John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps, and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. He also wrote A Prince of the Captivity which, for my money, is the apotheosis of the Hannay books.

Buchan was the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister. He had a traditional education, culminating is studying the Classics at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem The Pilgrim Fathers. His background suggests a man heavily influenced by conservative Scottish religion – which is about as conservative as religion gets.

His books bear out that suggestion, and none more so than this one.

A Prince of the Captivity

As the story begins, Adam Melfort is on trial for forgery. His friends, and there are many, do not believe his confession, and we quickly learn that they are right. His empty-headed wife has forged the check which he admits to. He goes to prison. She goes free, flittering on through her empty life, divorces Adam, and disappears out of the story.

Prison is barely described. A Prince of the Captivity is not a story about external events, but about what happens in Adam’s mind and soul.

In a typical novel, the previous sentence would be a reviewer’s signal to avoid it at all costs. Not here; the external events that forge Melfort’s soul are drawn from the toolbox of a skillful writer of thrillers. This story moves rapidly, with a few tedious exceptions, but when each part of the story comes to a close, the result, win or lose, means less than the changes it brings to Melfort.

Melfort is on a mission. His time in prison has pulled him out of normal society, and he now feels that whatever remains for him to do must be done from the shadows. He was an officer in the British Army, with a brilliant career before him. That is gone now. He passes World War I posing as a simple-minded peasant on a Dutch farm where the occupying German troops laugh at him, play cruel tricks on him, and otherwise ignore him. They do not know that he is running a ring of spies, made up of others as unprepossessing as he.

After the war, Melfort must find his life’s mission on his own. He leads an expedition to Greenland to find and save a missing explorer, then sets out to find leaders of quality to whom he can lend support. All those he chooses fail him, but he only moves on and continues his quest.

All this sounds vague and tedious, but it isn’t. This is still the Buchan of the Hannay books. The external events that make up the book are sharp, dangerous, decisive, and exciting. You could ignore the sub-text and read it as a thriller. The cover blurb on my copy calls it, “A thunderingly good read,” and it is. But it is also much more than that.

The Hannay books begin with England in danger, move to England at war, and end with England after the war, supposedly at peace, but not at peace with herself. World War I tore English society apart, and shook her certainty. The depression which followed made things worse.

A Prince of the Captivity, published in 1933, moves beyond the Hannay books. It reeks of discontent and hidden in the background is the sound of boots marching and armies mobilizing. Adam Melfort sacrificed his future to save his wife, and now he has to sacrifice anew. England sacrificed to win the Great War, and now it will have to sacrifice again.

Most critics were not kind to A Prince of the Captivity. I’m not surprised. Melding a thriller, an apotheosis of a personal moral code, and a vague prophesy of coming disaster is not easy. Perhaps it is not possible. Buchan didn’t do a perfect job of it, but he did write a fine novel. A Prince of the Captivity is my favorite of the dozen or so Buchan’s I have read.

John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps (presented Monday), and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. The last two of those sequels are presented here

The Three Hostages

Now the war is over and Hannay and Mary have settled in to a life of peace with their son Peter John. It is not to last. Three hostages have been taken from three of England’s leaders, and the ransom is their support of a program destructive to England. Hannay, against his inclinations, enters the search for the hostages. Much of the story is a series of chases, following various clues, during which Hannay is once again forced to work against the ordinary police to maintain his secrecy. Even when he finds some of the hostages, they cannot be rescued immediately. Unless all three can be retrieved at once, those missed will perish.

Much of the book is a satisfying look at Hannay at work, but there are also long, dull, dreary passages. Hannay first falls under the spell of the mystic hypnotist who is behind the kidnappings, then breaks the spell through deep personal stubbornness. His enemy is not aware that Hannay has recovered, so Hannay plays the role of sycophant, waiting for the chance to rescue the victims. It is a time of misery for Hannay; unfortunately, it is also a time of misery for the reader.

The story largely redeems itself in the last two chapters, which form a kind of long epilog during which Hannay and his nemesis come physically to grips in a Highland deer park.

The Three Hostages is the weakest of the Hannay stories, but still worth reading. Just don’t start with it.

