A Lost Lady of Old Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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