A Prince of the Captivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading, stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• True Grit and Gringos, by Charles Portis

• The Iliad

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

• The Divine Comedy, by Dante

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

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

The Watcher by the Threshold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— John Buchan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Burnet of Barns

This first week of John Buchan June concludes with a high-spirited historical adventure set in the hills of the Scottish Borders. This may sound like a familiar Buchan setting until one gets into the specifics. This is his first full-length novel, published in 1898 when he was just twenty-three: John Burnet of Barns.

Taking place mostly in the late 1680s, during a time of widespread unrest and disorder throughout Britain but especially in Scotland, this novel follows the adventures of John Burnet, the scion of an old and respected Border Reiver family from Barns, near Peebles on the River Tweed. Burnet may have rollicking, swashbuckling ancestors but he is a shy, diffident, scholarly sort. Where his aging father crippled himself racing a horse through the hills with other young bloods, John is set for university studies in Glasgow.

But the old yearning for adventure in his blood shows from the very first chapter, in which John, as a boy, skips out on a lesson from his tutor to go fishing in the River Tweed. There he meets the beautiful Marjory Veitch who, like him, comes of old aristocratic stock and, like him, has an imaginative, adventurous streak. They become constant companions and playmates right up until John departs for university.

John is a good student but never fully settles into university life. After a chance encounter in the streets with his arrogant and soldierly cousin Gilbert, who comes riding through town wearing his fashionable best, John decides on the spot to drop out and return home to Barns. To his surprise, Gilbert has beaten him there. To his greater and much less welcome surprise, Gilbert has met Marjory and decided to make her his own.

The encounter in the streets of Glasgow and Gilbert’s intrusion into John’s innocent world back home mark the beginning of an escalating series of confrontations. Gilbert’s attentions to Marjory provoke an epiphany in John—he realizes he loves her and always has, and sets out immediately to propose. She accepts. Soon after, John’s father dies, and he becomes the laird of his family estate much sooner than expected. He delays his marriage to Marjory so he can step fully into his new role.

But he also decides, thinking he has settled the matters of betrothing Marjory and getting his father’s affairs in order, that he should complete his studies—not at Edinburgh, but on the continent at Leyden in Holland. Marjory agrees to wait for him.

In Holland, John meets and clashes with Gilbert again. After John defeats him in a duel, Gilbert departs Holland in a sulk. This seeming victory proves fateful for John. Shortly afterward, John receives word that Gilbert has returned to Tweeddale, has insinuated himself into Marjory’s drunken brother’s company, and is menacing her and the household. Once again he drops his studies and heads home.

But Gilbert has baited him. Upon returning from Holland, he has fabricated documents showing John to be conspiring against King James II. A warrant is out for John’s arrest, and no sooner has he landed in Edinburgh than he flees to the hills to live as an outlaw accompanied only by Nicol, his shrewd and resourceful servant.

The central action of the book follows John through his months of outlawry—falling back from one hiding place to another, encountering numerous colorful characters, passing along secret letters for Marjory, and occasionally surprising and humiliating his pursuers—a condition only ended by distant political revolution. The climax of the novel is a relentless horseback chase across Scotland to Gilbert’s remote estate in the West Country with Gilbert and the captive Marjory always staying just ahead of John and Nicol, who must contend with freezing weather, drunken ferrymen, closed gates, scaled walls, and swordplay among the dangers.

I’ve actually owned a copy of John Burnet of Barns since the first John Buchan June in 2022 but have hesitated to read it. It’s among the earliest of Buchan’s published work and Buchan himself regarded it with some embarrassment, later calling it “immature and boyish” and “a hotch-potch.” In her biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan writes that he thought it “cumbersome and ill put together.” The very first of his novels that I reviewed here, A Lost Lady of Old Years, came out the year after John Burnet of Barns, and though I liked and admired it I noted pacing problems and a passive and slightly dense protagonist. If Buchan himself viewed the even earlier John Burnet of Barns as inferior, how bad must it be?