The Island of Sheep

Twelve years after The Three Hostages we once again meet Hannay and his now-teenage son Peter John. Hannay is in a middle-age slump, no longer feeling that he is doing his part to pay rent on his piece of the planet. In that mood, he falls into company with Lombard, a man he recognizes as a old friend from his youth. He remembers an adventure they shared in South Africa, and the vow that came out of it.

Shortly thereafter, he and his son fall in briefly with a Norlander (Norlands is Buchan’s name for the Faroe Islands) who is on the run from some unknown terror. Then Sandy Arbutnot arrives with tablet of jade and a complicated story about the end of an old adventurer known to them both.

All these things come together as if ordained by fate. There is a lot of fate in this book, but don’t worry; fate gets our heroes into trouble, but they have to get out of trouble on their own. It turns out that Haraldsen, the old adventurer who scratched his last testament on the back of the jade tablet, is the same man whom Hannay and Lombard defended against an enemy during their youth, and is also the father of the frightened Norlander. The vow which Haraldsen (senior) extracted from Hannay and Lombard requires them to come to the aid of his son.

The son of the old enemy of Haraldsen (senior) has sworn vengeance on his son, the Norlander, and has claimed the tablet which he thinks is the key to the treasure the old man searched for all his life.

Hannay and Lombard, each for his own reasons, decide to help the son. The bulk of the book sees that carried out through many adventures.

More than any book in the series, this is less about happenings than about the motivations and emotions behind the action. Haraldsen (the younger) is vastly and vacillatingly emotional, shifting from despair, to resignation, to berserk rage. This is his national character. Of course, the Nazis have since made national character a questionable concept, but this was published in 1936. The modern reader can just think of these characteristics as Haraldsen’s personality, and read on without guilt.

The Island of Sheep is not the best of the series, nevertheless, it is one of my favorites. It has that “northern thing” that drove Tolkien’s work. Fate stirs the pot in the beginning and personalities carry the rest of the story relentlessly on.

*****

This is the last Hannay novel, although he also appears as a minor character in The Courts of Morning. Tomorrow, A Prince of the Captivity, which “reads like an apotheosis of the Hannay books . . .”

John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps (presented yesterday), and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. The first two sequels are presented here

Greenmantle

Despite Hannay’s efforts, WW I has begun. Now a Major in the British army, he is convalescing after the battle of Loos at the outset of the story.

Buchan spent the war in London, working in intelligence and writing propaganda. His school friends were in the front of battle, and he lost many of them. Late in his career he wrote These for Remembrance as a tribute to those friends lost. It doesn’t take much imagination to see Buchan sending Hannay out to do what he was not allowed to do.

Hannay is called back from his soldier’s life and sent into Germany as a spy, seeking out a prophet of Islam who is believed to be about to raise an army in Turkey which will work against the British. His only clues are three words: Kasredin, cancer and v. I. He recruits Sandy Arbuthnot and John Blenkiron to join him. On his way into Europe he encounters an old friend from South Africa, Peter Pienaar, and adds him to his cadre. All three will figure in future novels as well, particularly Pienaar who is the title character of the second sequel.

The Thirty-nine Steps was a bit of a lark. There is no such lightness in Greenmantle. It is powerful, at times verging on grim, and therefore much deeper and more satisfying. It is probably the most unified of the five novels. The protagonists separate and come together, each playing his own part, but the novel never loses its overall focus. The four Brits enter Germany, then make their way down the Danube to Turkey, seeking out clues to their nemesis and finally ending their quest in climactic battle.

These stories are best read in order, but if you only read one of them, let it be Greenmantle.

Mr. Standfast

Mr. Standfast was originally a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book I had studiously avoided until I read this Buchan novel. Peter Pienaar, Hannay’s South African ally, uses Pilgrim’s Progress as the touchstone of his life. One suspects the same might have been true of Buchan. Certainly, self-sacrifice for the cause is a strong theme in most of Buchan’s work.

Once again, Hannay is called back from battle to take on a job of spying. This time he is sent into the heart of . . . England? Among the half baked and disaffected who question Britain’s war effort, Hannay’s old enemy Graf von Schwabing is hiding. He was a spy against Britain during The Thirty-nine Steps, and is a man of almost infinite ability with disguises. Hannay is sent to search him out and discover what new deviltries he is planning.

