Coyote vs Acme

Wile E Coyote and Will Forte in Coyote vs Acme

In the early days of the internet, when I was a kid, one staple of e-mail forwards and clean joke repositories was a short piece called “Coyote vs Acme.” Presented as the opening statement in a lawsuit filed against Acme by Wile E Coyote, the bone-dry humor derived from the unblinking lawyerly descriptions of Wile E Coyote’s slapstick mishaps and cartoon injuries. Even as a twelve-year old I found it hilarious. Wile E Coyote has always been my favorite Looney Tunes character.

It turns out “Coyote vs Acme,” like so many e-mail forwards from the mid-90s, was originally a copyrighted piece with a credited author, one Ian Frazier, published in The New Yorker in 1990. I’m glad to see Mr Frazier is still alive, because I hope he gets generous royalties for the film adaptation released last month: Coyote vs Acme.

The movie shouldn’t need much of a summary. Wile E Coyote contacts Kevin Avery (Will Forte), an unmotivated injury attorney who specializes in lawsuits against Acme’s cartoon products division. Kevin sues and settles, congratulating himself if he gets his clients a few hundred dollars from the corporation. Wile E, whom we intuit later is known to the suits at Acme as a “high usage user,” wants to sue for every Acme product that has ever failed him. That’s every product in the Acme catalog.

There’s more going on in the background involving corporate espionage, unethical and possibly illegal research projects, and whistleblowers, Kevin’s sense of failure compared to a law school classmate who is now the head of legal for Acme (Jon Cena), and Wile E himself, whose lawsuit is not straightforwardly about the money. Kevin and Wile E prepare their case, take it to court, attract the media, and eventually testify before the a Senate committee chaired by Elmer Fudd (a natural fit).

Coyote vs Acme offers two special joys. The first is the way it plays with the inspirational legal drama formula. If you’ve seen one crusading lawyer movie, you’ve seen them all, and Coyote vs Acme both conforms to the formula and spoofs it. (Imagine The Insider directed by Chuck Jones.) A lot of parodies have tried this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach and failed, their satire either toothless or the shift into heartwarming drama too silly. This one manages both, and often at the same time. A late scene—you know, the one that uses broken trust to introduce some uncertainty right before the climactic courtroom showdown—in which Kevin and Wile E have a falling out, reveal the truth behind their lies, and say something hurtful, works as both comedy and personal drama, and it leads into one of the best comedy-action scenes in the movie. It’s all in the execution.

And that brings me to the real gift of Coyote vs Acme—the Looney Tunes stuff. The film was made by people who clearly love the old shorts and vast stock of Warner Brothers characters but didn’t let that love curdle into fanboy reverence, undermine the whole thing with a lot of modern irony and meta quipping, or get carried away with in-jokes and easter eggs. There are plenty of both, including clips from the classic Wile E Coyote cartoons themselves, but the movie manages to feel like a Looney Tunes cartoon set in the real world for a full hour and a half.

A few favorite bits: Some of Wile E’s contraptions from the cartoons make appearances, including his off-brand Acme Batman suit and the ice-box, meatgrinder, and snow ski combo. One of the first characters we see onscreen is the Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre, playing an Acme researcher who disappears under mysterious circumstances. Acme has a humorous history, alluded to offhand, beginning as a cartoon anvil factory. While I also love Foghorn Leghorn and wasn’t thrilled to see him as the villain, he was pitch-perfect for it, a bluff good ol’ boy whose folksiness conceals cutthroat pragmatism. There are even some legal jokes, like a quick reference to Sylvester v Gonzalez on the legal standing of “predator” as a profession. And of the many, many tiny jokes one could point out, I especially liked the image Kevin and Wile E’s motel uses on their “No Pets” sign.

Coyote vs Acme is full of slapstick gags, visual puns, familiar character beats, and—most importantly—it’s clever and funny from beginning to end. That’s the least you can ask for from something claiming the Looney Tunes name, but it also has some thematic depth and a message about being willing to fail that both feels natural to the material and is genuinely thoughtful. I certainly benefited from it. Wile E has always been my favorite for a reason.

And, finally, it’s a genuine family movie. My in-laws took Sarah and me and all five kids to the movie on Labor Day and everyone—from our three-year old twins to my in-laws—laughed and enjoyed themselves the entire time. (One of our twins’ favorite moment: “When the big ball destroyed the car.” Watch and see.) The crazy backstory behind the film’s belated release is relatively well-known by now. I’m thankful it finally made it to theatres, as it’s the best time I’ve had at the movies in a long time, possibly years.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

Jim Corbett was born and raised in colonial India and worked as an official for a British railway in the subcontinent for twenty years. He was a keen outdoorsman and hunter but not a professional. Despite this, in 1907, when he was in his early thirties, he was asked to travel to Kumaon in northern India to kill a man-eating tiger. The tiger had originally come from Nepal, where it learned to hunt humans, but its depredations had grown so severe that it was driven out of the area and into India by a mass “beat,” with hundreds of beaters walking in line abreast through the forests and fields to flush the tiger and run it out.

This, Corbett’s first man-eater, was the Champawat tiger, and by the time he arrived in northern India, stalked, and shot it, the tiger had killed and eaten over four hundred people.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, published in 1944, tells this and several other hair-raising stories spanning almost thirty years, but Corbett, in a sign of his priorities and character, begins the book with an explanation of why tigers become man-eaters. Tigers and leopards do not normally eat people, Corbett tells the reader. They avoid humans. If a tiger begins eating people it has been driven to do so because of age, injury, or disability—something that turns it from hunting its usual prey in its usual style to softer targets. If your picture of the man-eater is Disney’s svelte and powerful Shere Khan, as mine at least partly was, remember that the Shere Khan of Kipling’s book is lame in one leg.

The Champawat tiger, he discovers, was an ageing tigress with two broken canine teeth. Another had lost an eye to a porcupine and had dozens of quills in the muscles and pad of one of its forelegs. Another was an old, slow tigress with a cub to feed.

