s realistic flavoring, it raises the stakes in universally understandable terms, and, ultimately, it’s an excuse to get Hannay on the run.

Third, while Buchan does not make knowing the real-world intricacies of, say, the Second Balkan war indispensable to the plot, he does cleverly play on his readers’ assumptions to misdirect and surprise. Compare the way that Agatha Christie, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook recently pointed in a great episode of The Rest is History, manipulates her readers’ prejudices as a form of misdirection. I don’t want to give too much away, but not everything Scudder tells Hannay turns out to be true, which reveals quite a lot about Scudder and the Black Stone—and about modern readers who read no further and accuse Buchan of anti-Semitism. There is much more yet to be discovered after Hannay flees into the highlands, and the man on the run unraveling the mystery of his own flight has become another staple of the genre.

Fourth, in one of the real strokes of genius in the novel, Buchan makes his hero an outsider in his own home country, rendering the familiar threatening. A quiet London street, a genteel manor house, a man fly-fishing in a stream—hidden dangers lie everywhere in a landscape that is supposed to be safe, and Hannay never knows whom to trust. In a word, Buchan invents the thriller’s sense of paranoia.

Finally, Richard Hannay is a winsome and compelling hero—tough, capable, resourceful, brave, and honorable, but not without a sense of humor and of the absurdity of his situation. He is also restless, a man with strengths that must be used. As the late Sir John Keegan put it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

The frustrated energy, the impatience with convention, but also the fundamental deference towards Imperial Britain’s great and good ring absolutely true. So too does Hannay’s personal integrity. He may look up to grandees [but] at his centre, . . . Hannay believes in himself, as a successful professional . . . and in his own simple but unswerving code of right and wrong. Moral certainty, which Buchan possessed in abundance, was one of his strengths as a writer. It gave him the power to achieve something particularly elusive: moral atmosphere.

One of Buchan’s great but underappreciated strengths as a writer—all the more remarkable in the age of anti-heroes and pragmatists that has arisen since his time—is his ability to make goodness not only believable but desirable. His heroes, as Keegan implies, feel like real people, not puppets in a morality play or bloodless avatars of a didactic message. Hannay is a great early showcase of Buchan’s abilities, a model of honorable behavior in a crisis who is portrayed sincerely but unromantically. Having missed the attack on Scudder, Hannay must escape. Having escaped, he must clear his name. Having cleared his name, he must help prevent the Black Stone from succeeding. Hannay does all of these things because they are the right thing to do, and does them in only the most honorable ways possible.

This “moral atmosphere,” as Keegan puts it, elevates The Thirty-Nine Steps from a mere thriller or adventure yarn into “a story of good and evil.” A striking accomplishment for so short and vigorous and thrilling a book, and for one dashed off as entertainment during an illness.

While The Thirty-Nine Steps has proven the most famous and enduring of all of Buchan’s work, the difference from the situation described by Douglas Murray above is that, while Buchan may have conceived and executed this novel quickly only for it to find runaway success, there was no later high-minded magnum opus that it outshone to his chagrin, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was never a mere “trifle.” It is a small masterpiece, and was followed by decades of steady, quality work, including twenty more novels, that have often been unjustifiably neglected while The Thirty-Nine Steps has remained justifiably famous. I’ll be digging into more of those as John Buchan June continues, and I hope you will, too.

Kershaw on history and junk psychology

Last night I listened to several episodes of The Rest is History’s back catalog while I worked on a project, among them an excellent two-part interview with Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the preeminent experts on Nazi Germany and author of the two-volume biography Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis.

After introducing Kershaw and talking about his background as a medievalist who stumbled into expertise on the Third Reich, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turn toward the interview’s main subject: Hitler himself. In discussing Hitler’s ideas and motivations, they raise the questions of popular myth and psychology (at approximately the 28:00 mark in Part I of their interview), especially as causal factors in major historical events:

Holland: Because it becomes almost a kind of comfort, doesn’t it, the idea that you can explain what Hitler does, say, come across some core psychological flaw. So people often talk about “Was Hitler’s grandfather a Jew? Was this something that he worried about?” or something like that—

Kershaw: That answer to that is no he wasn’t.

Holland: So the answer to that is the grandfather wasn’t Jewish and Hitler didn’t worry about that. So that as an idea is a nonsense.

Kershaw: That’s right. I think these psychological theories are best treated in a very critical and conservative fashion. That is to say, that, again, it’s an easy operation for any biographer to take up psychological theories which are usually non-provable because the subject had never been on a psychologist’s couch even, and then read into that an entire intricate and complex historical development. And I tried my best in the biography to avoid that and discarded the various psycho theories of Hitler—mainly in footnotes rather than in the text itself—and I’ve never had very much trouble with those ideas whether it’s Hitler or anybody else for that matter. So I think what we have to deal with are political processes that explain these things rather than psychological hangups.

