The Gap in the Curtain

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

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relax as part of Lady Flambard’s collection of conversationalists, and the melancholy, the preoccupied, the withdrawn.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

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

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

It works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blanket of the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Snipers has arrived!

No, that’s not a subject-verb disagreement. The Snipers is my latest published work, a short novel set during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944. I’m pleased to announce that, after the final rounds of proofs and revisions, it is now available on Amazon!

I announced The Snipers and its subject here earlier this month. Last week I posted a recommendation of the three non-fiction books I acknowledge in the author’s note at the of The Snipers. Check those posts out if you’d like to know more or look at the book’s page here. In the meantime, here’s the description from the back cover:

October 1944—It has been four months since D-day and the Allies are pressing through Germany’s last defenses. As the US Army makes its first move against the historic German city of Aachen, one unit finds itself stymied by a tenacious German sniper. With losses climbing, the commander calls up sharpshooter Sergeant JL Justus. His job: find and kill the sniper.

Weary from four months of fighting, Justus wants little more than a good smoke and some hot chow. But the assignment bothers him for other reasons. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how does he shoot so accurately and quickly? Can Justus and his buddies find him before many more men are killed? And in a battle like the one for Aachen, is finding the sniper even possible?

The Snipers is an evocative, thrilling, and moving short war tale from Jordan M. Poss.

One certainly hopes, anyway.

You can add The Snipers to your Goodreads reading list here. And if you’d like to order a copy, either in paperback or Kindle format, please use the buttons below.

I’m quite excited about this short novel. My hope is that it will be an exciting, entertaining, and thought-provoking short read. Please give it a look and let me know what you think. Hope y’all enjoy!

Three books behind The Snipers

My new novella The Snipers, a story set in northwestern Europe during World War II, arrives soon. Just waiting on the final proofs! In the meantime, I wanted to recommend three books that I made sure to cite as inspirations in the author’s note at the back.

These are not detailed campaign histories and give little or no attention to the political and strategic situations playing out at the highest levels of the war. One is a memoir, one is a short, narrowly focused history by a veteran, and the other is a grab-bag of anecdotes, reminiscences, and explanations for the public of what the infantrymen went through. They’re all excellent, and together they gave me some of my strongest impressions and understanding of what fighting in Europe from Normandy to Germany was like.

If You Survive, by George Wilson (1987)

Of these three books, this is the one I read most recently. George Wilson joined the 4th Infantry Division as a replacement platoon leader shortly after D-day. The title of the book comes from the pep talk his first commanding officer gave him as a brand-new second lieutenant plunked into combat in Normandy’s bocage: “If you survive your first day, I’ll promote you.”

Wilson survived Normandy, the breakout, the race across northern France, the Hürtgen Forest (about which more below), and finally the Battle of the Bulge.

Wilson’s descriptions of the fighting in Normandy and elsewhere are excellent, driving home the shock, horror, waste, and occasionally exhilaration of battle, but the standout chapters in his book narrate the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Though now overshadowed in public memory by the Battle of the Bulge, the result of a German offensive that occurred shortly afterward, the Hürtgen Forest saw tenacious, tooth-and-nail German defense in a rugged, densely wooded landscape sewn with pillboxes and minefields and raked by artillery set to burst among the treetops.

One of the strongest impressions Wilson’s memoir gave me had to do with the incredible turnover rate in personnel among frontline combat units—the attrition. During Wilson’s eighteen days in the Hürtgen Forest his company took 167% casualties. As Wilson relates it, men cycled in and out of his unit so quickly that he could not get to know them all and sometimes doesn’t try. Some replacements arrived and were killed or evacuated to a field hospital the same day, often within hours.

This is a scenario I’ve read about in other books and seen dramatized in a variety of films, but Wilson, with his straightforward, unembellished, but dramatic and moving style, makes you feel it.

The Hürtgen Forest is not the setting of The Snipers but it does figure into the story near the end, and Wilson’s If You Survive has a lot to do with how I present it. It’s an excellent lesser-known memoir that deserves a broader readership.