As it happens, not bad at all. I began it with some trepidation but quickly found myself engrossed. Despite some evident problems that mark John Burnet of Barns as an early and, yes, immature work, it has all of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction and was some of the most purely enjoyable reading I’ve had in a while.

The narration itself is not as tight and economical as is typical of later Buchan. As a narrator, John tends to overexplain, and even interesting incidents sometimes drag on. There are a number of free-floating incidents, like a flash flood on the Tweed that introduces the character of Nicol, that last perhaps too long and contribute too little to the plot. But the biggest weakness of the novel, at least in its first third, is pacing. John narrates his own life, and a real life is episodic, but it takes several chapters for the narrative to gain direction and momentum. The early chapters are unfocused and diffuse. We are a long way from the skillful in medias res openings of similar historical adventures like Midwinter or The Free Fishers.

These are real faults, but they barely detract from an accomplished, carefully constructed, and—most importantly—exciting story.

Technically, despite faults in pacing and overlong start, the novel is strongly written and intricately plotted. Every plot element is set up for later payoff. Considering the reputation Buchan still has for relying on coincidence in his fiction, there is very little of that in John Burnet of Barns. With such care taken over preparing the elements of the climax, the novel’s cross-country chase succeeds brilliantly.

The novel also features great historical detail in vividly and authentically described 1680s settings. Historical elements like the Covenanters and the Glorious Revolution are well integrated into the plot without overburdening it. Buchan also creates tactile, evocative atmosphere throughout. A cave full of outlaws, a lethal swordfight in a snowy forest, a rough crossing in a small ferry, hiding in the tall grass and heather as the enemy searches, and a shallow rocky fishing stream at sundown—all are beautifully imagined. And despite some incidents lasting too long or leading nowhere, others add such color and texture or are so fun and exciting that they’re worthwhile. A chance encounter with another outlaw, a nameless man with a terrible yearning to swordfight with someone, anyone, a man whom John never sees again, is especially wonderful.

But the novel’s greatest virtue is its stock of lifelike and engaging characters, most especially Nicol, Marjory, and John himself. Nicol is a recognizable type, the faithful lower-class servant (imagine a more dangerous Samwise Gamgee from the Scots Borders) but Buchan imbues him with life as a distinct, memorable individual. During his months in hiding John never seems more vulnerable than when he has sent Nicol on an errand, a clear testament to Nicol’s strength as a character.

Modern readers would unthinkingly critique Marjory as a damsel in distress, but this would be to misread a strong, canny woman with a lot of endurance. She’s sharper than John, which makes their awkward courtship sweet and funny, and in staving off Gilbert—right up until he uses his authority as a cavalry officer to kidnap her—she shows great tenacity. John and Marjory may not be Buchan’s best romantic pair—I’d still give that title to Sir Archie Roylance and Janet Raden in John Macnab—but they are well-matched and fun to read about.

But this is John’s story, and whatever the flaws of his narration he keeps the novel interesting and engaging. A recognizable Buchan archetype, the retiring scholar who is forced into action and daring, it is remarkable to see how clearly Buchan has both imagined and realized him so early in his career. Intelligent and learned but also recklessly impulsive, his earnestness, his senses of duty and honor, his friendship with Nicol, and his love for Marjory make him enormously likeable and carry us along with him as he changes. John Burnet of Barns is a coming-of-age story, and John’s flightiness and indecision gradually give way to the steadfastness and determination of maturity.

The man racing on horseback through sleet and snow in the middle of the night is unimaginable when we first meet him skipping out on school to go fishing, and that unexpectedness, through surprising turns and slow transformation, helps make John Burnet of Barns thrilling—a wonderful opening movement to a great career in storytelling.

The Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.

Moral intelligibility

In “Ship to Tarshish,” a short story in The Runagates Club, a collection by John Buchan published in 1928, a member of the titular club tells the story of Jim, a young man whose father, a wealthy businessman, dies immediately after a collapse of the company stocks. Unprepared for responsibility after a sheltered life of luxury and entertainments, Jim buckles under the pressure to save the family business and flees to Canada to start over on his own.

