The Butt-Covering Chronicles

Simon & Schuster has just published a new 75th anniversary paperback of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. This edition includes a short essay by Bradbury detailing his process of drafting and revising the stories that make up the Chronicles and expounding some of the philosophical assumptions behind them. It’s an interesting short introduction to the book—especially for anyone interested in a writer’s process and craft—but even more interesting is the “Editor’s Note” that precedes it.

The note begins with some information about the provenance of the essay, which was written shortly after Bradbury submitted the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles in the fall of 1950 and was rediscovered in his papers in the 2000s, but concludes with this, where the real purpose of the note becomes clear:

“How I Wrote My Book” refers to cultural touchstones (e.g., authors, books, music, politics) that may not resonate with today’s reader. Perhaps more disturbing will be some of the words and phrases Bradbury uses. Simply put, the language of the 1950s was not politically correct. Yet “How I Wrote My Book” offers fascinating insight into Bradbury’s creative process and is, at the same time, a powerful, at times urgent, commentary on Bradbury’s beliefs, thoughts, and fears about humanity and our world. And while expressions used by Bradbury in this essay may be anachronistic, his message is timeless and rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

After reading it with mounting contempt I told my wife about it. Had I misunderstood? she wondered. Maybe the note was referring to the stories, not Bradbury’s essay. So I checked again today and, no, the note is very specifically getting defensive about Bradbury’s introductory essay.

And what shocking material in Bradbury’s essay prompted this note? Having gone through the essay twice, I’m still not actually sure. One reads a note like this expecting to run into racial slurs, but there is nothing obviously offensive in anything Bradbury writes. He even goes out of his way to condemn fascism, Stalinism, and Joe McCarthy and to praise imaginative freedom in the kind of stirring, well-intentioned liberal peroration formerly beloved of English teachers.

My best guess is that Bradbury’s frequent use of “man” and “mankind” in discussing human exploration of space, the use of “his” as a generic pronoun (as opposed to now, when every imaginary writer or student is always pointedly “she”), a hypothetical “Mr and Mrs Joe Smith from Ashtabula,” and one sympathetic comparison of his Martians to Indians are the “disturbing” language the editor wants to prepare us for.

(Also, how can expressions you use in your own time be “anachronistic”? Bradbury didn’t slip into Old English or some future Anglo-Martian creole. This is just silly.)

At least the publisher didn’t censor or rewrite Bradbury’s essay. The irony of past attempts to censor Fahrenheit 451 probably ruled that out. But I was left wondering what kind of mealy-mouthed weenie wrote this, or even thought using up a whole page for it was a good idea in the first place. Notably, while an “editor’s note,” there is no editor named anywhere in the book. No one wanted to put his name on this—or, more likely, hers.

Last year I looked at some publisher’s notes and copyright page notices in recent reprints of Agatha Christie as a way to chart the hopeful trend away from “updates” and the “removal of offensive terms” toward their unexpurgated publication. Such notes are an improvement over stealth edits and censorship, but as long as this butt-covering instinct remains the work of authors who are no longer here to defend themselves will be in danger.

I ran across this new copy of The Martian Chronicles in Walmart. Just around the corner on an endcap were boxes of those cheap, faux-leather reprints of public domain classics. (Curiously, these are also published under the Simon & Schuster umbrella.) After reading this note I picked up a few of those that were likely suspects for censorship—Treasure Island, a fat volume of Lovecraft—and saw this in 8-point type at the bottom of the copyright page:

These works have been published in their original form to preserve the author’s intent and style.

Exactly right. Simple, to the point, and all the explanation necessary. More of this, and less of the editor’s note above.

Hollywood as volcano god

I’m about halfway through CM Kushins’s new biography of Elmore Leonard Cooler than Cool, and just read the hilarious, frustrating story of Leonard’s attempt to get his Edgar-winning crime novel LaBrava adapted for the screen.

LaBrava’s film rights were picked up by Dustin Hoffman, who, to put it generously, turned out to be a bit of a needy flake. He shopped the project around multiple studios before bringing in Cannon—of mid-80s Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson fame—skipped out on meetings with Leonard and potential directors like Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, demanded repeated rewrites from Leonard, fought to get co-director credit (nixed by the DGA), objected to his love interest being a much older woman (a key plot point of the novel), and finally dumped the project when Cannon published an ad in Variety using a publicity photo he didn’t like. Thanks to Hoffman, for almost a year and a half Leonard was unable to work on his novels.

I love books and movies. As I read, I imagine the movie I’d make of the book, especially if it’s good, and when I write I’m always imagining how I’d turn it into a movie. But I know that the relationship between the two art forms is fraught at best, and that the movie business is a business first. Though I’d love see movie versions of my books, I have no illusions about what might happen to them along the way. So I was especially interested in the commiseration offered Leonard by two other crime novelists once the story of LaBrava’s travails got around.

