The Free Fishers

Today John Buchan June continues with Buchan’s final work of historical fiction, the 1934 novel The Free Fishers.

Set in Scotland and the North Sea coast of Norfolk, during the Regency and at the height of Napoleon’s powers over the Continent, The Free Fishers begins with Anthony “Nanty” Lammas leaving a meeting of a secret society. Despite his position as professor of rhetoric and logic at St Andrews, Lammas grew up among the fishermen and sailors of the Fife coast and is an initiate of the Free Fishers, their underground fraternity, a network connecting its members to thousands of others all over Britain. This evening, Lammas learns that one of his former students, Jock Kinloch, has also joined the group.

Kinloch complains to Lammas that his attentions to a young lady named Kirsty Evandale are not being reciprocated. Miss Evandale only has eyes for Harry Belses—another of Lammas’s former students—and Harry, in his turn, has an apparently unhealthy interest in a mysterious Mrs Cranmer. This lady, whose husband is a wealthy aristocrat, lives on a remote moorland estate called Hungrygrain. She is also rumored to have outspoken Jacobin sympathies. All of which frustrates the volatile Jock and bewilders Lammas.

Shortly thereafter Lammas receives a special assignment from the college: under cover of traveling to London to beg funds from one of the school’s benefactors, Lord Snowdoun, he must save Snowdoun’s son from an impending duel concerning a lady. The son is Harry Belses. Harry’s challenger is the terrifying Sir Turnour Wyse, an excellent shot with a pistol. The lady is Mrs Cranmer.

Lammas, disconcerted to be sent on such a mission, consults the leader of the Free Fishers, Eben Garnock. In addition to smuggling and the usual duties of a guild or secret society, the Fishers occasionally conduct deniable intelligence work on behalf of the crown. Mrs Cranmer, Lammas learns, is rumored to be a Jacobin spy working on behalf of Napoleon. Already Lammas’s task has taken on more serious dimensions than sorting out a young man’s love life.

Lammas sets out for London and almost immediately meets Sir Turnour, a handsome, physically powerful, and arrogant man obsessed with matters of honor who is also a master horseman. Lammas also learns during one stop on his route that Harry, who had been locked up by his own family in London until Sir Turnour could be placated, has escaped and headed north, presumably homing in on Mrs Cranmer. Lammas changes his plans. He must stop Harry and keep him away from Sir Turnour.

As The Free Fishers nears its midway point, Lammas and Jock, with the aid of Eben Garnock and the Fishers, as well as Harry and Sir Turnour independently, all converge upon Hungrygrain and Mrs Cranmer. There they will encounter hostile locals, a suspiciously empty public house with an unhelpful landlord, and a small army of henchmen patrolling the grounds of Hungrygrain. They will also discover the truth about Mrs Cranmer and her husband, and that a plot is in motion to assassinate the Prime Minister.

I can’t summarize much more of The Free Fishers without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that its plot falls into two halves.

In the first half, Lammas leaves St Andrews on his mission and encounters person after person whom he regards, largely on the basis of hearsay, as an antagonist only to find that, not only do they have good qualities, they are ultimately on the same side. This half charmingly reminded me of The Man Who was Thursday, Chesterton’s breakneck thriller in which, one by one, the hero discovers that all of his enemies are actually friends. The second half of The Free Fishers is a suspenseful cross-country race by an unlikely team to stop the assassination and protect an innocent person from being framed.

I mentioned above that The Free Fishers was Buchan’s last historical novel. It is neither his best nor his most famous story but it shows all of his skills and experience as a writer in peak form. Comparison with an earlier historical novel like Salute to Adventurers is instructive. There, an extended prologue gives way to a sprawling, convoluted plot taking place over years, and though the mystery steadily builds in tension, the reader will win no prizes for guessing the identity of the villain. The Free Fishers, on the other hand, is light, high-spirited, and wittily written, unfolding at a fast, steady, expert pace over just a few days and revealing new surprises in every chapter. I greatly enjoyed both books but The Free Fishers is formally superior and, most importantly, more exciting.

Much more. The climactic action of The Free Fishers is suspenseful and the conclusion to Lammas’s story thoroughly satisfying. Though its plot and themes echo many of Buchan’s earlier historical novels—especially the call of a bookish minister to action and danger in Witch Wood and the benevolent workings of an ancient secret society in Midwinter—this is Buchan’s best executed exploration of them. If it has any shortcoming, it is that preventing the assassination of a now lesser-known Prime Minister gives the book lower stakes. The Napoleonic threat does not feel quite as eminent as it perhaps should. Still, The Free Fishers is a wonderful adventure, and I’d rate it just below Buchan’s historical masterpiece, the rich, eerie, and oppressive Witch Wood.

I could say more. The characters are strongly developed and surprising. Buchan proves especially adept at manipulating the reader’s sympathies, the best example being the haughty Sir Turnour Wyse. And Buchan evokes the world of royal roads, mail coaches, and wayside inns—whether in the hills of the Borders or the fens of Norfolk—with effortless vividness. This is the bustling highway world just out of sight of Jane Austen’s Regency.