There he spirals, unable to hold down a job that requires hard work or any specific skill or even consistently showing up, and lands in “a pretty squalid kind of doss-house.” The narrator describes Jim’s ruminations there:

The physical discomfort was bad enough. He tramped the streets ill-clad and half-fed, and saw prosperous people in furs, and cheerful young parties, and fire-lit, book-lined rooms. But the spiritual trouble was worse. Sometimes, when things were very bad, he was fortunate enough to have his thoughts narrowed down to the obtaining of food and warmth. But at other times he would be tormented by a feeling that his misfortunes were deserved, and that Fate with a heavy hand was belabouring him because he was a coward. His trouble was no longer the idiotic sense of guilt about his father’s bankruptcy; it was a much more rational penitence, for he was beginning to realise that I had been right, and that he had behaved badly in running away from a plain duty. At first he choked down the thought, but all that miserable winter it grew upon him. His disasters were a direct visitation of the Almighty on one who had shown the white feather. He came to have an almost mystical feeling about it. He felt that he was branded like Cain, so that everybody knew that he had funked, and yet he realised that a rotten morbid pride ironly prevented him from retracing his steps.

Back at the beginning of the year I wondered how much the values and commitments of the characters in Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic, would even be intelligible to a modern reader. Waltharius is over a thousand years old, relating a story from almost half a millennium before that. “Ship to Tarshish” is not even a hundred years old and is set in the 1927 world in which it was published. And yet we have the same problem.

The story’s drama grows entirely from the requirements placed upon Jim. Repairing damage from his father’s time proves too much for him. He can’t take it, and is ashamed that he can’t and that everyone knows and that he made it worse by running away. The redemption in the story comes from, as Kate Macdonald puts it in her introduction to The Runagates Club, “facing one’s fears and demonstrating courage and moral strength,” even when one is “shockingly inadequate.”

But, as I wondered about the bonds of loyalty and obligation in Waltharius, how much of this would a modern reader get? The ideas of Fate and retribution from God, or that certain behavior is shameful and that one should listen to critics, or the very concept of duty—Buchan conveys these powerfully but moderns scoff at all of it. Even the cultural allusions that gave the story resonance in 1927—Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, the mark of Cain—cannot be counted on to convey meaning to them. What John Keegan called the “moral atmosphere” of Buchan’s work would be not so much rejected as missed completely.

The modern reader is more likely to sympathize with the “useless” Jim at the beginning of the story: a well-liked, inoffensive, sociable non-entity whose only noteworthy skill is dancing. Rather than tough talk and hard work, they’d recommend therapy. And yet that would leave Jim stranded in his weakness. Worse, it would probably give him a flaw he lacks, a lack that is one of his few saving graces in the story—entitlement.

You can read “Ship of Tarshish” at Project Gutenberg. The Runagates Club is a fine collection of a wide variety of stories and will be one of the first books I write about next week, as this year’s John Buchan June gets underway.

Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

On Richard Adams’s Traveller

Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lee’s General Order No. 9, his farewell to his army. To commemorate these events, one of the Civil War history Instagram accounts that I follow shared Soldier’s Tribute, a painting of Lee’s farewell to his troops by the incomparable Don Troiani. 

The painting shows Lee, mounted, surrounded by his exhausted men who reach out to him, as they so often did, for succor. Lee turns to his right to shake the hands of his soldiers; in his left he loosely holds Traveller’s reins. If Lee is still, already statuesque, Traveller, his head pulled slightly back, shows subtle movement, either slowly edging through the gathering crowd or coming finally to rest in the face of it. If Lee is calm and resigned, Traveller’s eyes show, if not anxiety, puzzlement.

Seeing Traveller in that painting, especially with the subtle motion and emotion with which Troiani always packs his work, brought Richard Adams’s novel Traveller to mind again. It’s an unusual book, even for the author of Watership Down, and in it Adams does something remarkable.