Here’s John D MacDonald (whose A Deadly Shade of Gold I’m reading right now), reinforcing my non-joiner instincts: “I don’t see how you endure those people, and endure group effort, and endure conferences and stupid revision requests and kindred bullshit. . . . Please write the Hollywood book and kill them off in ugly ways.”

That “Hollywood book” would eventually be Get Shorty.

And here, more vividly, is Donald Westlake: “Dutch, why do you keep hoping to make a good movie? The books are ours; everything else is virgins thrown into the volcano. Be happy if the check is good.”

Kushins ends this part of Leonard’s story with a great stinger:

[A]s he began his next novel—the New Orleans crime epic he’d been planning since the previous year—he, along with [LaBrava producer Walter] Mirisch, took solace in the film Dustin Hoffman had opted to make instead of LaBrava.

Behind closed doors, they were among the only ones who found Ishtar very funny, indeed.

I read LaBrava last summer, and it’s one of Leonard’s best. Perhaps it’s a mercy that there’s no Dustin Hoffman-starring mid-80s movie version floating around out there. It still belongs to Leonard—a virgin pulled back from the brink of the volcano, just in time.

Short, fun, and good

We’ve been traveling for Independence Day but I wanted to put something short together before the weekend. A few recent items that have been on my mind:

All good food for thought, and with an important commonality: the importance of short books. Per Henderson’s Substack essay, an easy either to get back into or to renew one’s love for reading is to “prioritize short and fun books at first.”

My one quibble: I’d strike “at first.” Short, fun books are good at any time of one’s reading life. The following is a list of my own recommendations. All are books I’ve read and enjoyed and would stick up for in a fight, and all are 1) short, 2) fun, and 3) have good literary qualities. I have considered no other factors in selecting them, so if you have some criterion or criteria for a list that you value above 1-3 above, write your own list. The more book recommendations the merrier!

I’ve sorted them into broad categories but, in making these recommendations, I’d also encourage you not to limit yourself to any one category. Again—I’d vouch for all of these.

Familiarity breeds contempt

These are the books that you read—or were supposed to read—at some point in high school. I’m listing these here because despite being on a lot of school reading lists, they’re actually classics and are still being read for a good reason.

  • Animal Farm, by George Orwell

  • Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

  • The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

  • Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Thrillers and spy novels

Arranged in chronological order.

  • The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—A man framed for murder by agents unknown must flee both his enemies and the authorities. One of the books most responsible for the shape of the modern thriller and still a lightning-fast read. Long blog review here.

  • Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A hunter arrested and tortured by the (unnamed) Gestapo for an attempt on the (unnamed) dictator of a central European German-speaking country must escape his pursuers, who chase him all the way back to England.

  • Journey into Fear and Epitaph for a Spy, by Eric Ambler—Two excellent spy thrillers from just before the outbreak of World War II. In both, an ordinary man is caught in the crossfire of international espionage and must contend with his enemies as well as his own ignorance of spycraft in order to survive.

  • Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming—Forget the stereotype of movie Bond. The original Bond novel is short, brutal, briskly paced, and brilliantly written. Whether you go on to the rest of Fleming’s original series or not, Casino Royale is worth your time.

  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré—A British agent plays a long con on East German intelligence. A Cold War thriller in a deliberately different vein from any of the novels listed above, with heavy emphasis on the intricacies of spying and deception.

Swashbucklers old and new

  • The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope—An English tourist swaps places with the king of a small European kingdom when he gets falling-down drunk on the day of his coronation. Then the king’s scheming brother kidnaps the real king, forcing the bluff to continue. Spawned a whole subgenre of lesser imitators but a rollicking old-fashioned adventure itself.

  • Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson—Another one that’s a classic for a reason. Even if you know the story, it’s hard not to feel a boyish yearning for adventure awaken while reading or re-reading it.

  • Salute to Adventurers, by John Buchan—A young Scot embarks on a series of wilderness adventures involving pirates, Indians, and apocalyptic religious extremists in colonial Virginia. Long blog review here.

  • Captain Blood, by Raphael Sabatini—An English doctor falsely accused of treason escapes imprisonment and wages a war of piracy against his enemies. Less well-known now than Treasure Island, but one of the canonical pirate tales.

  • On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers—The great modern pirate story, combining vividly imagined real-world piracy with magic. An exciting, engrossing read from the first chapter.

Mystery and crime

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes and Watson wander into a gothic ghost story. Good mystery, great atmosphere, and sharply and concisely written.

  • Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—I’ve enjoyed every Christie novel I’ve read, but the vividly realized ancient Egyptian setting in this one makes it unusual and especially memorable.

  • The Moonshine War and Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard—Two good early crime novels from Leonard, one set in Prohibition-era Kentucky and the other in early 1970s California. In both, ordinary men must resist overwhelming odds to do what they think is right. Short, tight, and engaging.

  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—Boston crooks scheme, run guns, rob banks, and betray each other to the authorities. A brilliant short crime novel told almost entirely through dialogue.