I’ve written a lot about what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Understanding what mattered to people of the past, and how and why, is one of the crucial tasks of the historian. But it is another thing entirely to pretend to actual psychological insight or even diagnosis of psychological problems. These are almost always, as Kershaw notes, unfalsifiable. Such theories or explanations are pretty weak stuff on a purely personal level and make for misleading history, but made to bear the weight of historical causality they become positively nefarious. And the more causal weight, the worse.

To stick with the topic in question, stated baldly, such theories—that the Holocaust happened because Hitler had some kind of self-loathing about being part Jewish or (a deeper cut for a certain kind of amateur) because the doctor who failed to save his dying mother was Jewish—sound properly silly. But this kind of history is simple, and therefore easy to repeat and spread, and therefore almost ineradicable when it reaches the popular level. Here there be monsters—the monsters of popular myth.

Last spring I read the late John Lukacs’s The Hitler of History, a historiographical study, and blogged about it twice along similar lines: on the too-easy explanations of Hitler as madman and Hitler as Antichrist. For more on Chesterton and “the inside of history,” see here.

Revisiting Orwell on history: faster, more intense

A few weeks ago I wrote about Orwell’s contention that modern ideological attacks on history were a threat to objective truth itself. The passage I quoted from and glossed came from a 1944 “As I Please” column. That’s still worth reading. But yesterday I ran across this passage in a much longer essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” from 1942:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

This somehow manages to put the point even more pithily.

A little more, because I can’t help it:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. . . . It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

You can read more here. These passages come from a paragraph in § IV.

Compare my thoughts on cynicism in the study of history, which went viral on a small scale last month following a share from Tom Holland himself. For the mathematical implications of the denial of objective truth, see again Chesterton.

Prester John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Lost Lady of Old Years

June seems to be the month for themed celebrations, so some weeks ago during my leisure reading I conceived of my own. This is the inaugural post of what I’m calling John Buchan June, a month dedicated to the enjoyment and appreciation of classic adventure fiction. I’ll be reading as many of Buchan’s novels and posting about as many of them as I can. We’ll see how well I can emulate Buchan’s characters in embracing and enduring difficulty.

Today, I begin with the novel that inspired this celebration: A Lost Lady of Old Years.

This, one of Buchan’s earliest novels, takes place in Scotland during “the ‘45,” the last and greatest Jacobite uprising, and tells the story of young Francis Birkenshaw. Francis was born into an austere Highland family that had disowned his mother following an inappropriate marriage. Francis could provide the textbook example of the “callow youth.” A striver unwilling to hold down a desk job that might, with hard work, lead to prominence and respectability; a familiar of seedy neighborhoods, dive bars, and low company; and not a little entitled despite his station, he has something of the prodigal son about him. Having been reared by a mother supported by the quiet largesse of the current head of the family, Francis has assumed that she controls a hidden fortune and demands his share of it.

Having unwittingly deprived his mother of her whole month’s support, he takes ship for France, where he aims to join one of the many Scots mercenary units serving the King of France and so gain some experience of the world. As he departs Scotland, he determines to live utterly unto himself, as a pure pragmatist, devoid of moral scruple. This seems to him the proper mercenary spirit, and so far he is off to a good start.

As it happens, Francis never makes it out of Scotland. He picks fights, makes one friend, and abandons ship within a few days, and the remainder of the novel follows him in his wanderings through the Scottish countryside, seeking his fortune.

Everywhere he goes he is asked about his loyalties—does he support the Hanoverian King of England or Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite pretender? Francis doesn’t much care—he’s in it for himself—but finds himself drawn steadily into the Jacobite orbit, especially once he has made the acquaintance of two crucial characters: the aging and infirm but charismatic Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who confides and trusts in him; and, even more important to a young man, the beautiful Margaret Murray, the wife of one of the rebellion’s leaders. Francis becomes infatuated with her and, for her, willingly undertakes a dangerous mission to deliver secret messages to the Jacobite forces in the field where they face off against the army of the King of England.

I don’t want to give much more away, except for two facts: First, Francis’s adventures ultimately take him through the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, the mopping up operations following the Pretender’s defeat, and the capture and executions of some of the people whom he has followed and grown to admire; and second, all along, and completely unbeknownst to him, he has been used. By whom, and to what purpose, I’ll leave to you to find out.

Buchan wrote A Lost Lady of Old Years in his early twenties, while still a student at Brasenose College, Oxford. It was published in 1899, one of his first published works—and it shows. Despite its well-realized Scottish settings, its excellent level of historical detail, its wry and witty writing, and its vivid fictional portraits of real people—the most striking of which is the ill-fated Lord Lovat—A Lost Lady of Old Years is clearly the early work of a gifted but inexperienced writer. Those familiar with Buchan’s later books, especially the short, sharp, rapidly moving The Thirty-Nine Steps, will be surprised at how often the pacing flags in this novel.