Corbett begins with that long note on what causes tigers and leopards to eat humans and the book only gets more interesting from there. Though never laying out in point-by-point detail what signs he’s looking for as he stalks a tiger and examines its tracks, one picks up a lot from each story. In addition to the drama of the hunt—near misses, near-fatal surprises, and the suspense of searching, planning, and lying in wait—each story is an education. The age, sex, and size of the tigers matter as well as the local environment and what the local people do. Many victims are snatched from fields where they’re cutting grass or harvesting wheat. Others are taken while gathering firewood or cutting down trees. Each story is different and each, even if they have the same outcome, follow surprising trajectories.

But it’s almost certainly the drama that will lead one to pick up a book like this, and Corbett delivers. In perhaps the most thrilling hunt Corbett stumbles upon the man-eater he’s hunting on a rocky forested hillside, half-turned, with only one hand on his rifle and the tiger lying mere feet away. His coolness, experience, and skill are what save him, though I don’t want to give away how.

I’ve already mentioned Corbett’s character, and that’s an important part of the story and what it is like to read Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Corbett is no Hollywood stereotype of the big game hunter. From the start, hunting the Champawat tiger in his early thirties, Corbett seeks no reward and asks the government to cancel bounties placed on the man-eater. He respects the locals, knows their languages and customs, and singles many of them out for their bravery under the circumstances. One especially vivid example is a woman who, while cutting grass with her sister, saw a tiger attack and drag her sister away. Rather than run, she pursued the tiger and attacked it with her sickle. It was too late for her sister, but Corbett admired her guts and made it a point to speak to her when he arrived and to show her the tiger’s carcass before he left.

Corbett is also no braggart. Though exceptionally skilled he freely admits to mistakes—including at least one that, he owns with open regret, allowed a tiger to escape and kill more people—and tells plenty of stories about missed or botched shots and errors of judgment. Even when he records the dimensions of his quarry after a successful hunt he notes that the figures are worthless as they cannot be corroborated. His self-effacing manner also allows the book to be funny on occasion, as in one episode in which he takes multiple shots at a tiger that leaves and returns several times with no apparent effect, only to discover that he has shot at multiple tigers and killed two.

Another important aspect of Corbett’s character, and one that makes the book especially refreshing to read, is his dispassionate account of the animals he hunts. Whether tigers, leopards, or—in one outlier chapter—fish, Corbett describes them without anthropomorphism. This attitude conveys a respect for the animals and a sympathy that stops well short of sentimentality. Once a tiger has taken to man-eating, it must be killed, but Corbett does not approach his job as a game and the only satisfaction he takes in it is ridding the people of Kumaon of a deadly menace.

And Corbett never loses sight of that menace. He never ignores or downplays the human toll of the tigers’ attacks and narrates the killing and eating of dozens of people with neither coldness nor showy emotionalism. Sons, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, husbands, and fathers are killed, and Corbett makes it clear that these are serious and painful losses. The story of one man, a veteran of an Indian regiment in the British army whose only son is killed just after enlisting, is especially powerful.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon mostly focuses on the stories of big cats Corbett was commissioned to kill, but one chapter concerns a trophy hunt for a huge, magnificent male tiger known as the Bachelor of Powalgarh, another—mentioned above—is about fishing, and the final short chapter is about Corbett’s late-life interest in photographing and filming tigers. (Here’s a sample of his footage.) Never concerned about glory or trophies, Corbett was a conservationist who wanted the best for both man and animal. While never blaming humanity, he points out that many man-eaters were made by careless hunting—taking a shot at a tiger and not finishing it off or overhunting a tiger’s normal prey. Fittingly, India’s first national park was named after him and, thanks to conservation efforts, now has the densest population of wild tigers in the world.

“[H]aving lived most of my life in the jungle,” Corbett writes near the end, “I have not the ability to paint word-pictures.” On the contrary. Corbett’s stories are a testimony both to simple, strong, unaffected writing and to a life well-lived. I’m not sure where I first heard of Man-Eaters of Kumaon, but I’m glad I did. While I expected it to be interesting, to my great surprise it is one of the most interesting and dramatic books I’ve come across in years. I highly recommend it if you need something to shake up your reading.

Vincent Can’t Sleep

I ran across VIncent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky at the library two years ago and checked it out to read to my kids. It simply but movingly tells the story of Van Gogh’s lifetime struggle with insomnia, hints at his broader problems with mental health, and suggests the role these played in his unique work. I enjoyed it, the kids enjoyed it, and we returned it to the library.

Two things have happened since then that have deepened my appreciation of the book, though. First, shortly after first reading Vincent Can’t Sleep to the kids I read Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt is in the Wind, which includes a chapter on Van Gogh and his difficulties, and the followup, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, which is very specifically about pain and hardship in the making of art. Both made me think more seriously about Van Gogh’s life and work and especially his suffering.

Second, as I’ve mentioned before, early this year I got plumb worn out. I was tired and depressed and—the worst of my symptoms—I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had trouble sleeping before and even worked it into one of my novels, but this year I had real insomnia.

I’m thankful to say I’m much better—and perhaps I can tell the whole story of this bad winter and spring someday—but revisiting Vincent Can’t Sleep this week I had a much deeper understanding of the story it tells and, as moved as I was the first time, it meant even more to me.

The author, Barb Rosenstock, begins with Vincent’s childhood in Zundert, where, in the attic room he shares with his devoted younger brother Theo, he often struggles to sleep. He wanders at night, once going on a long midnight walk that inadvertently takes him across the border into Belgium. The night sky comforts him in ways daytime human company cannot. The story follows him to boarding school and his first job in his uncle’s art gallery. He is lonely, creative, and volatile. Because he scares his uncle’s customers he tries his hand at other work before settling into the life of a drifting artist.

Art helps him confront his sleeplessness. In a beautiful illustration of an adult Vincent staring into the sky above his Café Terrace at Night in Arles, Rosenstock tells us that “He discovers that darkness is not plain black.”