The Boys’ Crusade, by Paul Fussell (2003)

Paul Fussell may be familiar to you if you’ve ever taken a course on World War I. His literary study The Great War and Modern Memory is still standard reading. But Fussell did not write about war as a detached, ivory tower academic. Like Wilson, he fought across northwestern Europe from Normandy to Germany, in Fussell’s case as an infantry platoon leader in the 103rd Infantry Division. He was twenty years old when he first saw combat.

The Boys’ Crusade is not a memoir, though it is strongly shaped by Fussell’s own experiences, which he has written about more directly elsewhere (especially Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic). Instead, it briefly narrates the campaign across northwestern Europe with an emphasis on the experience of ordinary soldiers, most especially the very young men like Fussell who constituted most of the combat infantry. Though a short, fast read, The Boys’ Crusade is full of vivid detail about what it was like to fight in the bocage or the forest or through villages and cities, to deal with officers, to march and march and march, to lead, to follow, to wallow in mud and snow and sleep in the rain, to deal with civilians, to yearn for women, to be tired and scared all the time—and what it was like to experience all of this at the age of eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty.

I’ve included a few passages that made a particularly strong impression on me the first time I read it some years ago and that, along with other books and more study, undergird what I try to evoke in The Snipers.

Here’s Fussell on the appearance of GIs after they had been at the front for a while, away from regulation-happy officers and the nitpicking of the parade ground:

There was one advantage of being in an attack, and only one: there, a soldier was seldom troubled by the chickenshit to be met with in the rear. At the real front there was no such thing as being “out of uniform,” for the soldier looked like a tramp with individual variations all the time, and officers were indistinguishable from the lowest dogfaces. Neither wore anything like insignia, and to look as dirty as possible was socially meritorious.

The two best approximations of this that I’ve seen on film are in one old and one recent movie: Battleground and Fury. (Really stop and look at the infantrymen in Fury sometime. Whatever else you think about that movie, it brilliantly evokes the lived in, raggedy, hard-eyed reality of the dogface in northern Europe.)

Back to Fussell, who notes that appearance was also an easy way to pick out replacements, the guys who hadn’t been in it yet:

Newcomers were regarded with a degree of silent contempt, and replacements were the most conspicuous newcomers. There were many signals by which new arrivals could be detected. Cleanliness was one of them. Soldiers or officers in new or neat clothing, not yet ripped in places or grease-stained all over from C- and K-rations, were easy to spot as targets of disdain. Company officers wearing gold or silver bars on shirt collars were clearly unacquainted yet with the veritable law of the line that unless officers’ insignia were covered by a scarf, enemy snipers would pick them off first. (Probably quite false, but believed by all.) The helmet net could become a low-social-class giveaway by the absence of a worn-out portion at the top; when the helmet was taken off and placed upside down on the ground, the net should be worn away. In many infantry divisions, rumor held that if the chin strap of the helmet was fastened and worn in the correct way, the wearer ran the risk of being beheaded by a close explosion, which, it was said, would tear off helmet and head at once. This probably began as a practical joke, like sending a newcomer to get a left-handed screwdriver, but it was widely believed.

That’s is a pretty representative passage, offering both general observations as well as vivid specifics while also conveying the mixture of boyish jocularity, protective exclusivity, half-believed superstition, and grim realism of the frontline GI.

And, finally, the opening of Fussell’s chapter on the Hürtgen Forest campaign:

If today an eighty-year-old survivor of the Boys’ Crusade were asked to indicate his worst moment as an infantryman, he might answer “Omaha Beach.” And then as an afterthought, he would be likely to add, “No, Hürtgen Forest”—less publicized and cine-dramatized but equally unforgettable, at least for the few participants still living.

This is a book well worth reading. I recommend it to students all the time as a short, accessible, but blunt and truthful explanation of the infantryman’s war.