The novel is narrated by Traveller, in the first person, in thick phonetically-rendered dialect. It can be hard to understand at first, and the danger of such narration is that it will come across as silly. But you get used to it, and the “accent” of Traveller’s speech is never used to mock him. Traveller has a distinctive voice, and Adams, an Englishman, captures the tone and style of Southern yarn-spinning with remarkable accuracy.

That’s one area in which such a book could have misstopped but didn’t. There’s also a running gag of sorts in that Traveller, a simple animal unquestioningly loyal to his master, always interprets every event in the most optimistic way possible. At first it’s ha-ha funny and we chuckle in amused sympathy, but gradually, as the novel nears its end, this use of irony creates a profound sense of pathos. Traveller ends the novel thinking he and Lee won, that Lee is leaving Appomattox not downcast and defeated but relieved at having forced “the blue men” into submission, and instead of a punchline it’s powerfully moving.

I don't know of any other novel quite like it. Dramatic irony is so often used for reasons other than pity.

It also achieves its most powerful effects if you know the Civil War and the Eastern Theatre and its colorful cast of characters—well-known generals like Jackson, Longstreet, Hill (AP and DH), and Stuart as well as more obscure figures like Prussian cavalryman Heros von Borcke—and even their horses well. Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel, in particular, a pensive horse full of dark forebodings, is an especially powerful presence. I have to wonder what someone ignorant of all that would make of it. The animal characters are so well-drawn and memorable and their skewed understandings of the human world so well conveyed that I imagine even someone with only passing knowledge of the Civil War would get it, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, Traveller is criminally underappreciated. Its concept sounds like a cute gimmick and I’m sure a lot of people have written it off as kitsch or a mere curiosity as a result. But as I’ve written here before, it’s artfully done, a marvelous, inventive angle on a familiar story. And the goal of retelling a familiar story, as I often tell me students when approaching a subject they might actually already know about, should be to make it strange again. Check it out.

You can view Soldier’s Tribute with some extensive explanatory notes at Don Troiani’s Facebook page here. The dust jacket art of my first-edition hardback of Traveller is Summer, one of four memorial murals by Charles Hoffbauer at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. And if you’re ever in Lexington, VA, visit Traveller’s grave right outside the crypt of Lee Chapel, where his master is entombed.

The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

Len Deighton on writing to entertain

Apropos of my thoughts on the false divide between literary and genre fiction last week, here’s a great 1977 interview with Len Deighton that I happened across over the weekend. This interview takes place after the success of The IPCRESS File and its sequels as well as Bomber and Fighter but before the Bernie Samson novels I’ve recently mentioned here.

Asked whether or not his heroes are not less concerned with thoughts than with actions, Deighton replies:

Well, I think that’s true, and I think that people who write the sort of books I write are essentially in the entertainment business, and they will be judged according to how successful they are at entertaining the reader, and anything else that they want to do has to be done in a way that is subordinate to the main task of entertaining the reader. And I think that the sort of books I write are essentially action books, that people move, that they do think but that they don’t spend too many pages in thinking if you sell many and there has to be pace with it.

The literary-genre divide is nothing new, of course, as interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s followup question makes clear: “When you say ‘I’m in the entertainment business,’ you’re separating yourself from people you’d call ‘novelists,’ is that…?” Deighton:

Well, depends how you use the word novel. I mean, I think novelists at one time were people who wrote the sort of books that Victorian housemaids took to bed at night and read. Well, I’d be very happy to be identified as a novelist in that context. But I’m afraid that the way that the word is used nowadays, to mean profound and philosophical, well now I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone away from a good read by attaching a label like that to anything that I do.

Deighton gently but firmly disputes not the status of his own books but the artificiality and pretention built up around what it means to be a “novelist.” His happiness to align with the books that entertained even the lowly (Deighton’s parents both worked in service), the sort defended by Chesterton in “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” is of a piece with his insistence that messaging, argument, and “anything else” a writer might “want to do” with a book must come after entertaining the reader.