The first half of the book is more light-hearted than Greenmantle, including a chase across Scotland that is a bit of a reprise of the first novel. Hannay even falls in love with his co-worker Mary Lamington, whom he marries after the end of the novel. Hannay untangles Ivery’s (as von Schwabing is now known) plans, turns a pacifist into a patriot, and sees the man behind the disguises. Nevertheless, Ivery escapes.

His job half done, Hannay returns to the front where he once again encounters Ivery, nearly loses Mary to him, and returns Ivery to England. I’ll leave Ivery’s rather odd fate untold.

In the end, Peter Pienaar, who has been a character in the wings throughout the novel, emerges to fight again at the climax, and justifies use of his namesake as the books title.

Mr. Standfast is a good read, if not quite up to the standards of Greenmantle, but it has its oddities. Ivery’s fate comes in a manner Hannay sees as fitting, even though the logical thing would have been to shoot him and kick his body into a road ditch in France. There is nothing unusual in that, but it is hard not to shake your head in perplexity at Hannay’s choice. Then there is Mary, the woman Hannay will marry and who will give him a son. Hannay falls in love with her – a reasonable start – but he never seems to fall in lust with her. One has to wonder how that son was ever conceived.

A critic of Buchan once said that he wished his characters would stop all those thirty mile walks across the moors and just jump in bed with some woman. That isn’t likely to happen in a book published in 1919.   tomorrow, The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep

Shakespeare would not be the world’s greatest playwright if fate had treated him differently. The Bard was born around 1564. If he had been born five hundred years earlier, we would never have heard of him. If he had been born in 1564, but in central Asia or in a Mandan village on the plains of the Americas, we would never have heard of him.

Shakespeare is famous because he was great and because he was born in the right time and place, in a culture that was rising, and which would dominate the globe for the next 400 years.

For roughly a century, counting backward from World War I, there was an efflorescence of English literature celebrating the culture that came from that domination. Much of it is about rich, silly people worrying about their insignificant lives, without knowing or caring about the Caribbean slaves or Indian peasants who were paying the bill. There are masterpieces here, but I find them largely unreadable. I can’t look at Elizabeth Bennet’s little problems without also seeing the colonial system that underpins her world.

There is another literature of that period that understands what it takes to maintain the life of the home country. Kipling, with all his jingoism, comes immediately to mind, as do Stevenson and Scott. The protagonists of this literature know how to get their hands dirty, and are actively creating a nation. Looking backward, we see their failings, but at least they are working to build the world that Darcy and Bennet will unthinkingly inhabit.

I realize that it is illogical to dislike those who reap the rewards of colonialism, yet appreciate those who created the system. Sorry, I can’t help it; I have a prejudice for workers over whiners.

John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott, with the addition of an elegiac tone as his world crumbled beneath his feet. He wrote 100 books, but is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps, and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay.

The Thirty-nine Steps
(Sometimes given as The 39 Steps,
just to confuse alphabetized book lists.)

Richard Hannay is just back from South Africa, having “made his bundle” and ready to  reconnect with his native country. Instead, he finds London dreary and dull compared to colonial life. He is about to give up and return to exile, when he becomes entangled in the affairs of Scudder, a sort of free lance spy who has discovered a massive threat to England. Scudder is killed, Hannay is blamed, and he sets off across Scotland and England, dodging the police while trying to keep Scudder’s discovery out of enemy hands.

Buchan wrote this as a light romp while he was recovering from an illness, and it can be read that way. Hannay is a very human superman. He has great endurance and hunter’s skills learned in South Africa, but he also has moods. He talks himself out of worrying about his fate, then falls into a funk, then rises again to a mood of certainty. It is very British – can you imagine a hard boiled American PI with moods – and very charming. More than anything else in the whole series, moods humanize Hannay and make us care about him, as well as about his mission.

The Thirty-nine Steps was written during WW I, but takes place just before hostilities broke out. It joins Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands as a call for England to wake up to the coming danger, although Childer’s book was true prophesy and Buchan’s only pretended to be. The second two novels in the series take place during the war (tomorrow’s post) and the last two take place after the war has ended (Wednesday’s post).