  • The Highwayman, by Craig Johnson—Is a long-dead Indian police officer sending distress calls in an area that is otherwise without radio reception? A short supernatural entry in the Longmire mystery series.

Sci-fi (and adjacent territory)

  • The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, by HG Wells—Again, classics for a reason. Both brilliantly imagined, well paced, thought-provoking, and very short.

  • The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London—An apocalyptic story of an epidemic that wipes out most of mankind as well as the story of one man left in the ruins who must start over. A great surprise from an author I’d previously associated with dog stories.

  • The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham—Two great postwar sci-fi novels. In one, killer plants escape and wreak havoc after the majority of mankind is blinded, and in the other, alien invaders wage war against mankind from beneath the ocean. Both brilliant, suspenseful, and surprising reads. Long blog review of The Kraken Wakes here.

  • The Road, by Cormac McCarthy—Father and son cross a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Again, don’t let its popularity and the Oprah endorsement lull you into contempt. This is a genuinely great and powerfully moving novel.

Westerns

  • Massacre at Goliad, by Elmer Kelton—Human drama and action in the Texian Revolution.

  • Last Stand at Saber River and Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leonard—Two of Leonard’s best Westerns. As in the crime novels recommended above, both feature principled men seeking restitution against stronger and less scrupulous enemies and monstrous injustice.

  • True Grit, by Charles Portis—Whether you’ve seen one or both film adaptations, Portis’s original novel is still better. A masterpiece of tone and voice with a compelling story whether you’re reading it for the first or the fifth time.

  • No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy—Another brilliant novel brilliantly adapted for the screen, but still better than the movie. Not a bad place to start with McCarthy if you find The Road’s post-apocalyptic bleakness daunting.

Other (I dare not say “literary”)

  • Shiloh, by Shelby Foote—A great short Civil War novel told from multiple points of view over two days. A great fictional account of real events, beautifully written and rich in detail.

  • The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis—The souls of the dead take a field trip to the edge of heaven. Simple, straightforward, but wonderfully rich and powerful. One of my favorites of Lewis’s books and one you can easily read in an afternoon.

  • Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King—My estimation of King has steadily fallen for the last decade, but this novella remains a small masterpiece and one of the handful of books on this list that I read in one sitting, without stopping. Still one of my favorite reading experiences. I reread it recently and it holds up.

  • Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton—Beowulf retold from an outsider’s point of view. A great adventure, a wry spoof of academia, a shocking horror story, and a lot of fun if you also know Beowulf. Long blog review here.

  • Grendel, by John Gardner—Though “Beowulf retold from the monster’s point of view” might sound like a familiar, overdone premise in our age of Wicked and Maleficent and Cruella, Gardner’s novel differs from those in presenting Grendel as sympathetic but still evil and Beowulf as still heroic. A great read with hidden depths.

  • The Loved One and Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh—The darkest of dark comedies from a sharp-eyed master of stinging humor. I laughed so hard I cried in both books.

Again, these are just the ones that came easily to mind, and I’m sure I could supply a list twice or three times as long. Whether you’re one of the people described above, someone who wants to become a reader again, or you’re just looking for something to refresh your reading life here in the middle of the year, I hope you’ll find something good in this list.

The Path of the King

This year’s John Buchan June, in which I’ve tried to focus more on Buchan’s short fiction, draws to a close with a book that is both a collection of short stories and a coherent novel and may be my favorite read this month, a sweeping set of interconnected tales spanning a thousand years: The Path of the King.

Beginning in the 9th or 10th century with the son of a Norse king, Buchan follows his descendants through multiple countries and widely varying fortunes. In the first story, the king gifts his son Biorn with a golden arm-ring. Biorn has just come of age to sail to war with his father, and in the year the story takes place famine and bad weather have placed greater than usual pressure on the outcome of their Viking raids. They strike west, avoiding Britain because of the hard-earned vigilance of its kingdoms, and settle on pillaging Frankish lands along the English Channel. When they are ambushed, Biorn is one of the only survivors, snatched out of the fight by a foreigner in his father’s war band and left in the woods. He wanders until he finally begs help at a peasant’s hut, where the story leaves him—alone, bereft, with nothing left to him but his arm-ring and an old woman’s prophecy that a great kingdom would one day arise from him.

The ring reappears in the next story on the finger of one of William the Conqueror’s more principled knights, and then on the finger of an impoverished descendant, a girl who escapes England by marrying a Bruges cloth merchant and making a fortune in commerce. One of her descendants goes on Crusade with St Louis and departs on an ill-fated mission to meet the Mongol Khan Houlagou, a mission from which only his arm—still wearing the ring—returns. One of his descendants hosts Joan of Arc, who convinces her to marry a good knight when she has doubts about the future, and one of their children becomes a Renaissance Humanist scholar and, finally, a voyager with Columbus.