Further, Francis Birkenshaw himself is largely passive throughout, wandering through events far larger than himself and far beyond his ken. Such characters can make for good novels. The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which Richard Hannay spends much of the story on the run from a seemingly omnipotent enemy, is an instructive counterexample. Where Hannay is an older, wiser, and more experienced man accustomed to danger and alert to deception, giving him some control despite the odds against him, Francis is naïve, flighty, and easily hoodwinked. This is a realistic picture of a pugnacious young man, but he often feels like a side character in his own story. Note my use of the phrases “unwittingly” and “unbeknownst to him” above.

However, what makes Francis interesting is his explicitly stated quest to live beyond the rules, as a purely amoral pragmatist, and his constant failure to live up to that dark ideal. Whether Francis is a Jacobite or not is not the only test he faces everywhere he goes; he also often wanders into situations that test his resolve to live amorally, as when his shipboard friend steals the only food in an old peasant woman’s house and Francis, despite himself, is outraged.

So A Lost Lady of Old Years, in addition to a striking portrait of a real historical moment and a study of loyalty, honor, and betrayal, also reflects the importance of moral formation, of properly oriented affections and piety. One can also sense something of Buchan’s Calvinism in the story in the way that Francis sets his own goals but is consistently drawn to something else, something higher, that changes Francis for the better despite his bad intentions. In the end, Francis’s signal failure in the novel, to live entirely unto himself and his own good, paradoxically proves his only success—bitterly earned, but worthwhile.

A Lost Lady of Old Years is an enjoyable read, with many of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction—eager young men from straitened circumstances, beautifully rendered exotic settings, picaresque and episodic journeys into greater and greater danger, the inevitable Scottish connection—while showing some of the limitations of the beginner. It’s a lesser-known work of the Buchan bibliography, but one with its own strengths and charms and well worth seeking out.

Top Gun: Maverick

I’ve only seen the original Top Gun once. Twenty years ago, around the time I graduated from high school. And I fell asleep during part of it. So my anticipation of Top Gun: Maverick has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with my lifelong interest in military aviation and action movies and my more recent esteem for Tom Cruise’s action career.

It was worth the wait. And while I can’t make any direct comparison to the original, I’d be willing to bet Maverick, this much later sequel, is actually the better movie.

Top Gun: Maverick opens with Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) working as a test pilot, pushing the envelope with an experimental prototype. When the contract for the prototype is terminated and the program shut down, Maverick is saved—not for the first time—from discharge by the intervention of Iceman (Val Kilmer), who is now commander of the US Pacific Fleet. Ice has Maverick reassigned to their old flight school in San Diego, where he is tasked with training a batch of previous graduates for a specific, extremely difficult mission.

An unnamed “rogue state” is nearing completion of a high-tech uranium refinement facility. It is imperative that the facility be destroyed; it is almost impossible to reach it. The lab lies underground at the bottom of a narrow valley hemmed in on either side by steep mountains, and the mountains are topped by SAM sites.

Maverick develops a training regimen designed to push the younger pilots selected for the mission—who are already the best of the best—to their limits and force them to accept that they still have things to learn. He tests their skills, confidence, and endurance as well as their teamwork. Though still a daredevil and risk-taker, Maverick was chastened by the death of his partner Goose in the first film, and the presence of Goose’s son Rooster (Miles Teller) among his trainees renews this old guilt.

The personal dimension is further complicated by Maverick’s reacquaintance with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), an old flame who runs the aviators’ dive bar nearby, and by the hostility or distrust of many of Maverick’s superiors. Maverick awkwardly reconnects with the former, and struggles to avoid being grounded by the latter.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot. It will come as no surprise that Maverick not only trains the young pilots but ends up leading the mission, but there are other surprises in store and a lot of good action along the way.

The story of Top Gun: Maverick is simple but effectively told. This movie exists within a long, grand tradition of military mission movies in which elite units have to rise above even their own excellence to achieve an impossible objective with very narrow parameters for success: think The Dam Busters. What makes the movie work is not a convoluted story with numerous subplots or bloated action sequences, but efficient, well-paced storytelling, good acting, and exciting action. This film does what all great films of this genre do: make the challenges, stakes, and threats clear, make the action meaningful by giving us characters to care about, and then present the climactic action comprehensibly and suspensefully.

The strongest character in the movie, by far, is Maverick. In addition to being a plot-driven action adventure this film is a character piece, and Tom Cruise, proving he need not be limited to motorcycle chases and sprinting, does a very good job giving depth to an erstwhile hotshot as he confronts age and the danger inherent to his work. This Maverick begins the movie as an expert loner with a callous disregard for danger and has to learn—through his trainees, through Penny and her daughter—that men ultimately derive meaning and purpose not only from vocation and leadership but attachment.