Shortly after the publication of The Free Fishers, Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada, a position in which he served until his death. This appointment, his move from Elsfield in southern England, illness, and affairs of state slowed his writing of fiction, and he produced only three more thrillers—the final adventures of Dickson McCunn, Richard Hannay, and, most movingly, Sir Edward Leithen—before he died in 1940. But if he produced no more historical novels, at least this part of his writing career ended on a note of adventure, brotherhood, and swashbuckling fun.

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work

Today marks a first for this blog’s observance of John Buchan June: the review of one of Buchan’s non-fiction books. Though now primarily remembered for thrillers like The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan also wrote many, many works of non-fiction, including biographies, legal analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and a history of the First World War begun while the war was still in progress and eventually totaling 24 volumes. Take a look at his bibliography sometime to get a clearer sense of the breadth of his literary career.

Following the end of the war and through the 1930s, Buchan wrote several biographies of figures he admired—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, Montrose—as a way to recuperate from both the strain of his duties during the war as well as recurrent illness. Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is the first and shorter of two that Buchan wrote about Scott (1771-1832). Originally published in 1925 as The Man and the Book: Sir Walter Scott, part of a series of short authors’ lives from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, this book is more an introduction to Scott’s life and a brief critical appraisal of his work than a full biography.

Buchan begins with a capsule overview of Scott’s background, ancestry, childhood in Scotland, and education, covering as well Scott’s career in law, through which he gained a position that made his literary work possible. After this introduction Buchan closely examines Scott’s writing, beginning with his poetry. Scott started off as the author of long narrative verse and an anthologizer of Scots border ballads, two activities that established Scott’s reputation as a poet and national folklorist and raised interest in Scots poetry and culture more generally.

Scott’s turn from verse to fiction—and his virtual invention of the genre of historical fiction—marks the most important event of his career, and Buchan spends the greater part of the book on Scott’s novels. Appropriately so, as these are the works for which Scott is still read and remembered. Visit a bookstore of your choice and, if they have Scott in stock, it will almost certainly not be Glenfinlas or The Lay of the Last Minstrel but Waverley or Ivanhoe or Rob Roy.

It is easy to see why Buchan admired Scott. Both were of Scottish extraction, deeply educated, and naturally gifted storytellers; both rose from relative obscurity through talent and hard work and moved among the great names of their day; and both produced exciting fictions marked by an idealistic but fundamentally patriotic traditionalist vision of the world. Buchan is no hero-worshiper, however. He bluntly acknowledges deficiencies in Scott’s work—pacing problems in Waverley, for example, or unnecessarily melodramatic speeches in Rob Roy or “the weak and careless ending” of Heart of Midlothian. But Buchan also makes it clear that these flaws are only flaws, that they count little against the craft, insight, and delight of the best of Scott’s work. I’ve written here before about Buchan’s assessment of Scott’s basic tools as a novelist, but he also praises Scott for his skill at describing landscapes, his ability to evoke the spirit of long-gone times, and for his characterization of familiar Scots types, including, amusingly, “the greatest alewife in literature.”

Following his overview of Scott’s long and successful career as a novelist, Buchan turns from “The Sunshine of Success,” the period following the 1819 publication of Ivanhoe, “which had a more clamorous welcome across the Borders than any other of the novels” and “marked the high-water point of Sir Walter’s popularity,” through the prolific output of the 1820s to “The Dark Days,” Scott’s final years—years of decline and near financial ruin.

Given how thin this book is on the details of Scott’s life, I found this penultimate chapter especially interesting. Having invested heavily in his publisher but not taken care to oversee how the business was run, Scott was left responsible for enormous debts upon the firm’s collapse. Rather than declare bankruptcy, which Scott viewed as cheating his creditors, he worked like mad despite his failing health to see that they were all paid in full. Buchan presents this as the admirable action of a principled and honest man, but he notes that not all of Scott’s contemporaries saw it this way. The historian Thomas Carlyle described Scott’s refusal to accept bankruptcy as desperate pride: “Refuge did lie elsewhere,” he wrote, “but it was not Scott’s course or habit of mind to seek it there.”

Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work is a short book and much of the middle is taken up with long quotations from Scott’s novels—many of them twenty pages long, with one coming in at thirty pages—but in the interstitial critical commentary and chapters of straight biography Buchan offers a concise, vivid, well-rounded portrait of the man. Much of the finer detail of traditional biography is missing, but by the time Scott meets his end, on September 21, 1832, “breath[ing] his last in the presence of all his children,” the reader still feels he knows him and is sorry to see him go. He is also—if I can speak for myself—eager to revisit Scott’s novels, or to read the many he has never gotten around to.

As mentioned above, this was only the first of Buchan’s books on Scott. The second, Sir Walter Scott, a full biography praised for its research and readability, arrived in 1932. I hope to read that sometime in the future. In the meantime, Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work, offers a good introduction to both the man and the poetry and fiction he left behind, as well as a good glimpse of Buchan himself through this sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of one of his literary heroes.