A generation on, the ring returns to England with an aristocratic Huguenot refugee following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, is on the hand of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s men during one of Raleigh’s last voyages to Virginia, and on the hand of one of the regicides who signs Charles I’s death warrant at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

This marks the beginning of a descent in the line, and the next generations we meet are skulkers and spies. One, the regicide’s grandson, works half-heartedly as a Catholic spy in England and, fearing he will be exposed by a judge who has discovered his secret, has decided to murder him when someone else does it first. Caught in an arcane plot, he is himself killed and used as manufactured evidence of a Catholic plot to invade England. His grandson, spying on the Jacobites for the Duke of Marlborough, is caught by Jacobite agents and forced to admit that, though he comes “of an ancient house” it is “somewhat decayed.” The ring is his only proof.

Spared, he vows to change his way of life, though the decay of the house seemingly continues. The next story finds one of his descendants in the wilderness of Kentucky with Daniel Boone. Like the ancestors who populate the previous stories, he is bold, intelligent, and restless. Also like them, he is ill-fated. Boone retrieves his ring and we next find it, in The Path of the King’s next-to-last story, in the possession of Nancy, a dying frontierswoman in a rickety cabin. In her final day of life, her beloved son Abe loses the ring while using it as a sinker on a fishing line and she has a vision of all the boys through her ancestry who had desired and proudly worn the ring. Whatever the ring signified, she decides, has reached its end.

The final story, told in four vignettes spanning four years of war and upheaval, follows her son Abe as President of the United States.

The first story in the first book covered this month, “The Green Wildebeest” in The Runagates Club, is introduced by Richard Hannay as a meditation on the way ancient things survive and recur in groups of people. The Path of the King is a book-length elaboration on this theme as well as many other familiar Buchan motifs, especially providence. Denied his father’s throne, Biorn and all of his descendants nevertheless keep the kingliness of their blood alive, and all of their actions and decisions—from the Conquest, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years’ War to the Reformation, English Civil War, and the American frontier—prepare the way for the man who will close the circle and fulfil the promise made to Biorn, ruling as “the last of the Kings.”

But as I’ve written before, a theme by itself is nothing. The power of a theme grows from particularity, the concrete specifics with which an author dramatizes it. The great strength of The Path of the King lies in Buchan’s vividly imagined historical vignettes. Each is populated by distinct characters in well-realized historical scenes that, despite their brevity, breathe the spirit of each story’s age strongly and authentically. It is totally absorbing. The book’s thematic connecting tissue, much like the ring itself, is always present but never the point, which gives The Path of the King both subtlety and a staggering cumulative effect.

Also crucial to this effect is the elegiac tone of much of the book. Though a few of the stories at the beginning and end span years and are long enough to be subdivided into chapters, many of them are vignettes—single historical moments. Most of them concern death. The stories, small instances in the thousand years of this family line, are moments of handing over and transition. Epiphany plays an important role, especially as the family’s fortunes rise and fall—and fall and fall—and more than one character has a deathbed vision, a glimpse of past and future. All of this, rooted as it is in the lifelike detail of the individual stories, creates a profound sense of the passage of time and the brevity of life. Ubi sunt?

I could quibble with a few things. The historical tone in places is a bit whiggish, but Buchan, ever fair-minded, does not present a straightforward progressive picture of upright Protestant modernizers triumphing over the backward. The Puritans and Parliamentarians of the Civil War and the anti-Catholic Whigs of the Restoration come off looking especially bad and Buchan presents the Jacobites, as in A Lost Lady of Old Years and Midwinter, as noble, principled, but doomed—more obsolete than evil. A bit more galling is the celebration of Lincoln as a ruling like a king. For a Southerner and an Anti-Federalist sympathizer, this is not the endorsement Buchan thinks it is.

But those are quibbles. The final story about Lincoln is of a piece with the others in its imaginative qualities, in its portraits of real people—Lincoln’s story is told from the perspectives of Edwin Stanton and William Seward, who are as vividly drawn as St Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Cromwell, Titus Oates, and Daniel Boone in others—and in its emotional strength. The scenes of Lincoln’s death, at least when Stanton is not opining on his majesty, are a fittingly moving conclusion to the story.

Perhaps my favorite stories in The Path of the King were the first two, “Hightown under Sunfell” and “The Englishman,” which is unsurprising since they’re set in my beloved Early Middle Ages. Buchan imagines the Viking Age and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England brilliantly. “Eyes of Youth,” the Crusader’s adventure into Central Asia, and “In the Dark Land,” with Daniel Boone, offered the most adventure of the lot, with men striking into vast wildernesses full of alien dangers. The two spy stories, “The Marplot” and “The Lit Room,” offer some quality Buchan espionage in a historical vein. The most moving, for me, may have been “The Maid,” in which a young noblewoman who has just rejected an offer of marriage receives a visit from Joan of Arc and, a year later, has a vision of her on the day of her martyrdom. Buchan’s Joan is refreshingly both pious and human, an earthy farm girl in armor fired by love of God and France. And the penultimate story, “The Last Stage,” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln is gifted a vision of her ancestors and her son’s future, has a similarly mystical power.