On the next page, Vincent lies in bed, “shut tight in a hospital,” the monastery asylum where he was confined for a year. This could be the darkest moment of the story, and yet it is here that Vincent, inspired by the view from his window and his lifetime of looking at the night sky, paints his most famous painting. Completing it, he can finally—in the book’s beautiful final image—rest, absorbed into and at one with the night sky.

The story is good but the glory of the book, what makes the story work so powerfully, is the art by Harry Potter illustrator Mary GrandPré. She successfully evokes Van Gogh’s style throughout, recreating some of his most famous landscapes as part of the storybook settings and giving cameos to other Van Gogh paintings in the background. It’s a beautiful book on every level.

But it’s that final image, the restless man at peace, having created something from his unrest, that moves me so much now. At the worst moment of this spring I couldn’t write—I could think of nothing to write and couldn’t muster the will to try. Then, slowly, writing became the best way to handle what I was feeling. Even dashing off a blog post here—“all this nothing,” in the words of You’ve Got Mail, another melancholy story, that has meant more than “so many somethings”—eased my mind. There were many nights through the spring when what made me sleep best was not meds or valerian root tea or the tight control I began exercising over caffeine and screentime, but simply having written.

I am no Van Gogh, but Vincent Can’t Sleep, in its simple way, has helped me understand him and my own life better, and to even more deeply appreciate God’s gift of creativity and how it can heal. Darkness is not plain black.

I, Ripper

The scene of the crime in Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” murders

I’ll begin this review with a caution—Stephen Hunter’s I, Ripper is thrilling entertainment but not for the faint of heart. Hunter himself noted, at a booksigning at the time of the book’s release in 2015, that he was concerned about the novel’s violence when he submitted the first chapters to his editor. Her response: “Why don’t you move the violence to the front and really start the book off with a bang?”

He did, and it does. Be warned.

Jack the Ripper killed five women—that we are certain of—in the fall of 1888. All of the victims were occasional or professional prostitutes and most of them were alcoholics who spent the money they earned from their johns—thruppence at a time—on gin and, occasionally, one night in a rented bed in a dosshouse. Whitechapel teemed with such as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe—the latter of which included lots of Jews, political radicals, and Jewish political radicals, all on the run from Tsarist persecution—and a constantly changing mob of sailors and industrial workers. The district’s dense network of shops and rowhouses and unlighted maze of small streets and alleys hummed with activity even during the night, as workers walked to or from late shifts at slaughterhouses and factories and the docks and upper class types went slumming in the pubs or, perhaps, looking for a “judy.”

From the first page, in which Jack, as yet unnamed but in his own voice—a found diary—cuts the throat of his first victim, Hunter evokes the jungly tumult and grime of this world brilliantly. I, Ripper’s authentic atmosphere is one of its greatest strengths.

Another is its structure. Telling the story in alternating chapters of Jack’s diary and a 1912 memoir by Jeb, an Irish reporter working under a penname for the Star, a London tabloid, Hunter pits the two against each other as initially unwitting foes. Jack, roaming Whitechapel and brutalizing the lone prostitutes, is driven by some unexplained mission. Jeb, ambitious and cold by his own admission, breaks crucial news about the first murders and starts to make a name for himself.

Jack, not insane but monstrous, is mysterious only in the sense that we hope to learn who he is and why he is doing this. Jeb is a more complicated creature. He realizes he is taking advantage of Jack’s crimes—and his mutilated victims—to build up his own reputation as a writer but genuinely believes in reporting the facts and castigates himself when lured into helping fake the letter that coins the killer’s name. A fellow reporter on the Star, an American, routinely speculates in print and fixates on anti-Semitic theories early on in the crime spree. Jeb worries that his reporting may cause vigilantism or—if his colleague has his way—pogroms.

Just as he develops qualms about his work, Jeb meets Professor Dare. A linguist and an advocate of what might later be called psychological conditioning, Dare offers to share his theory about Jack with Jeb—the killer is dyslexic, and has experience in the remote reaches of Afghanistan, where the women of the tribes disembowel prisoners in exactly the manner Jack does. Find a man matching this description—they decide to call it a “profile”—and they find Jack.

Added to his ambition and his unquiet desire to report accurately and responsibly, Jeb takes on detective work. This will place him on a path to a final collision with Jack the Ripper himself.

I don’t think I can reveal more without giving away too much. I, Ripper’s fictional plot, elegantly interlaced in the imagined diary of Jack and the memoir of Jeb—who turns out to be a real person with a famous name that I don’t want to give away—is solidly constructed and resolves in several good twists, some with surprisingly literary implications. It is one of this grim, gory book’s great enjoyments.

But only one. Another is Hunter’s imagining of the rumbustious world of London journalism. The former movie critic for the Washington Post, his Star newsroom and its combination of jocularity and callousness feels utterly real. A standout chapter is that in which Jeb, goaded into it by his editor and a colleague, forges the first and most famous Jack the Ripper letter. The calculated poetry of the letter and the group effort to get it notoriety is entertaining, convincing—the “Dear Boss” letter has been suspected of fakery since it appeared, but I had never considered its artistic and linguistic character before—and revealing.

“Newspapers,” Jack muses about halfway through. “What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?”

That’s the fictional side of I, Ripper. Another pleasure of the book is Hunter’s attention to the actual facts of the Jack the Ripper case. I’ve mentioned his vivid recreation of the grungy, bestial world of Whitechapel—which is not quite on the same level of depravity as a James Ellroy novel but might still leave you wanting to take a shower—but the crimes, the crime scenes, the victims, and many of the other real people involved are painstakingly imagined without the stiff, lifeless effect of some similarly detailed historical novels. The historical figures have personality, living and breathing as convincingly as the fictional characters.

This is especially important in the case of the victims. Hunter doesn’t soft-pedal their lifestyles or recast them as somehow noble, and yet, though staggering drunk, winkingly offering mortal sin to the passerby, or both at the same time, they feel like real people and worthy of sympathy. Their encounters with Jack evoke dread and pity and his treatment of them as objects, mere matter to be parted and manipulated for his own ends, seems more monstrous as a result.