The supporting cast is less well developed but not one-dimensional. Jon Hamm and Jennifer Connelly are good as Maverick’s antagonistic commander at Top Gun and Maverick’s love interest, respectively, and giving depth and personality to characters it would be easy to play as clichés. The standout among the trainees is Goose’s son Rooster, who gets the most substantial writing among them and is well-performed by Miles Teller. The other pilots have essentially one personality trait but still feel like real people we could feasibly get to know better, a testament to the actors cast in those parts.

But Top Gun: Maverick’s big selling point—and my main interest going into the movie—is the action. Most of the aerial sequences were shot with the actors really sitting in real F/A-18 Super Hornets (and one F-14 Tomcat) really doing the things they purport to be doing in the movie, and the result is a series of flight scenes that convey the speed and G-forces and general danger of fighter combat as well as the amazing skill of a seasoned pilot. One reason the action works so well is that it’s comprehensible—director Joseph Kosinski stages the action so that we see and understand what’s going on. The action is also helped by the writing. Key moments in the finale are properly set up during training, so that by the time the climactic action is unfolding at supersonic speed we grasp what’s happening intuitively. It’s excellently done.

In the end, I found Top Gun: Maverick not only enjoyable and exciting but refreshing. It’s a throwback in the best ways possible, and not just stylistically—though it does a good job emulating the golden-hued long-lens cinematography of the original and includes just enough 80s music to be fun without being cloying. More importantly, it’s not cynical, has good characters and a dash of humor, doesn’t overstay its welcome, doesn’t pander to the present-day political sensibilities being shoehorned into every other entertainment being shoveled our way, tells a good strong story straightforwardly, is undergirded by some positive and goodness-affirming themes that arise organically from the plot, and has a genuine feel-good quality that makes it a joy to watch with an audience.

Top Gun: Maverick is not deep, but it’s well-crafted and engaging and pure, solid fun. When I saw it last night, people gasped, laughed, and applauded unironically, and that only enhanced it. I look forward to watching it again.

Orwell on history and objective truth

I doesn’t take much to get me on an Orwell kick, and the most recent started with an interesting piece in First Things entitled “What Orwell Learned from Chesterton.” Somewhere during this most recent dip into Orwell’s essays, I came across an “As I Please” column from February 4, 1944—the spring before Operation Overlord, when an Englishman could visit Dover and look over the Channel into the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating short reflection, and right up my alley.

Orwell begins with an arresting apocryphal tale:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

Orwell tells this story to introduce the topic of the investigation into truth in history, and considers how well Raleigh might have succeeded in his historical project. “Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison,” Orwell writes, Raleigh “could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events.” Why? Because

“A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it.”

— George Orwell

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts—the casualty figures, for instance—were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

That’s because of ideology; everyone now has ideological reasons to obscure, hide, or attempt to alter the truth. Orwell supplies numerous examples from his personal experience and contemporary events, most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which he was a participant, as well as the Battle of Britain, Trotsky’s supposed betrayal of the Soviet Union, and the factuality of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “In no case,” he writes, “do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.”

I was particularly struck by that last line, as it’s a perennial favorite of a certain kind of eager student who wants to let others know he’s not naïve. That is, it’s usually a species of the cynicism I wrote about last week. (It’s also easily disproven by visiting the History section at any Barnes & Noble, where you can find apologia, exonerations, and revisions in favor of any number of “losers” in history.)

But Orwell isn’t using it that way here. Rather than a universal statement about unreliability or bias, he is describing the end result of ideological struggle. This is how history will be written—even if our side wins—if we are not careful, as his next line suggests: “In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries.”

The Allies could rightly claim to have salvaged something from the wreck of the war if they would at least be truthful about it after the fact. It’s still not entirely clear that that was the case, and insofar as even the “good guys” in a conflict like World War II take the same ideologically motivated approach to the truth as their totalitarian enemies, subjecting the truth to the claims of usefulness rather than subjecting themselves to it, they become totalitarians, too. Indeed, they share the most important characteristic of their enemies:

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

— George Orwell

This is broadly applicable, because it’s true, and this is why history in particular is so hotly contested right now—along with everything else. Totalitarianism is, after all, total.

After a few caveats and notes about the effects of the war on freedom of the press, Orwell concludes by suggesting that “[t]here is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don’t envy the future historian’s job.”

Me neither.

You can read the entire “As I Please” piece in several places online. I found it here. I definitely recommend the MD Aeschliman piece on Orwell and Chesterton mentioned above, and if you want to begin or complement an Orwell kick like mine, let me also recommend a 2017 piece from Ben Sixsmith that gets at one of the things I most like about Orwell: “George Orwell Would Dislike You, Me, and Our Opinions.”