The Path of the King was serialized over a year from the fall of 1920 to 1921 and published in book form in 1921. It was Buchan’s first historical fiction since Salute to Adventurers before the First World War and would be followed not only by more great thrillers but by the best of his historical novels—Midwinter, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, and The Free Fishers. Elegantly constructed, rich in meaning, and beautifully imagined throughout, The Path of the King is a fitting beginning for the peak of Buchan’s literary career.

* * * * *

Thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June. I’ve greatly enjoyed the four years of this project, most especially because of the people it’s brought me into contact with. I’m looking forward to next year, though with twenty-nine books under my belt—including the overwhelming majority of Buchan’s novels—I’m already trying to plan what to read. I may have read all of his most famous books by now, but as The Path of the King, The Watcher by the Threshold, and John Burnet of Barns show, there is still plenty of wonderful reading among the more obscure Buchan.

I hope y’all have a pleasant July, and that these posts can guide you toward something good to read in the long hot evenings. As always, thanks for reading!

The Courts of the Morning

This year’s John Buchan June enters the home stretch today with one of Buchan’s later thrillers, a South American adventure featuring filibustering European adventurers, American big business, kidnapping, regime change, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and two favorite recurring characters—The Courts of the Morning.

After a introduction by Richard Hannay in which he explains some of the background to the novel’s events, The Courts of the Morning picks up with Sir Archibald Roylance and his new bride Janet as they begin an overdue honeymoon. They decide to visit the small, prosperous Republic of Olifa on South America’s Pacific Coast. Meanwhile, Sandy Arbuthnot, now Lord Clanroyden, has grown restless in peacetime Britain—always the first tremor of adventure in a Buchan novel—and set off into the wild as a knight errant.

Olifa impresses Archie and Janet. Economically booming thanks to its copper deposits, the republic boasts a thriving capital city with both picturesque Latin American charm and every modern convenience, a smooth, charming president with modern ideas, a modern transportation network, and a modern, motorized army and air force staffed and advised by officers collected from around the world. Modernness—their guide insistently emphasizes it.

And yet, the more Archie and Janet see of Olifa, the more unease they detect. It takes enormous effort to get permission to tour the copper mines in the arid Gran Seco region near the mountains, as if someone is hiding something, and the presence of the mining company’s paramilitary guards and police forces strikes a discordant note. Castor, head of the mining conglomerate and de facto ruler of the Gran Seco, strikes Archie and Janet as superficially charming and cultured but cold, methodical, and ruthlessly pragmatic toward his workers, who sometimes end up in cities looking like the used up husks of human beings. The old families of Olifa, people who can trace their ancestry back to the soldiers of Pizarro, are unhappy. They resent the protection of a class of international mercenaries, and Castor’s mining has gained the unwelcome attention of the United States, which has begun to throw its weight around in Olifa in order to protect its interests in the mines.

Olifa sits poised between two fates: to become a commercial satellite of the United States or to become a vestigial attachment to Castor’s mining company.

Sandy and another old Buchan stalwart, the American spymaster John S Blenkiron, reappear. They’ve been spying on Olifa and Castor both as outsiders and, having infiltrated Castor’s operation, from the inside. They have uncovered extensive abuses by the company, which has functionally enslaved the local Indians and used a powerful local narcotic to keep employees like Castor’s bodyguards compliant, as well as Castor’s personal ambitions: to sweep away “the debris of democracy” in Olifa, establish himself as ruler, and use economic power to sow discord in the divided, restless United States.

With this intelligence in hand, Sandy and Blenkiron convince Archie to join them in a plot to foil Castor and shore up Olifa’s independence through revolution. Having kidnapped Castor and whisked him into protective isolation in the remote coastal plateau known as the Courts of the Morning, Blenkiron leads the mines and the Gran Seco in open revolt to Olifa’s government while Sandy takes to the hills and wages a guerrilla war with the help of the Indians. Castor, watched over by Janet and Barbara Dasent, an old acquaintance from America who has fallen for Sandy, bides his time, waiting—and slowly being transformed.

Even this thin summary covers only the first part of The Courts of the Morning. The civil war sparked by Sandy and Blenkiron goes on for weeks and becomes more and more complex. Castor’s drug-addicted “Conquistadors” reenter the story, kidnapping Janet Roylance in one of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, and become the most dangerous, unpredictable element in the plot against Castor. This is a rich, detailed, busy novel.