Up Front, by Bill Mauldin (1945)

Bill Mauldin served with the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily and Italy, where he was wounded during the Monte Cassino campaign, before landing in southern France and advancing through western Europe. But he was most famous as a cartoonist, publishing a single-panel cartoon about two ordinary infantrymen called Willie and Joe. His characters first appeared in the divisional newspaper but were eventually syndicated in Stars and Stripes and published back home in the States. Willie and Joe became immensely popular and well-known, and Mauldin’s cartoons got a lot of attention—not all of it positive. He had a rather famous one-way feud with Patton, who thought the cartoons disrespectful and a threat to discipline.

Shortly after the war Mauldin collected some of the best of the cartoons in this book, Up Front, and supplemented them with a loosely structured running commentary. Though dismissive of his own writing, Mauldin brilliantly and succinctly explains to the civilian reader what the men streaming home from the military in 1946 had been through. Everything is here: the danger, the frustration, the destruction, the distance from home and family, the camaraderie and affection, the bottomless unfulfilled appetites for women and booze, the physical misery, the joy of simple comforts, the irony, the exhaustion, the plight of civilians, and most especially the tedium. If war is proverbially 99 hours of boredom punctuated by one hour of sheer terror, Mauldin deftly conveys that.

And, perhaps most importantly, he conveys the humor that sustained the GIs and bonded them together—not only the gallows humor you might expect but a great deal of pure silliness. A strong sense of the absurd and a gift for improvisation were just as important for survival as ammunition and good leadership.

I could share any number of samples, but this is the passage I always think of as the one that most strongly affected my understanding of the war—making me able to imagine some of what it was like—when I first read it as a kid:

Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

I discovered Up Front one day in middle school while tagging along with my mom in an antique mall. I spotted an old copy lying on an end table, for sale. I had never heard of Bill Mauldin but I loved comic strips and cartoons and World War II history, so I excitedly showed it to Mom. She bought it for me. I can’t be more thankful. This more than any other book laid the foundations for my understanding, however imperfect, of the experiences of GIs in Europe during World War II.

That first copy was a very early printing. I read it so much that the dust jacket eventually crumbled away to nothing, but I still have the book as well as a more recent facsimile reprint from WW Norton that includes a foreword by Stephen Ambrose. It is also included in toto in the Library of America’s excellent two-volume collection Reporting World War II. It is well worth taking the time to read.

Conclusion

Though The Snipers is not directly inspired by anything in these books, they helped shape my understanding of what the war was like for the young men who lived and fought through it. I strongly recommend all three of them—for starters. Thanks for reading, and I hope y’all will check out The Snipers when it arrives!

Mr Standfast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. No one else has captured McCarthy’s blend of the old and modern like the Coen brothers.

I was genuinely grieved to learn of the death of Cormac McCarthy yesterday afternoon. No other writer has accomplished something quite like his body of work, and no other writer’s work has meant quite what his has meant to me.

I discovered him in the summer between my last two years of college. I have a standing rule that I will check out any unfamiliar book or author I hear about more than twice within a certain short amount of time. With McCarthy, I ran across references to his novel Blood Meridian in three places within the same week. I picked it up at the Barnes & Noble in town and that was that.

Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s magnum opus. It is also the worst place to start with his work. It is rich, dense, sprawling, arcane, operatic, a deliberate fusion of old fashioned curlicued prose and modern muscularity and bluntness. The chapters have strange headings summarizing the content and McCarthy does not use quotation marks. And of course there is the much-remarked upon brutality. But because of the allusions that had convinced me to pick Blood Meridian up, that was the one thing I was prepared for. 

I was flummoxed. I knew something great was going on but I struggled to wrap my mind around it. I thought the lack of quotation marks was a risible affectation. And I only barely followed the story. I think I gave it three stars on Amazon.

But it stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. And I bought more of McCarthy’s novels. 

