The House of the Four Winds
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As this year’s John Buchan June draws to a close, we return to the adventures of retired Scottish grocer Dickson McCunn and friends, this time traveling abroad to help a disinherited prince claim his rightful throne. This novel, the final fictional read this year, is The House of the Four Winds.
Before we consider what kind of trouble the redoubtable Mr McCunn lands in this time, we should consider a mostly-forgotten genre: the Ruritanian Romance. Anthony Hope, a twenty-four year old London lawyer, published The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894 to great acclaim. The plot of this novel concerns an aimless English traveler being swept into a foreign country’s succession crisis and being forced—temporarily, at first—to impersonate a king. Hijinks ensue. As I’ve mentioned here before, The Prisoner of Zenda is a favorite swashbuckler of mine.
But what Hope did genre-wise In Zenda was to combine political intrigue, secret identities, well-intentioned conspirators, high-spirited derring-do, the put-upon Englishman in an exotic land, and a little old-fashioned forbidden romance and—crucially—set it in an imaginary central European kingdom. That unlikely formula proved a huge success and spawned decades of imitators, all called by the name of Hope’s kingdom: Ruritania.
Ruritanian politics informed the plot of the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay, which I reviewed earlier this month. In that novel, factions from the Republic of Evallonia slip into Scotland with the aim of interfering with British public opinion via the press. In The House of the Four Winds, a direct sequel to Castle Gay, Buchan embraces the Ruritanian genre form and sends his characters into the heart of Europe. The result is, as we will see, only partially successful.
When the novel begins, Dickson McCunn is taking a doctor-ordered cure at a spa town in southern Germany. Coincidentally, Alison Westwater, the young heroine of the previous novel, is in the same town with her elderly parents, as is frequent Buchan hero Sir Archie Roylance—taking a break from a dull League of Nations conference in Switzerland—and his wife Janet, whom we learn is a cousin of Alison’s. At various points members of the group encounter figures they recognize from their previous Evallonian adventure in Scotland: first Mastrovin, the nefarious leader of the republicans, a man with ties to the Bolsheviks; and second the heir to the throne of Evallonia, Prince John, whom Mastrovin had attempted to kidnap in Scotland in the previous novel. Something is afoot.
Meanwhile, Alison’s love and the real hero of both this novel and the previous one, Jaikie Galt, is taking a walking tour across eastern France and southern Germany. He winds up crossing the border into Evallonia—which, based on context, seems to be somewhere between Salzburg and Trieste—and almost immediately becomes embroiled in the country’s political upheaval. As established in Castle Gay, Evallonia was one of a number of half-baked republics created by the Treaty of Versailles following the end of the First World War, and like all of those enlightened creations is beset with problems.
Evallonia’s unpopular republican government is on the brink of collapse. Everyone expects this; what worries them is what will replace it once it has collapsed. The monarchists hope to restore Prince John to the throne as king. Mastrovin’s republicans have more sinister intentions, though these are never made totally clear. But what most complicates matters is the recent rise of a movement known as Juventus. A populist, nationalist movement oriented toward youth with a powerful and popular “Green Shirt” paramilitary wing, Juventus enjoys nationwide support but is functionally rudderless. Unlike similar populist movements in, say, Italy and Germany, Juventus has no singular figure who can steer it toward an attainable political goal. Until they have one, the Green Shirts are a danger to everyone.
The plot, hatched in the castle known as The House of the Four Winds by Jaikie, Count Odalchini, one of the leading monarchists, Randal Glynde, a circus owner with a long career in Evallonia (and another of Alison’s cousins), and, eventually, Dickson McCunn himself, is to manipulate the Green Shirts into support for Prince John by placing an even more objectionable heir on the throne, the prince’s elderly uncle, an archduke who has been living in exile for decades. This, they hope, will rally the Green Shirts to Prince John, restore him to his throne, and unite the anti-republican factions enough to prevent a pro-Bolshevik turn in Evallonian politics.
It should not be a surprise that the plot succeeds, but along the way the characters encounter plenty of dangers from every direction: kidnapping and torture by Mastrovin and his cronies; bullying and roughing up at the hands of Green Shirts; and dangers like scaling castle walls and leaping from prison windows. Like the other Dickson McCunn novels, The House of the Four Winds is a lark.
This book was published in 1935, between The Free Fishers and The Island of Sheep, two brisk and skillfully executed late novels. Reception for this final Dickson McCunn adventure, however, was pretty poor. Andrew Lownie, in his biography The Presbyterian Cavalier, quotes critic Cyril Connolly’s judgment that The House of the Four Winds represents “a rather low point” not only for Buchan’s fiction but for his entire career. Lownie himself notes succinctly that critics and reviewers since then “have not substantially challenged that contemporary view.” Ursula Buchan is more to the point: The House of the Four Winds “is probably [Buchan’s] worst novel.”
I enjoyed this novel more than they did, but it certainly has more evident weaknesses than much of Buchan’s other fiction. Most of them—strangely for Buchan, a master of pacing—are structural. Several chapters in the middle and end of the book begin with abrupt leaps forward in time, backtrack to fill in what has happened, and then awkwardly shuffle forward again. This technique can work; here it mostly doesn’t. (I remember being warned off of it in my undergrad Novel Writing class.) Some plot elements are introduced and abandoned quickly. At one point, Jaikie departs (between chapters) on a motorcycle with the aim of meeting an important Countess, but reappears having not found her only to be immediately diverted into another strand of the story. Finally, Mastrovin and the other villains are defeated too early, leaving an overlong denouement involving the mechanics of extracting a disguised Dickson McCunn from Evallonia.
There are also more contrivances than is usual, even for a writer famous for using the lucky coincidence. Jaikie’s love interest Alison has so many cousins one begins to wonder if everyone in the novel is related to her. Jaikie is also always bumping into people he happens to know. And Glynde and his circus, especially his trusty elephant, are always exactly where they need to be, exactly when they need to be.
But The House of the Four Winds still has its charms. For someone interested in thrillers and adventure stories, the interwar spin Buchan puts on Hope’s Ruritanian form is clever. This is a light adventure in a recognizably shaken up, post-Austria-Hungary central Europe, and reflects not only real currents of disruption, uncertainty, and political revolution, but presages the dangers that could arise from these scenarios. Dangers that, indeed, already had by 1935. Mussolini is mentioned once and Hitler not at all, but The House of the Fours Winds is shadowed by their presence. Could Evallonia in the hands of the Green Shirts, who are presented as misguided and potentially dangerous but fundamentally decent, wind up where Italy and Germany did?
More immediately enjoyable are the characters themselves. Jaikie and Alison’s genuinely sweet romance finally flowers in this novel, and it is good to see Sir Archie and Janet again. (It also makes me want to reread John Macnab, in which they meet and enjoy the best love story Buchan wrote.) And, thankfully after Castle Gay, from which he is mostly absent, we get more Dickson McCunn.
The novel’s final short farewell chapter, in which a band of horsemen hurries Mr McCunn over the mountainous Evallonian frontier by moonlight, is a charming episode devoted entirely to him and his spirit of adventure. That’s how his stories began in Huntingtower, the best of the bunch, and even if Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds never worked as well as that first adventure did, this novel’s conclusion makes a fitting end for this unlikeliest of Buchan heroes.