Perhaps too busy. Buchan’s fictional Olifa is convincingly imagined—much better than the Evallonia of his later, more straightforwardly Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds—and the war unfolds plausibly. An extended passage late in the book in which Olifa’s commanding general surveys the military situation is thoroughly thought-out and casts what we’ve already read of Archie and Sandy’s adventures into realistic relief. But, as multiple Buchan biographers, the John Buchan Society, and contemporary reviewers have pointed out, this level of detail sometimes overwhelms the novel. JB Priestley, in his review at the time, captures exactly my experience of the novel:

It begins very well indeed with a convincing South American republic, mysterious copper mines in the mountains and a first-class villain on the grand scale. Somewhere about halfway through I found myself losing interest. To begin with, there is no longer any mystery. Then the villain begins to change character, and nobody effective takes his place. And the long and involved accounts of guerrilla warfare that take up most of the later chapters seemed to me below the usual Buchan level of interest. In many ways this is a more ambitious tale than most of his old ‘thrillers’ but it does not seem to me so successful.

With the outbreak of the revolt, the mystery and espionage end, and the novel follows parallel tracks of war and spiritual transformation. It is good—I was not as disappointed as Priestley professed himself earlier in that review—but does not fully deliver on the promise of the absorbing opening chapters.

I’m struck that Buchan returned so often in his later fiction—here, in Castle Gay a year later, in The Blanket of the Dark a year after that, and in A Prince of the Captivity in 1933—to the kidnapping of a villain as a plot element. In all of these stories there is some hope that, cut off from their power and networks of cronies and henchmen, the villains can reconnect with something they have forgotten and repent and use their gifts for good—transformed by the renewing of their minds.

It doesn’t always work. In The Courts of the Morning it does, but this development is only partly convincing. Would Castor, under the influence of a woman like Janet, really turn from his greed, ruthlessness, and lust for power and embrace the cause of Olifa? I have my doubts, but was carried along by the story despite them. Others have flatly rejected it. You’ll have to read The Courts of the Morning for yourself to decide.

And read it you should. Despite the ponderous campaigning of the second half and its debatable conversion of Castor, The Courts of the Morning is good entertainment. There is intrigue and action aplenty, kidnappings and rescues, airplane crashes and sabotage campaigns, and many near misses. And however convincing one finds Castor’s change of heart, the climactic chapter, a nighttime assault on an old Olifero family’s home and a showdown between the last remaining groups of antagonists, is suspenseful and moving.

The Courts of the Morning is, in its way, a fantasy novel, and Buchan’s attention to sub-creating Olifa is one of the book’s joys. Discovering the country alongside Archie and Janet in the first chapters of the novel is almost as fun as the emerging mystery itself. And this vivid, realistic account of Olifa gives weight to the struggle in the majority of the book—whether Olifero nationalists who wish to wrest control of their homeland back from both the mining tycoons and the Yanquis, the Indians who wish to be left alone, or even the déraciné, mercenary henchmen of Castor’s company, the stakes are clear and important. It matters who wins.

The story is also thematically rich. The characters at various points discuss the laxness that comes with affluence, the dilution or corruption of national cultures by wealth and globalism, the abuse of power when centralized in a single man, the fleeting, fallible natures of all governments, and, as mentioned, the need not only for political but for spiritual transformation. Without the latter the former will mean nothing.

But my primary interest in this book, and perhaps the best reason to read it beyond enjoyment, is to see two favorite characters as the protagonists of their own novel. One of the delights of reading through Buchan’s vast body of fiction is the large cast who drift in and out of each other’s stories. Archie and Sandy are two of the most frequent supporting characters. Both appear in Richard Hannay’s First World War adventures (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast) and Archie plays a crucial role in the Sir Edward Leithen adventure John Macnab, which is where he meets and falls in love with Janet.

Blenkiron also appears and others are namedropped, but Archie and Sandy, so often side characters, did not disappoint. Archie and Janet turn out to have a much more eventful honeymoon than they could have imagined, with their devotion to each other as well as their courage tested, and Sandy again proves himself a master of disguise, of irregular warfare, and—for the first time—of a woman’s heart. He also faces a challenge he has never faced before: the allure of earthly power.

The Courts of the Morning has its flaws, but it is an engrossing adventure with enough suspenseful set pieces to satisfy any Buchan fan. It may not be top-tier Buchan, but it is entertaining, and it offers a rare glimpse of two favorite characters on their own, embracing danger, and emerging triumphant and beloved.

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 fourth 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!

Made of words

A strange kerfuffle I recently witnessed on Substack (I still don’t know how Substack chooses what to show me and I suspect I never will):

A Catholic philosopher whom I’ll call Magus recently published a book exploring, as far as I can tell, ways to counter the disenchantment and rationalistic, reductivist worldview of scientific materialism afflicting the modern world. All well and good. This book only came to my attention, though, when Magus published a detailed defense of his work rebutting a review by someone I’ll call Simplicio, a former occultist turned wannabe Chesterton Catholic turned bearded Orthodox firebrand.

Simplicio took issue with one of the book’s later chapters, in which Magus gestures toward the esoteric tradition of hermeticism as a possible model for Christians trying to approach the world through its non-material, eternal valence. In the course of his arguments, Magus used the word magic.