Hunter committed himself to changing as few known historical details as possible, working around the truth rather than altering it for his fiction. In an afterword, he notes four minute details he tweaked, only two of which actually relate directly to Jack’s actions. An impressive achievement. And if you know the case well, he includes enough detail to pinpoint where his fictional story is weaving into the truth. For example, as Jack approaches Elizabeth Stride, the Swedish-born third victim, he passes a man wearing a deerstalker cap. This was a real man seen in conversation with Stride by the penultimate witness to see her alive, a police constable. This places Jack’s assault in time and in relation to other witnesses like Israel Schwartz, who, based on Hunter’s fictional reconstruction of events, did not actually see Jack.

Real life informs the fiction, which convincingly creates an alternative explanation for the known facts. This is a tricky bit of business for a novelist to pull off, and Hunter does it effortlessly—and, for the reader who doesn’t know their Jack the Ripper lore, invisibly and unobtrusively. His fictional solution, rooted as it is in the facts, offers enjoyable resolution to a real life mystery.

If I have any complaints whatsoever about I, Ripper they are minor: a handful of anachronisms (Belloc’s famous line about the Maxim gun, from 1898, is paraphrased by Jack ten years too early) and some tonal convergence of Jack’s diary and Jeb’s memoir that led me to suspect, briefly, that Jeb would turn out to be Jack (he doesn’t; Hunter is much better than that). I suspected the ultimate culprit early—it’s a whodunnit, or maybe who’s-doing-it, after all—but Hunter successfully obscures, misleads, and distracts so that the final reveal was still satisfying.

Finally—an odd complaint—I, Ripper is simply too good. I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone. This is a gripping, disturbing thriller and a masterpiece of historical fiction, and Hunter’s success in conveying Jack’s horror is what makes it difficult to recommend. But if you’re interested in the case, enjoy a well-constructed crime and suspense novel, and think you can handle a few months in Whitechapel and the company of one of the worst people who ever lived, you should definitely check it out.

Nolan’s Odyssey

I dashed off some initial thoughts on the first teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey just before Christmas. I concluded with this: “Even from this teaser it’s clear that [Nolan has] put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.”

This is more or less exactly what I thought of the film, which I finally saw this Wednesday. Homer’s power and that “despite” both feature strongly in my opinion.

I won’t bother to summarize the story. Everyone knows a little bit of it and if you’re here, bothering to read this, you probably know it even better than most.

To begin with what I liked, The Odyssey is hugely entertaining. That’s the basic standard a good movie must meet, and as a movie The Odyssey is astonishing. (Its quality as an adaptation of a great work of literature is a separate question, which we’ll return to.) The film is technically accomplished, the IMAX cinematography and the staging of the many action scenes expertly done, and the special effects seamless. The vast, cast-of-thousands scale of sequences like the Fall of Troy is overwhelming in the best sense. And for all his practical effects street cred, Nolan wisely used CGI in a number of appropriate places, a lesson seemingly learned from the underwhelming attempt to mimic the atomic bomb with a practical gasoline explosion in Oppenheimer. And I’ll go ahead and say here that I think The Odyssey is a much better movie than that one.

The film’s pacing is strong but not flawless. I’ve heard a lot of people say the movie didn’t feel three hours long. That wasn’t my experience—it actually felt enormously long to me, but in a way that conveyed the scope of the story rather than simply being boring. The Odyssey’s strongest sections are, unsurprisingly, those depicting Odysseus’s wanderings. The cyclops scene is a small masterpiece, tense, terrifying, and suspenseful, and makes the familiar one-eyed giant strange and scary again. Likewise the passage between Scylla and Charybdis and, in an episode from the poem I always forget about, the monstrous Laestrygonians, depicted here as plate-armored giants who can turn the very trees against intruders. The most disturbing scene in the movie is certainly that involving Circe, whose transformation of Odysseus’s men using half-glimpsed body horror is both frightening and unspeakably gross.

My favorite sequences were certainly Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops and his journey to Hades to speak to the shade of Tiresias. In mood, atmosphere, and technical execution they were flawless and totally absorbing. These sequences were also allowed to breathe, lingering and building tension in a way some others, though exciting, were not.

Another favorite, coming at the climax, is Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors. Though not the film’s best action scene, it draws together many expertly prepared strands of the story—Odysseus’s bow, Antinous’s treachery, Telemachus’s arc toward manhood, and the utter loathsomeness of the suitors—in a satisfying explosion of violence. When Odysseus, having revealed himself to the crowd gathered in his palace by stringing his bow and shooting through the twelve axes, puts his next arrow into the throat of the first suitor to die, the audience at my showing clapped and cheered.

This climactic resolution is a good example of the dimension is which Nolan has most successfully adapted the Odyssey to the conventions of film—structure and resolution. The setups and payoffs necessary for a film to make sense and satisfy as a narrative are well done, likely his best work in this regard since The Prestige.

But easily the best aspect of Nolan’s Odyssey is just how much of the original is in here. It’s impressive for a movie that, though long, still comes in under three hours. While in most cases deviating from the plot of ancient literature in adaptation is accepted as necessary, Nolan hews very close, including things left out of other adaptations (the Laestrygonians, the sirens, Odysseus’s dog Argos) and leaving out little. Some of these omissions, like Nausicaa and the Phaiakians and the almost total absence of the gods, require reshuffling of other plot elements. We’ll return to this, but as an adaptation Nolan has chosen mostly wisely and with attention to narrative concision without sacrificing much.

As for The Odyssey’s flaws: with a couple exceptions I was unimpressed with the acting. Tom Holland had a welcome earnestness as Telemachus but felt stiff much of the time, and Zendaya performs Athena like a slightly less angry version of Chani in Dune, all frowns and glares. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were good in their roles as written by Nolan, but—again, a point we’ll return to—the cunning and wiliness of this eminently well-matched couple was missing. Damon’s Odysseus has blunt-force persistence but not much in the way of guile, and he lacks the glory-seeking and boastfulness that attract the destructive attention of Poseidon. Homer’s Odysseus had charisma. Damon’s is dogged, but one is not left wondering why his men would rebel against his authority.