I read through everything except Suttree by the time I graduated, and I reread several of them over the coming years. At last, I reread Blood Meridian last year, and while I want to say that I found it a completely different book, it was I who had changed. Age and maturity and years and years of reading McCarthy and reflecting back on Blood Meridian through his other work and—to throw it into relief—the work of less skilled imitators had prepared me for the novel. I had grown into it. It amazed me all over again.

Blood Meridian was the beginning of a long challenge to my way of writing. It was a bold early demonstration to me of the power of the precisely-chosen verb, of how to use a wide-ranging but carefully controlled vocabulary to create texture (or music, if you prefer), of the necessity of deep research presented as an organic part of the story, seamlessly and without ostentation. 

And the lack of quotation marks that annoyed me so much at first caused me to reconsider even more. McCarthy, I realized, had set himself an artistic limitation by refusing punctuation conveniences. He did not use quotation marks—or semicolons or, unless absolutely necessary, commas—the same way a sonnet writer does not use a fifteenth line. It was a self-imposed boundary that strengthened and liberated his style. It meant, as McCarthy has said himself, that there was less to get in the way. It allows the language to tell the story. Pure words.

From this I learned to avoid leaning on typography to communicate meaning. And so while I have not gone nearly as far as McCarthy in this regard, in my fiction I don't italicize words for emphasis or to establish the rhythm of a person's speech or use elaborate punctuation or typesetting. In a scenario like that of his penultimate novel, The Road—which as a student of the early medieval period I don’t have a hard time imagining—how much of your typographical shenanigans will survive transmission? McCarthy wrote to last. I hope to, too.

So much for style. What Blood Meridian and McCarthy’s work also taught me was to confront the harshness and evil of reality head on. Because of the violence and darkness of his work—most especially Blood Meridian, with its scalphunters and Comanches and hangings and the inscrutable, unstoppable Satanic figure of the Judge—people call him a nihilist. He wasn’t. What McCarthy had was a deeply moral sense of the utter fallenness of the world and an unwillingness to look away.

There is a time and place for the opposite approach, but we need our McCarthys, too, in all their bleakness. Witness this passage from a 1992 interview that I’ve seen circulating since yesterday:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Uplifting? No. But it’s true. All the charge of nihilism means is “McCarthy did not reassure me.” Good. Those “afflicted with this notion,” which is most of us nowadays, need to be unsettled. McCarthy, a master of this kind of prophetic unsettling, showed us how.

Cormac McCarthy, novelist, prophet, and personal hero, RIP.

Coming soon: The Snipers

I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest book, a World War II novella titled The Snipers.

The Snipers takes place during the Battle of Aachen in October of 1944. Four months on from D-day, the Allies are pressing into the western edges of Germany and slowly, laboriously penetrating the Siegfried Line. Aachen, the former chief residence of Charlemagne and one of Germany’s most prestigious and historical cities, is heavily defended, and as the US Army enters the outskirts of the city one unit comes under devastating sniper fire. Their battalion commander, unable to slow the offensive, instead calls up the leader of his reconnaissance squad, Sergeant JL Justus for a special assignment—find and kill the German sniper harrying the men of Charlie Company.

Justus has only two men left in his squad after the continuous slog from Normandy to Germany, and he has just settled down to some much-deserved rest in reserve as other units push into the city. But he has sharpshooting experience from the weeks following D-day and the boys under fire need him. And so he and his buddies Whittaker and Porter load up and enter the city.

Justus, a Georgia boy with an abiding interest in the Civil War and a wry sense of the absurd, has his doubts about the mission. Is there a sniper at all? If so, how is he supposed to find him? Can he do so before many more men are killed? And why is the commander of Charlie Company so certain that there is more than one sniper?

The rest of the story, which takes place across a single day of block-by-block, house-to-house fighting through the rubble of a once-beautiful city, will challenge and shock Justus in more ways than one. I hope it will do the same for the reader.

I’m quite excited about this one. I may related the genesis of the story here sometime soon, but for now I’ll say that once I had it in my head it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d gotten it down in writing. My hope is that it will prove a brisk but involving action story, both thought-provoking and poignant and with a dash of humor, ideal for reading in two or three sittings. At 35,000 words, it’s a little less than half the length of my previous World War II novel, Dark Full of Enemies.