These debates spanned several point-counterpoint essays on Substack and magic was the pole around which all the rest of the furor rotated. Specific points of evidence aside—and this post is not a comment on Magus’s book or Simplicio’s laundry list of nitpicks and criticisms thereof—Simplicio would not let go of the word magic, which he equated with Satanism and devil-worship. Christians are forbidden that and Magus is, therefore, a heretic, a serious word Simplicio was very free with.

Magus countered that this was a straw-man argument and that magic is not a univocal word. It can and does and always has meant many more things than Satanism. He invoked specifically the “deep magic” of Aslan which is, in the same book, placed in opposition to the White Witch’s magic. Simiplicio called this evasive—we all know what magic means.

And round and round we went, with Simplicio insisting on a single, narrow, unambiguous meaning of this word and Magus countering hopelessly that not only is Satanism not what he meant, it should have been clear in context that he used magic as a metaphor anyway.

As it happens, Simplicio is the only one of these people I had heard of. I’ve read his previous books and essays with some enjoyment but, the more I’ve read of him, the more I’ve begun to suspect he isn’t very bright. Hence the pseudonym. But I don’t follow or subscribe to either Magus or Simplicio (again, Substack), so discovering this back-and-forth gave me the bystander effect of the proverbial car crash.

But the moment that stood out to me in all the sound and fury was a joke Simplicio made at Magus’s expense. When Magus, insisting on clarifying definitions of this notoriously vague word, wrote that “it depends on what one means by magic,” Simplicio called this a “Petersonian rejoinder.” As in, the once sharp but increasingly confused and confusing Jordan Peterson.

Peterson has always, as a Jungian, been prone to wandering into what Mark Twain called the “luminous intellectual fog” of German thinkers. Sadly, this has only become more the case as he’s made interpreting religion more and more of his brand, a task for which Jung has badly equipped him. His equivocation and hair-splitting in answer to questions as simple as “Do you believe in God?” reached the point of self-parody a while ago.

But the problem there is not Peterson’s ever more convoluted and recursive search for fine distinctions. The problem, probably, is somewhere within Peterson himself. What made him so powerful and refreshing a decade ago was his insistence that definitions matter, that words matter, that precision is a crucial guide toward the truth. All of that is still true regardless of where he ended up.

What came to mind when I read Simplicio’s little dig was a scene in A Man for All Seasons. When Sir Thomas More, who has resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, learns that Henry VIII plans to require an oath of loyalty with regard to his remarriage to Anne Boleyn, we have this exchange:

More: But what is the wording?

Meg [More’s daughter]: What do the words matter? We know what it will mean.

More: Tell me what the words say. An oath is made of words. It may be possible to take it.

A Man for All Seasons is full of argument of various kinds and qualities, with More’s opponents constantly working to entrap him, catch him in contradictions, or simply embarrass him. Here’s a great sample. The movie is very much about words, and as long as More insists that words tell the truth, precisely and accurately, he is unbeatable.

But he also exceptional, as the movie makes clear and as reality continues to reflect.

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 Buchan’s Julius Caesar

For last year’s John Buchan June I dipped for the first time into Buchan’s enormous body of non-fiction with his short critical introduction Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work. This year I’ve read another of his late-career works of history, this time the 1932 biography Julius Caesar.

For those who know Buchan as a writer of adventure novels and do not know about his education in the classics or his extensive work in history and current events, having edited the publisher Thomas Nelson’s multivolume history of the First World War while the war was in progress and eventually writing long biographies of Scott, Montrose, Cromwell, and Augustus, a life of Caesar might seem an oddity. But Caesar as a subject combines all of Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer—the classicist’s mastery of Greek and Latin literature, the MP’s insight into political rough-and-tumble, the historian’s big-picture view, the propagandist’s PR sensibilities, the novelist’s yearning for adventure. That Buchan is such a good writer, strong, vivid, concise, and therefore powerful, helps as well.

Buchan begins Julius Caesar with a brief portrait of the Roman Republic in Caesar’s youth, flush with success and grown beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. The accidental empire carved out by the Romans over generations strained its political system, which was created to govern a single city of sober, principled, self-governing men. By Caesar’s day, Rome had grown culturally decadent and its system corrupt. Elections were about choosing between oligarchs bent on enriching themselves and voting boons to the public, policy was not so much decided in debate and voting but through bribery and influence-peddling, and the law itself had grown so sclerotic that the government resorted more and more often to once-rare emergency measure like dictatorships.

This was an all-too-recognizable Rome of empty formalities covering practical lawlessness and decay. Caesar, a sharp young man, discerned this early.

Buchan gives good attention to the great crisis of Caesar’s young adulthood, the civil war between Marius and Sulla that pitted, at least notionally, a party appealing to the masses against a party with elite support. The former favored expedients (and massive public benefits) and the latter favored tradition and order. Both used strong men to get what they wanted. Thousands were murdered in seesaw purges before Marius died and Sulla, on behalf of the Senate, crushed what was left of his popular movement.