The two exceptions—scene-stealers both—are John Leguizamo as Eumaeus and Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous. These two elevate the film, and Pattinson, who imbues Antinous with an awful oleaginous magnetism, is largely responsible for how satisfying Odysseus’s slaughter is.

The material culture I was so uncertain about in my trailer reaction didn’t end up bothering me much. Yes, the armor is ridiculous fantasy Greek armor (that also doesn’t seem to stop or turn aside any weapons whatsoever), and yes, the ships are all wrong (they are literal Viking ships, the largest of which I got to look at in Mystic, Connecticut some years ago). The film’s approach to material culture is to shrug and say “whatever,” which makes it no different from any of the other Odyssey or Trojan War epics made since the silent era. I wish we had gotten a movie more firmly rooted in the Bronze Age of Odysseus, but we didn’t and that’s fine.

Which raises the dread spectre of the controversies surrounding Nolan’s Odyssey, including “historical accuracy.” It is not, as some internet types congratulate themselves for believing, ridiculous to want the film’s ships, sets, and costumes to reflect either the world of the Trojan War or the world Homer may have imagined in his own context. Just because Homer’s Odyssey is fiction—at least, that’s how we think of it—doesn’t mean its original context is valueless.

That’s not the path Nolan chose, unfortunately, but it is also true that the Nolanesque look he decided on isn’t inherently wrong, either. It’s worth judging on its own merits, and I think his brutalist matte black tactical imagination is somewhat self-limiting—a theme to which we’ll return. The look of The Odyssey is fine, but not a surprise. A surprise, whether rigorously historically sourced or even more archly fantastical, like 300, would have been nice.

However, Nolan himself undermines the argument that accuracy of whatever kind doesn’t matter by including numerous mentions of the Sea Peoples, mysterious raiders from the central and western Mediterranean who relentlessly attacked the east and brought on the Bronze Age Collapse. This is an unnecessary gesture toward real historical context that doesn’t mesh with the fantastical elements and doesn’t work historically—Homer’s characters wouldn’t have been aware of impending civilizational collapse and Homer himself didn’t include it because, though he lived in its long aftermath, he didn’t know about it. A strange choice but one clearly made for thematic reasons.

As for the casting controversies that generated a seriously annoying amount of internet bloviation: they proved a massive nothingburger. I’ll focus on Helen of Troy here. On one hand, as Homer translator Daniel Mendelsohn put it recently in a Rest is History Club episode, “it’s a little disingenuous to assume that Nolan wasn’t being consciously provocative in his choice” of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. It’s not ridiculous—much less racist—to notice. On the other hand, Helen appears only briefly, and I didn’t find her presence jarring at all given what I’ve already said about the film’s historically unmoored approach. Something else bothered me much more.

The worst flaw of Nolan’s Odyssey reminded me of the recent adaptations The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front. In both of those cases, I wrote much longer than normal reviews—as here—trying to strike a balance between appreciating the filmmaking and decrying the vandalism of the originals. The Odyssey is a much better movie than either of those and more faithfully presents the events and even the structure of the original, but it still fails to understand and present the original’s worldview.

In place of the deep concern with piety and hospitality in Homer’s poem, something almost every incident from the cyclops and Laestrygonians (uncivilized bad host, civilized bad hosts) to the Phaiakians (the ideal of civilized good hosts) illustrates, Nolan’s film foregrounds what he calls “Zeus’s law,” a watered down form of hospitality that amounts to the Golden Rule—almost directly quoted at one point—and a strange nonviolence. Despite what the suitors have spent years doing to Odysseus’s wife, son, servants, and palace, Odysseus for some reason can’t retaliate without going into exile. (Exiled by whom? I saw someone ask online. Is he not the king?) One of the few major departures from Homer is the film’s ending, in which Odysseus and Penelope, rather than restoring Ithaca through Athena’s help, leave, sailing west as in Dante and, later, Tennyson, but for twenty-first century reasons.

This strange, confused theme grows out of the film’s larger point about war and violence and the destruction of civilization. This is where the Sea Peoples come in—at the end, Penelope explicitly connects their threat with the Greek victory in the Trojan War. And for Odysseus himself, this is manifested in his guilt and trauma over the sack of Troy. Nolan’s Odyssey is about processing trauma and atoning for sin.

This leads to a running undercurrent of resentment. Antinous’s wickedness stems from his resentment of Odysseus and Telemachus much more than greed, Circe vents years, possibly centuries of resentment on Odysseus when thwarted, Sinon, in Hades, grouses at Odysseus for leaving him ignorant of his designs, and everyone resents Agamemnon. The biggest problem with Nyong’o’s Helen isn’t Nyong’o, it’s the seething resentment at being returned to Menelaus that Nolan has imparted to her.

This is not unique to this film, of course. I’m struck that in updating or making relevant an old story, the go-to modern method is to import and emphasis grudges and resentments. This reveals more about us than Homer, certainly.

Like Nolan’s matte black and concrete visual style, all of this is both ultramodern and—worse—uninteresting.

It’s strange, but The Odyssey makes the same mistake here as the The Return, which squandered a brilliant performance by Ralph Fiennes—whose Odysseus had obvious cunning—in simplifying and deconstructing the story. The Odyssey is a far better movie than The Return, but its psychologizing and therapeutic themes have the same flattening effect, a fact noted by no less a light than Emily Wilson, whose iambic pentameter translation I would not recommend but has been unfairly blamed for what a lot of online rage-baiters perceive as Nolan’s failings. Per Wilson: “The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrized way—and needs drugs to do so!” Fuss about helmets, ships, and casting all you like—this is the real, most serious departure from Homer.