Proper priorities, I think.

I’m struck in this interview by Deighton’s confidence in sticking up for himself as an entertainer. Perhaps it’s born of his background. The posh and well-connected Ian Fleming, by comparison, right from the publication of his first Bond novel adopted a defensive crouch about his writing. This posture comes through in his 1963 essay “How to Write a Thriller.” A sample:

I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

Despite including some good advice, Fleming severely undersells himself throughout this essay. But read on for a story Fleming tells about a conversation with a young relative writing self-consciously literary novels, and note the way in which Fleming defines himself as “a writer” rather than “an author,” a difference only of connotation, and asserts that his only goal is “to get the reader to turn over the page.”

Both Fleming and Deighton aim to avoid pretention; both simply want to tell stories. Both ended up doing much more. Again—proper priorities.

Deighton, who is still with us at age 96, by the way, is always great in the old interviews I’ve been able to turn up on YouTube. (Here’s another one from 1983 that’s quite good albeit not as in-depth.) His interview style—open, straightforward, down-to-earth, making no fuss and creating no Oz-the-Great-and-Powerful mystery around his trade—reminds me of Elmore Leonard. Both are always refreshing to listen to. Check out the interview quoted above and give one of Deighton’s books a try if you haven’t yet.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Literary vs genre fiction, craft vs content

Item: This week at The Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas bids “Good riddance to literary fiction,” arguing that “it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.” Readers want stories, not beautiful but aimless style.

Item: This week 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back announced their next read, Colleen Hoover’s BookTok bestseller Ugly Love. In discussing their choice, Mike and Conor brought up this passage from a Texas Monthly article on Hoover’s success and recent writer’s block:

Hoover is often approached by readers who tell her that her books are the first they’ve finished in years, but her success has puzzled some fellow authors. “A lot of writers will read my books, and they’re like, ‘Why is this so popular?’ ” she says. “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.”

That Spectator column celebrating the near-irrelevance of literary novels is odd and frustrating, not only because the magnificent work of popular art that awakened Thomas to the pointlessness of literary fiction was, ludicrously, The Da Vinci Code, but because the image he sets up of literary fiction is a straw man. Gorgeously written, navel-gazing novels on Important Themes in which nothing actually happens? This describes a recognizable prententious award-bait type but is not characteristic of all literary fiction. Certainly not the kind that has lasted.

But I agree entirely with Thomas at one point: stories are what matter. This is why, to me, the division of fiction into literary and genre fiction has always felt uncomfortable if not downright false. Good fiction is good fiction, as far as I’m concerned, and so my interest has steadily drifted toward care and craftsmanship and a compelling story wherever you may find it.

So I’d rather read a good literary novel than The Da Vinci Code, not because the latter is low-brow or too popular, but because it’s abominably written. And by the same token, I’d rather read a good crime or sci-fi novel than self-absorbed high-brow bilge—anything by the Bloomsbury group, for example, the prototype of what Thomas is condemning in his Spectator piece. What traditionally separates Evelyn Waugh from John Wyndham or Graham Greene from Ian Fleming is reputation, which is fickle and easy to manipulate. What these all have in common is that they’re excellent writers, which is all that should matter.

The real dividing line in modern fiction runs between stories and content, between craft and indiscriminate consumption, between good stories told well, with the mastery of all available creative tools, and mere utilitarian delivery systems for specific kinds of (increasingly pornographic) audience-demanded stimulation. As Mike, baffled, spoofed Hoover’s explanation of her approach, “You know, this whole writing thing—I’m not a fan of the prose, or…”

If the words don’t matter, you’re not writing.

My guess is that rumors of the death of literary fiction, like Mark Twain’s, will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. What will die will be pretension—MFA-in-crowd stories of the kind mocked by Thomas in his column. What will survive—what must survive—are good stories told with care in any genre. Only that will outlast fads and keep imaginations rather than appetites alive.