This conflict created the world in which Caesar began his career proper. It also made the careers of the slightly older men who rose to prominence before him, like the plutocrat Crassus but especially Pompey, whose rise was fueled by military glory. Cicero came along shortly afterward, an outsider rising to prominence in law. These and other major figures—Clodius the demagogue, Cato the Younger, Milo, Catiline, and, later, Brutus and Cassius—receive good attention despite the brevity of Buchan’s narrative.

Buchan charts Caesar’s rise to prominence through the complicated, corrupted, testy arena of Roman politics elegantly, including his two consulships and what it took to achieve them. Buchan looks especially closely at the roles of political allies, debt, and the mob in making careers and suggests the jockeying and jostling of interests and personalities vividly without bogging down in detail. Likewise his chapter on Caesar’s decade in Gaul, the years that made him a legend to the masses and an enemy to partisans of the Senate, succinctly covers his major campaigns with perhaps the most attention being given to his war against the uprising led by Vercingetorix.

Throughout, Buchan narrates skillfully, with incisive and nuanced explanations of the major problems facing the Republic. His narrative nicely balances broad trends and the long view with the repeated shocks of specific crises. When Herbert Butterfield wrote that the quintessential task of the historian is to find “a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity,” he could have been describing Buchan’s work in Julius Caesar. Though covering one of the busiest and most tumultuous lifetimes in history in a little over one hundred pages, it never feels incomplete or foreshortened.

Crucially for a short biography like this, Buchan also excels at the concise character study. His portraits of Cicero, Pompey, and Clodius are especially sharp and fairly presented. But the book belongs to Caesar, and Buchan evokes both the fundamental personality of his subject—the charm, ambition, pragmatism, and keen intelligence—as well as the way Caesar learned and grew over the course of his career, first developing canny political instincts before becoming alert to possibilities he could never have imagined as a vulnerable, inexperienced young man in the wake of Marius and Sulla’s purges.

It’s in the final chapters covering Caesar’s war against the Senate, his dictatorship, and his assassination, that Buchan ventures his most controversial interpretations. The Republic, Buchan suggests, had it coming. Look at the adjectives I’ve used above: corrupt, decadent, testy, sclerotic, empty. In a community riven by personality-driven faction, mob violence, and corrupt elites, polarized, deadlocked, and myopically focused on the squabbles of its political class, Caesar’s tyranny, Buchan suggests, was a grand act of simplification if not purification. The Republic was no longer worth preserving, and Caesar represented the best possible form of destruction.

Further, Buchan argues in the penultimate chapter, Caesar was prepared as dictator to usher in a new kind of Rome, broadened and strengthened by its subject peoples, who would be Romanized just as they contributed their earnestness and vigor to the decaying original. Not only a skilled politician and military genius, Caesar was a visionary ready to unite the world.

I disagree with this interpretation. Though Buchan pointedly highlights Caesar’s self-serving pragmatism early in the book, he is too charitable in his reading of Caesar’s later actions, especially in arguing that Caesar was right to defy and wage war against the Senate and that Caesar’s mercy toward his enemies was motivated by a deep-seated kindness. Cato, whom Buchan deplores as a simple-minded contrarian, was right to see Caesar’s public forgiveness as a political stunt. And interpreting Caesar as a simplifier sweeping away hopelessly corrupt systems accepts rather too readily the premises of every would-be tyrant since.

The bigger picture of Caesar’s conquests being a tool of broadening and uplift, sharing Rome’s resources and taking in the best that the Empire has to offer, strikes me as a very British (and therefore Christian, modern, and technological) vision that does not reckon with the realities of Roman statecraft, war, and governance. Here I think Buchan’s justifiable admiration of Caesar the political maneuverer and Caesar the general misleads him. Idealism and cynicism can and often do coexist in great personalities—Buchan chooses to believe Caesar was mostly an idealist, and that his ends justified his means.

Reflecting on the future fate of Rome near the end of the book, Buchan includes a Latin tag: de nostro tempore fabula narratur, “About our time the story is told.” True to history, Julius Caesar is also explicitly meant to draw parallels with Buchan’s present. It also works with our own. As I noted above, the contemptible parody of the old Republic, recognizable in the Britain and Europe of 1932, is just as recognizable in 2025. Are we, then, to hope for a Caesar? The old Roman in me, the opponent of the populares and the fan of Cicero, the last of the true believers, shouts No. It was Buchan’s way to be hopeful, but it is far too dangerous to hope for the kind of Caesar he describes here.

While I disagree with much in Buchan’s final estimation of Caesar that does not detract from the enjoyability or value of Julius Caesar. This is a brisk, elegantly crafted short biography based on a command of the original sources and extensive late 19th and early 20th century historical research. Buchan offers us an excellent short character sketch of a great man and the times that made him—before he remade them, and us.

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.