The first paperback proofs of the novel arrived just this afternoon. I’ve included a gallery below that I hope y’all will accept as a preview. Pending tweaks and final corrections—which should be minimal thanks to the efforts of friends and beta readers who have already looked at the manuscript and provided helpful feedback—I hope to have The Snipers out and available on Amazon before the end of the month, just in time for the Independence Day holiday.

Last week I reorganized my website’s Books page to divide full-length novels like Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville from short fiction, and to add The Snipers. You can look at the dedicated page for The Snipers, with paperback and Kindle purchasing links (not yet activated), here.

Thanks for reading! This one came together unusually quickly and I hope y’all will check it out once it’s available. Stay tuned!

The Dancing Floor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borges on the two registers of English

An interesting clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language and some of its peculiar strengths has been going around lately. In the clip, excerpted from Borges’s 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line,” Borges talks about why he regards English as a “finer” language than his native Spanish. After describing how he grew up reading English books in his father’s library (“When I think of the Bible, I think of the King James Bible”) and how even having forgotten Latin is better than never having known it, Borges continues:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

WFB: The most what?

Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

WFB: “Asomó?”*

Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

You can watch the whole discussion here, with the above beginning at approximately 17:20.

I speak no Spanish and so can’t vouch for Borges’s perspective on his native tongue—though I’d seriously hesitate to call his perspective into question, as some internet commenters on this clip seem unduly confident in doing—but I think he perceptively draws attention to two useful and beautiful features of English.

First, the interplay of verbs and adverbs. Immediately after the examples he gives of “live down,” “laugh off,” “dream away,” and “live up to,” Borges offhandedly suggests, “I suppose they can be said in German.” Any German speaker will be familiar with the separable prefix verb, a verb-preposition pair with a distinct (sometimes dramatically different) meaning from the root verb. I’ve always thought this feature had a grammatically more flexible cognate in the English use of prepositions in the way Borges describes. The physicality of these idioms, many of which give a subtle spatial quality to an abstract action, is worth considering.

This extends to rhythm as well. Here’s Borges on English adverbs slightly later in the interview:

Borges: Of course, in Spanish words are far too cumbersome, they’re far too long. Well, I go to one of my hobbies: For example, if you take an English adverb, or two English adverbs, you say for instance “quickly,” “slowly,” the stress falls on the significant part of the word. Quick-ly. Slow-ly. But if you say it in Spanish, you say “lentamente,” “rapidamente,” then the stress falls, let’s say, on the non-significant part, on the gadget.

The capacity of English for onomatopoeia is an often overlooked and underexploited quality. English isn’t limited to being spoken or written—it can be played.

But what I really love is Borges’s talk of the “two registers” of English, which seems to me exactly the right metaphor for the way English meaning and especially connotation work. (Another metaphor I’m accustomed to use: texture.) Depending on which words you choose to say something, you can pitch it high, low, or anywhere in between, with subtle variations in meaning in each. The good speaker or writer will choose carefully and precisely.

Consideration of the registers of the language—direct versus vague, concrete versus abstract, blunt versus diplomatic, coarse versus tactful—lies behind what many writers have written about the relative merit of Germanic and Latinate vocabulary. It is not precisely correct to say, as Borges does, that English is both Germanic and Latinate. It is Germanic. But it does have an enormous hoard of loanwords from Latin and other Romance languages. These borrowings were often heavily contextual—the jargon of medicine, theology, government, and even military ranks are often Latin, Greek, or French—and brought with them not only synonyms but finely differentiated shades of meaning.

And that’s what both features Borges discusses have in common. The availability of many shades of meaning is one of the things I love most about English, allowing incredibly fine precision. (Note that in the explanation of separable prefix verbs I linked to above, one of the purposes of such a grammatical feature is to be “more precise.”) To use another musical metaphor, English has a range of many, many octaves. Reading widely—especially in poetry—can strengthen your command of them.