Do we need another PTSD therapy fable? Is there not something in the alien world Homer’s imagination has kept alive for 2700 years that speaks to us without thinking we have to modernize it? Homer is brilliant on his own—dramatic, funny, terrifying, suspenseful, and moving by turns. It’s a fool’s errand to think one can improve him by making him relevant.

So this is not Homer’s Odyssey; it’s Nolan’s, for better and for worse. It’s riveting entertainment on a massive scale and worth seeing just for that. It also succeeds better than any other film version at covering most of the epic’s plot and events. But its worldview is not the original’s, and what it substitutes—or, rather, clumsily adds onto—is predictable and unsatisfying.

And yet, whatever misgivings one might have about Nolan’s imprint on the story, he was smart enough to get as much of Homer into the film as he could, and that’s the film’s saving grace. As I had hoped back in December, Homer’s power is much greater than any limitation or miscalculation on Nolan’s part, and so The Odyssey excites and moves precisely where it’s truest to the poet.

Watcher in the Shadows

As I noted when reviewing Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot back in the early spring, Household knew how to open a thriller. In Watcher in the Shadows, another Cold War-era shocker, he sends a postman to Charles Dennim’s front door on page one and blows him in half on page two. The novel barely slows down from there.

Dennim lives a quiet life in a rural English village. He’s an expert zoologist specializing in squirrels and shares the house—now missing most of its windows—with his widowed aunt. What presumably only he, a friend in British intelligence, and the unknown person who sent him a mailbomb know is that he is actually Charles von Dennim, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family and, during the Second World War, a double agent working undercover as part of the SS staff at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Now, ten years on from the war and in his early forties, Dennim prefers not to think about all this. He carries on his research into small mammals and enjoys his leisurely outdoor pursuits, including hunting and horseback riding with Aunt Georgina, an accomplished riding instructor. The abortive mail bomb gives him pause. Perhaps it was meant for someone else, though none of his neighbors strike him as the likely targets of assassination. But a few days later he receives a postcard—a photo of Buchenwald with a X marked over one building, the officers’ mess.

His past is known to someone, somewhere, albeit not in full. Dennim had successfully fed intelligence to the British during his time at Buchenwald and arranged the escapes of several important female political prisoners. He risked his life and his sanity—the moral damage done not only to his mind but to his sense of honor by the secrecy of his role comes up several times—in order to undermine the Nazis, though the nature of his work means neither he nor the British government can acknowledge it.

Dennim investigates and finds that several other men associated with Buchenwald—two officers and a truck driver—had recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances. One was tortured for days, hinting that the killings are motivated by something highly personal. Dennim, not least because he is not guilty of the crimes his enemy apparently seeks to avenge, determines not to be next.

This leads into the bulk of the novel, a series of removes from place to place in the English countryside as Dennim tries to lure the killer into a trap. Thinking of himself as a goat staked out for a hidden tiger, Dennim learns quickly that his enemy is smart, observant, and supremely cautious. A misstep on his own part might send the assassin into hiding for months, long enough to drive Dennim mad or render him complacent, an easy target. He must proceed carefully if he wants to force a confrontation.

Along the way Dennim finds allies in unlikely places—a retired admiral, a pub landlord, a sharply observant working class laborer—as well as, for the first time in his life as a bachelor spy-cum-zoologist, love. Benita, the admiral’s daughter, is no merely obligatory love interest but proves especially important, as by the time Dennim confronts his enemy one-on-one at a remote Cotswolds barn, he has much more at stake in his life than when the hunt began.

Watcher in the Shadows has many of the hallmarks and strengths of the other Household novels I’ve read so far: strong, lean prose, energetic pacing, continuously building tension and suspense, and beautifully realized outdoor settings. But a number of other factors set it apart and make it unusually rich and thought-provoking.

The first is Dennim’s romance with Benita. Household, as I’ve noted about Buchan before him and Ambler, his close contemporary, is not an author one would normally associate with a romantic subplot, but like both he can evoke newly kindled love simply and poignantly, in ways that both enrich the characters and matter to the plot.

The next is the depth of Dennim’s prior experiences undercover. Without giving too much away, Dennim’s secret is known to more people than himself, his enemy, and his few contacts in British Intelligence, and his postwar history is more complicated than his simple career studying squirrels may at first suggest. Buchenwald and secrecy damaged him, and coming to understand this both reveals hidden depths in other characters and plays an important role in learning how to defeat his enemy.

The last is the enemy himself. Again, I want to avoid spoiling the book, but the man trying to kill Dennim has a surprising connection to Buchenwald and to Dennim—that is, to the von Dennim family, now reduced to a widowed aunt and a bachelor squirrel expert but once a powerful noble dynasty. This connection and the mostly vanished world it evokes leads Dennim and his enemy backward in time, past genocide and the amorality of the nation state to the chivalric code of honor shared by those of noble blood. It is blood, in fact, that helps save Dennim’s life at the end.

Plenty of spy novels acknowledge or ruminate on the damage done by the secrecy, deceit, and pragmatism of espionage, but few offer an alternative, much less an alternative rooted in the past. By the end of Watcher in the Shadows, honor and honesty have given two irreconcilable enemies common ground in which to resolve their differences. Dennim’s duel with the enemy moves from the metaphorical—chess, cat and mouse, tiger and goat—to the literal. Their long fight at the barn is a sustained masterpiece of suspense and, thanks to the contrast between old world honor and modern technocratic nihilism running through the book, a challenging moral contest.

I read Watcher in the Shadows for the thrills and suspense and Household, true to form, didn’t disappoint. But the novel reaches a moral and cultural depth I found surprising—and inspiring. This is as good a thriller as any Buchan, Ambler, or Ian Fleming produced, and is well worth reading.

Sir Quixote of the Moors

The first John Buchan June ended with Buchan’s final novel and one of his masterpieces, Sick Heart River. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, this fifth John Buchan June concludes with his first published book—and the last novel I hadn’t read since beginning this event: 1895’s historical novella Sir Quixote of the Moors.

