Sick Heart River

Today is the last day of John Buchan June. All along, my plan has been to end the month by reading and reviewing Buchan’s final novel, the posthumously published Sick Heart River, which he completed only days before his unexpected death in the early weeks of 1940. In keeping with the best of his work that I’ve written about this month, this novel tells of a rousing adventure undertaken by a stalwart and upright hero in a beautiful and dangerous landscape, and in keeping with the end of a beloved project, it is a profoundly moving and melancholy story. Buchan’s final novel may just be his best.

Sick Heart River begins with Sir Edward Leithen, now a quarter century past his first adventure in The Power-House and fifteen years on from his poaching exploits in John Macnab, settling his affairs in London. He has learned he is dying. Lung damage incurred when he was gassed during the war—the last war, as Europe is edging closer and closer to another war as the story begins—has belatedly turned into tuberculosis, and his doctors have given him a year to live.

Leithen has taken stock of his life. He has a London flat and a country house, a personal library of 20,000 books, a thriving law practice, and a good reputation. But he has no wife, no children, no close living relations. He has friendly but strictly professional relationships with his colleagues at his legal practice. Even his handful of real friends—old allies like Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot and his confederates in the John Macnab escapade, Charles Palliser-Yeates, Sir Archie Roylance, and the Earl of Lamancha—he finds himself refusing to inform about his illness. He is alone, dying, in a world in which he has achieved every kind of success but that has become suddenly unrecognizable to him. How will he face death, and what is his death—after all these years and adventures and all this worldly success—to mean?

All Leithen knows is that he will not waste away in a nursing home. He wants to die “standing up.” That, in itself, will mean something. To him.

He refuses to take his club friends into his confidence, and so by chance he receives a visit from John S Blenkiron, the American intelligence operative and former comrade-in-arms of Hannay. Blenkiron notes that Leithen is not well but can’t draw him out, and so tells him about bad news of his own—his niece Felicity’s husband, Francis Galliard, an industrious, successful, and wealthy French Canadian transplant to the high society and banking worlds of New York City, has disappeared. Leithen, sensing his opportunity, asks to know more.

Thus equipped by Blenkiron with a mission that will give his final days purpose, allowing him to die “standing up” and perhaps even “making his soul,” Leithen travels to America. He interviews Galliard’s friends, associates, in-laws, and wife, and intuits a familiar malaise in Galliard, a dissatisfaction and despair that cannot be assuaged by worldly success. From New York he travels to Quebec, to the ancestral Galliard lands overlooking the St Lawrence River, and hires Johnny Frizel, the half-Scottish, half-Indian brother of the guide who was last seen leading Galliard northward, toward the Arctic.

Together, Leithen and Frizel travel thousands of miles by boat, plane, dog sled, and on foot in their quest to find Galliard. As they travel, it becomes clearer and clearer that Galliard and the elder Frizel aim to reach the remote, unmapped, nearly mythic valley of the Sick Heart River in the most rugged mountains of the Northwest Territories. In addition to adventure, exploration, and survival, mystery pervades this first half of the novel. Why has Galliard fled his life, and what is driving him—or, as seems more likely the more Leithen follows them, his guide—so relentlessly toward the Sick Heart River? To reach this valley might kill Galliard. Following Galliard, trying to catch up to and convince him to return to civilization and his wife and friends, is killing Leithen.

I read Sick Heart River in three days. A gripping, beautifully written, well-paced but introspective novel, it is perhaps Buchan’s finest achievement. He based the landscapes and the journey closely on some of his own travels in the northwest as Governor-General of Canada, and the book reflects clearly the immensity and variety not only of Canada’s landscapes but its peoples. Buchan’s keen eye and descriptive powers make the forbidding mountain and wilderness settings, as well as Leithen and the other characters’ struggles, so vivid and involving that, as with John Macnab, when I set the book down I felt as if I had really been somewhere else and that not only my attention by my body and spirit would need time to adjust to my return.

That feeling proved even more profound owing to Sick Heart River’s confrontation with mortality, which is the real point of the novel. Melancholy suffuses the novel from the first page, and one feels with Leithen the spirit of Ubi sunt? felt so keenly by those whose own civilizations have passed them by, not always to the better. Despite or perhaps because of their successes, the characters have become detached and sick at heart—Leithen through the clarifying moment of his diagnosis; Lew Frizel, the elder brother of the pair of guides, through the madness of the North; and Galliard through the slow effects of his deracination, his removal from his roots and the people and places who made him. All of them sense their need to atone and to return to something; all of them come up short.

And all of this is dramatized in Leithen himself. Leithen is a dying man, and Sick Heart River, in three stages, tells of his wrestling with this fact, of the paradox of how he saves his life.

In the first third, Leithen determines to die “standing up,” facing the inevitable and embracing his fate with a resolve and courage hardened by reason. Closed off, implacable, reliant entirely on his own (failing) strength, protected only by what another character calls “the iron armour of his fortitude,” he is a Stoic with all the courage and coldness of the ancients.

In the second, having found the wounded and desperate Galliard, pursued Galliard’s maddened guide Lew Frizel into the valley of the Sick Heart, and almost died in the attempt, Leithen finds himself awed into a reflection of not only the infinite power but the infinite goodness of God and trusts himself to his care. Wintering in the mountains, nursed by the Frizels and slowing getting to know and understand Galliard, Leithen not only survives his trek to the Sick Heart but even begins to recover. For the first time since his diagnosis he finds himself entertaining thoughts of the future, of reuniting Galliard and his wife, returning to his practice, buying back his country house… But, should he fully recover, is this really what he will have survived the Sick Heart for?

The last third presents Leithen with his final crisis. As Leithen, Galliard, the Frizel brothers, and their Hare Indian crew work their way back down from the mountains, they learn that the Hare tribe has also been afflicted, like Leithen, with an outbreak of tuberculosis and, like Galliard, with despair. They will not act to help themselves, and they die in droves at their camp near a Catholic mission. As with so many of Buchan’s heroes in the best of his stories, it comes down to a choice. Should Leithen pass on and return to the world and to the success of his mission, or stay and help other sick and despairing creatures like himself?

Leithen stays. The final word is given to Father Duplessis, one of the French priests ministering to the Hares, who speaks Matthew 10:39 as both Leithen’s epitaph and the theme of the book: “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Sick Heart River is much more than an adventure novel; it is, as Buchan’s granddaughter and biographer Ursula Buchan puts it, “a spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada.” It is in many respects very similar to Leithen’s lark into Scotland in John Macnab, but with far greater dangers and higher stakes than being caught poaching and forced to pay £100. Not only is Leithen’s life on the line, so is his soul.

Even by the standards of the other novels I’ve reviewed this month, Sick Heart River is an engaging, well plotted, well paced, and surprising adventure with a strong cast of characters in brilliantly realized settings. It is also an uncommonly rich and poignant philosophical and theological story. That it moves so briskly despite the depth of its themes and ideas and that the themes harmonize so well with the action is a testament to Buchan’s skills, and that meditates so profoundly on life, death, and grace makes it not only a fitting end to my John Buchan June, but to the great man’s life as well.

Thanks for reading along this month! I hope y’all have a pleasant and restful July, and that these reviews and recommendations will give you something good to read.