A really interesting discussion. I’m watching the rest of the interview in fits and starts today. You can find the whole thing on the “Firing Line” YouTube channel here. It’s worth your while.

*A fascinating bit of trivia: Buckley is quick to suggest a possible Spanish equivalent for to loom over because Spanish was actually his first language. Largely raised by Spanish-speaking nannies, he purportedly didn’t learn English until entering school at age seven.

Huntingtower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witch Wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On exoticism and annoyance

A curious passage in an otherwise measured and informative book that I read this spring. Referring to early 16th-century rumors of Maya cannibalism, the authors write:

There is, in fact, no evidence that the Postclassic Maya were cannibals devoted to slaughtering captives in religious rituals, despite the popular (and sometimes scholarly) obsession with “human sacrifice”—vividly reflected in images stretching from early modern European woodcuts accompanying accounts of discovery and conquest to modern equivalents such as Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto. There is no doubt that the Maya ritually executed war captives, people judged as criminals, and people, animals, plants, and objects chosen as religious offerings. But such executions have been practiced in almost all human cultures. Nor were such rituals in Maya society necessarily religious, despite the Western tendency to exoticize and exaggerate Maya executions as always religious and always human sacrifice. Maya culture was no less violent than any other, but nor was it any more so.

There’s a strange movement here from disputing evidence of cannibalism to ranting against popular curiosity about human sacrifice. Despite clearly disapproving of such curiosity and putting “human sacrifice” in scare quotes, the authors follow this rant with a pretty definitive concession that the Maya “ritually executed” people* “as religious offerings.” (If only there were a term for ritual execution of captives as religious offerings!) The capper is the paragraph’s concluding reflection, two weak and patently false appeals to moral equivalency.

I’ve mulled this paragraph over for a while now and what strikes me most about it—beyond handwaving and minimizing a particularly brutal form of ritual murder—is the sense of scholarly annoyance throughout. As if the authors, after getting questions about human sacrifice for the five hundredth time, respond, “No! Well, yes, actually. But not really. But yes. But everybody else has done it, too. And why are you so obsessed with this, weirdo?”

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to this kind of irritation. Anyone who has ever specialized in anything must either get comfortable facing the same set of popular misunderstandings over and over again or get irritated and snippy. Both feelings are understandable. The latter comes naturally. The former you have to work at. In the best case scenario, the scholar (and/or teacher, though I recognize the two don’t always overlap) can address common misperceptions of his field frankly and as an invitation to learning more. You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .

Having introduced the much-maligned and -misunderstood Middle Ages to students in this way for years, I can tell you that this approach works. But you have to subsume whatever irritation you feel at putting the same myths to rest again and again and let your passion for the subject take over.

What the above paragraph tries to do instead is dismiss curiosity (via the telling word “exoticize”) and dodge (by playing word games). A smart or skeptical student wouldn’t be fooled. And the genuinely curious will go somewhere else with their questions, probably to untrustworthy internet sources.**

But the accusation of exoticism is perhaps the worst element in all of this. I’ve seen this rhetorical charge most often in a certain kind of polemical academic discourse and, occasionally, in a vaguer version that has trickled down into the mainstream among the kind of people who rage against “cultural appropriation.” It seems, to me, to be way to spin curiosity as a bad thing. Notice something unusual, interesting, or even horrifying about another culture? Don’t you dare ask about it. You’re not allowed to be interested in this thing in this way.

Which is too bad, not only because of the uncharitable assumptions built into an accusation like this or the perceptible annoyance in writing like the paragraph above, but because of the way it worsens the insularity of academics. Charging the curious with exoticism, condemning questions to which you have to concede the central facts, and redefining terms—these are bridge-burning instincts when what I think we need most right now is greater curiosity.

*And plants, leaving one wondering how one “executes” a plant.

**Jackson Crawford, the Old Norse linguist I’ve referred to many times here, has a lot to say about this phenomenon on his YouTube channel.