Ten chapters and barely eighty pages long, Sir Quixote of the Moors is a brisk historical romp designed to pose the hero an unsolvable dilemma. I usually avoid major spoilers in these posts, but since this is a brief story aimed inexorably at its climactic chapter, I will reveal the ending. Avoid spoilers if you choose. But it’s a good story and good stories are spoiler-proof, and I’ve tried to leave out some of the details that make reading it rich and enjoyable.

Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1680s, Sir Quixote is a story of “The Killing Time,” when the Scots Covenanters were subject to pursuit and slaughter by forces loyal to King Charles II. The narrator is an outsider: Jean de Rohaine, a French Catholic nobleman who has come to Scotland on the invitation of an old Scottish schoolmate, who had promised military adventure. After days of carousing, Jean departs with his host on their first assignment, which turns out to be burning Covenanter farms and killing women, children, and old people. Jean, his sense of chivalric honor outraged, leaves his host on the spot.

He has acted on principle but his choice proves foolishly imprudent—a dynamic that will return. He doesn’t know his way back to the port where he entered Scotland and gets hopelessly lost on the moors. He is betrayed by an innkeeper working as an informant for the authorities and only the honorable conduct of one of his pursuers allows him to escape. Lost, hungry, on the run, and exhausted by the wind, cold, and rain, he throws himself on the doorstep of the next house he comes to.

This proves providential. Jean has cast up at the manse of an aged minister of the persecuted Covenanter church, who lives there with his daughter Anne and her fiancé, a laird named Henry Semple. They care generously for him in his distress but no sooner has he begun to recover than the minister and Henry are forced to flee into the wilderness. They leave Jean to protect the house and Anne, trusting in the sense of honor that first brought him to them.

Jean is as good as his word, driving off a party of government thugs hunting for Henry in one scene and attempting, through his charm and skill in the courtly arts of music and dancing, to help Anne pass the time while she awaits Henry’s safe return. The latter has an unintended effect, though. In trying to help Anne cope with Henry’s absence, he wins her over, and he feels himself falling in love with her as well.

When Henry reappears, starving and crazed, on the run again after his hiding spot has been betrayed and with news that Anne’s father is nearing death, Jean reaches a crisis. He cannot honorably act on his feelings for Anne, and remaining with her will only deepen the affection and attraction growing between them. But leaving her orphaned, her likely future a marriage to a madman—if Henry even survives—seems to be a failure in his duty to take care of her. Memories of his own lost love arise to accuse him, and in the final pages he makes his terrible decision. He flees.

There is more to it than that, but that’s the main arc of the story. In her introduction to the edition I read, Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald interprets Sir Quixote as a story about religious extremism. I think that’s a necessary element of the setting but not Buchan’s point. Jean’s dilemma pits his passion against his honor, the opportunities his situation opens to him against his constancy and good faith, his feelings for Anne against promises made to the one she, in turn, had promised herself to.

If this story were told today—and it has been, over and over—it could only end, with utter, tired predictability, one way. Buchan does something more interesting, but without comforting platitudes. Jean’s honor runs deeper than slogans, and when he makes the hard and unsatisfying choice Buchan does not ignore or conceal the pain of his decision: “‘But honour is more than life or love,’ I said, as I set my teeth with stern purpose.” And, in the next paragraph: “though all my soul was steeled into resolution, there was no ray of hope in my heart—nothing but a dead, bleak outlook, a land of moors and rain, an empty purse and an aimless journey.”

Virtue may be its own reward, yes, but that reward is not gotten lightly. Buchan makes the reader feel it. This, as with so much else in Buchan’s work, was surprising and refreshing.

Sir Quixote of the Moors is clearly an early work. The twenty-year old Buchan’s style has not yet balanced the sturdy clarity, archaism, and dialect he so skillfully intermingled later, and the characterization is—unsurprisingly in a book of less than eighty pages—thin. The characters are believable but not deep. But Sir Quixote also foreshadows much of the mature Buchan’s strengths as a writer: fast pacing that doesn’t feel rushed, smoothly incorporated historical detail, the palpable “moral atmosphere” praised by Sir John Keegan, and, most especially, beautifully and vividly described settings. The Borders locations familiar from so many of his other novels have never felt colder, more miserably rainy, or less forgiving.

This is an enjoyable romp and a piece of juvenilia most writers could be proud of—or at least not embarrassed by. But Buchan himself consistently denigrated it, beginning with the pre-publication proofs, which he found unsatisfying to read. Thirty years later he attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent its being republished. Part of his attitude toward Sir Quixote may be the result of lessons learned. No good author looks back at early work without seeing tics and habits one is grateful to have grown out of. Buchan similarly dismissed his next book, his first full-length novel, John Burnet of Barns.

But another, more intriguing dimension of Buchan’s attitude toward this book may be the path it took to publication. Buchan, a young author (an “intimidatingly precocious” one, per Macdonald), had his title changed by the publisher. Originally called Sir Quixote, they added of the Moors and the cumbersome subtitle Being some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. Buchan also complained of the poor binding.

That’s bad enough, but then the American edition—which may have been pirated, though the details are still murky 130 years later—added two sentences to the final page. In this extra paragraph, Jean reverses himself and heads back for Anne.

This addition, apparently meant to give the book a happy ending, must have come from an illiterate editor because it completely undoes Jean’s story and misunderstands Buchan’s purpose behind it. At least one biographer has suggested that Buchan may have been asked to provide the extra lines, but it’s impossible to imagine Buchan accepting this change. With all this in mind his later attitude toward the book is suggestive.

The book’s background is interesting, and it also reveals a young author with enough tenacity to weather a bad first experience in publishing and keep going, but Sir Quixote of the Moors is still worth reading for its own sake. Simple, short, not especially deep but emotionally involving, and with many of the virtues of its author’s later work, it is more than a curiosity. It’s a fun and moving short story and, knowing as we do what treasures its author would gift us over the next forty-five years, an invitation and a preview. Sir Quixote is a worthy final read in this five-year journey.

* * * * *

Thanks again for another great John Buchan June. It’s both fun and a little melancholy to read the last unread Buchan novel after five years. As I said recently in a podcast interview about this project, if I had planned to read and write about all of them I never could have done it. But this has been a wonderful five years and, with all of the novels read and a handful of the non-fiction, I need to decide how to continue.

Likely I will read Buchan’s major biographies. As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, I had intended to read Oliver Cromwell but daily life impinged and I didn’t have time. That may be a good place to start for next year. I may also revisit the small handful of books I found underwhelming—Mr Standfast, The Courts of the Morning, The House of the Four Winds—and give them another shot.

But be assured, John Buchan June will return. Thanks for joining me. Your readership, notes, and e-mails have meant a great deal. I hope y’all have a good July and can enjoy at least one of the books I read this year!

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.

The Magic Walking Stick

The fifth John Buchan June continues with a true outlier in Buchan’s vast and varied body of work. In the more than one hundred books published in his lifetime, Buchan wrote history, thrillers, historical fiction, poetry, and short stories—including weird fiction and supernatural horror—but only one children’s novel. That novel is 1932’s The Magic Walking Stick.

Thirteen-year old Bill is home from his boarding school and eager to go hunting. On the eventful day narrated in the first chapter, he sets off from his family’s country home with one of the gamekeepers. A storm is brewing up and they’re in a hurry, but Bill falls behind when he can’t find his walking stick. The gamekeeper and dogs leave without him and Bill, giving up on finding the stick, hurries to catch up.

In a wonderfully atmospheric opening, signs and portents appear suggesting something uncanny is about to happen, but Bill is too rushed to pay proper attention. He is stopped, however, by the sight of a old man sitting under a hornbeam. The old man is curiously dressed and has a strange, high-pitched voice, but offers to sell Bill a new walking stick from the bundle of sticks he carries. He offers a peculiar one—of a reddish wood with a white, crescent-shaped handle at the top. Bill accepts and pays a farthing.

When Bill catches up to the gamekeeper and tells him about the old man, they turn back to look but the man—hornbeam tree and all—is gone.

What Bill discovers that day is that the stick, if set in the ground and twirled while one wishes to be in another location, will transport him there instantly. He learns this by accident during their hunt: to his great delight when he lands in the middle of a flock of ducks and to his gratitude and relief when he is saved from a flash flood.

This begins the most fun and adventurous part of the story, as Bill experiments with the stick and discovers more of what it can do. He visits exotic places in the Pacific and Africa and plays a bold trick on his family’s obnoxious neighbors. He also learns more about the stick itself. By happenstance, his father is reading a medieval chronicle and relates one of those curious side-stories so many medieval scribes included without elaborating on the details we’d love to know now. Two ancient staves named Beauty and Bands had made their way to Charlemagne’s court. They could, if used properly, transport their owners anywhere, but each observed certain limits: one could be used only for serious work, the other for amusement. Misuse them and they would, somehow, disappear—as, indeed, they had later in the Middle Ages.

Bill decides his stick must be one of these but, not knowing which it is, disciplines his use. He doesn’t want to transport himself to the Solomon Islands on a lark only to be abandoned there by the stick. As in so many good stories of magic and fantasy, his exploration of what precisely he can do is a lot of the fun.

I won’t go into all of Bill’s adventures, but by the middle of the book he has learned how to honor the purposes of both sticks and work within their limits, first by saving an uncle who had disappeared why flying over the Sahara and finally, in the novel’s longest and most consequential series of adventures, by helping young Crown Prince Anatole, the heir to the throne of a troubled eastern European kingdom called Gracia, escape his anti-monarchical enemies and claim his throne.

This second half is pure Ruritanian romance and, as noted by Buchan biographer Andrew Lownie, thematically meshes with other Buchan novels of the time, especially the Dickson McCunn books, which entangle the retired Scottish grocer in the dynastic disputes and revolutionary upheavals of Evallonia. But where The House of the Four Winds, especially, falls apart as a novel, The Magic Walking Stick captures the lightness and swashbuckling high spirits of books like the original Ruritanian romance, The Prisoner of Zenda. Gracia’s political situation is not over-elaborated, Bill’s pluck as well as his friendship with Anatole make their escapades fun and engaging, and Buchan throws in enough twists and reversals to keep it suspenseful.

I think it’s safe to call The Magic Walking Stick a minor Buchan work. The two biographies I have, those of Lownie and Ursula Buchan, each mention the book only two or three times, and only Lownie explains anything about its story and reception. In trying to run down a copy for John Buchan June, even the cash-grab print-on-demand versions available on Amazon were few, and I ended up reading it in e-book form through our local library. A Buchan book being hard to find was a new one for me. (I’ll note that the entire thing is available from Project Gutenberg.)

This is too bad, because The Magic Walking Stick has the lightness of touch, the brisk pace, and the winsome young hero common to much classic children’s fantasy. The situations Bill gets himself into are varied and cleverly executed, and the many settings—including tropical places continents away, the moors and forests of Buchan’s beloved Scotland, and the fields and hills of southern England, which are clearly based on the Oxfordshire landscapes around Elsfield, where Buchan lived with his family at the time—are simply but beautifully described. Buchan makes Bill’s leaps from the thorny scrub of Africa back to the cold and damp of England palpable.

I also enjoyed the glimpse this book provides into the world of a well-to-do English boy of the early 1930s. Bill goes hunting and angling with the family keeper, knows his way around the servants’ quarters and back passages and can use them for mischief, and can visit London where, at the age of thirteen, he buys his friend a rifle for £25. A totally lost world. If Buchan’s original readers could thrill to imagining themselves traveling anywhere instantly, a modern reader of any age might just relish imagining having the kind of freedom Bill enjoys.

The Magic Walking Stick was a welcome surprise. As children’s fantasy, it is not of the same rank as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia but, as both Tolkien and Lewis were fans of Buchan, it is difficult to imagine those books existing without books like this one. It is not deep, but it is fun and exciting, and still worth a read for both adults and kids.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.