Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Merrill’s Marauders

Jeff Chandler as Gen Frank Merrill inspects his exhausted men before the final assault In Merrill’s Marauders (1962)

There’s a scene in Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead in which the recon squad at the center of the story are ordered to drag an artillery piece into position in the jungle. They must first get it across a river and then up a muddy, deeply rutted track to the top of a hill with no mechanical assistance. It takes all day. And it’s agonizing. Mailer makes the reader feel—for pages and pages—the messy, clumsy, impossible effort as well as the inevitable frustration when the gun finally slips loose and slides right back down the hill into the river. The reader ends the chapter as exhausted as Mailer’s soldiers.

Precisely that note of weariness and exhaustion is the salient mood of Merrill’s Marauders, an unusual 1962 World War II movie I recently rewatched with my sons after an interval of many years.

I don’t intend this post as a proper review—if you’ve found your way here you probably already know something about the movie—but I do want to draw attention to this aspect of exhaustion. Few of the classic 1950s and 60s World War II films approach their subject with the attention to labor, repetitiveness, and sheer tiredness that Merrill’s Marauders does.

Briefly, Merrill’s Marauders tells the true story of a special US Army unit deployed to Burma in support of British efforts there. Burma is a neglected corner of the war anyway, and the unfamiliarity of the story as well as its realistic, serious depiction of the wastage and attrition of the campaign make it worthwhile viewing.

This is despite the movie being quite rough around the edges. Wikipedia diplomatically calls it an “economical historical epic,” which being translated is “low budget movie.” It shows in different ways, most obviously and jarringly in a sequence incorporating stock footage from Battle Cry, a film about Marines in the Pacific, into a film about the US Army in Burma.

That Merrill’s Marauders works at all can be credited to its director. Sam Fuller was himself a veteran of the war and would go on to write and direct The Big Red One based yet more directly on his experiences. Presented with this story and a small budget, Fuller mostly dealt with his constraints artfully and used his funding where it could make the most difference. The film begins in medias res, with the Marauders already worn out and their numbers depleted after weeks on the march in the jungle, and it ends not with the final great battle to take their objective but on a character-centered moment just before the action—a daring move that works perfectly. That’s the writing. Technically, a pair of mid-film assault sequences are staggeringly well executed, as is a climactic defense against a banzai attack.

Action punctuates the separate acts of the story but the subject is really the men themselves, their leader, General Merrill, and their exhaustion. At several points in the film they are declared used up by the unit surgeon, utterly incapable of more, and yet when they receive new orders they pick up and carry on. There is heroism in the combat scenes but a no less extraordinary heroism in the long marches through jungle and over mountains in between. One senses that Fuller, a combat infantryman himself, understood well the drain of boredom and endless work and wanted the audience to feel it in their bones.

Where Merrill’s Marauders differs most starkly from the scene I opened with from The Naked and the Dead is in its earnestness. Mailer’s novel is a bitter, cynical story in which endurance and courage are rewarded with yet more pointless hardship. Merrill’s Marauders believes in its men and their work. The war is terrible and wastes good men, but their unromantic, plodding tenacity is something to be admired.

The film’s best moment, for me, and one that illustrates beautifully the place Merrill’s Marauders reserves for sincerity and goodness, is not General Merrill’s final scene—a calvary-like passion complete with pietà—but a quiet one near the middle. The Marauders, despite their weary, malnourished, disease- and leech-ridden condition, have liberated a strategically important rail junction from the Japanese. While Merrill considers the situation, his men sack out anywhere they can sit or lie down. The Burmese natives appear—they’re all women and children, a fact with dark implications that the film wisely leaves us to intuit. An old woman approaches one of the toughest sergeants in the unit and gratefully offers him rice. He breaks down weeping before he can finish eating it.

If few of the classic war movies portray the weariness and sheer effort of the war as little more than a discomfort or inconvenience, fewer still offer us moments like that.

Merrill’s Marauders is a unique little movie, telling a unique story with the sharp perspective of a veteran spiritually unwearied by cynicism. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, or revisiting if you have.

Palma’s Divine Comedy

Considering how much space his work takes up in my mind, I don’t write about Dante often enough here. Some books you read so early, and at such a formative time, that they become part of the foundation of one’s taste, worldview, and imagination, informing everything without always being seen. The Divine Comedy is one of those for me, and I want to make a rare comment about it here, specifically in praise of the recent English translation by Michael Palma.

One of the commonplaces of writing about Dante in English is the difficulty—in English—of terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante created for the Comedy. This is a “threefold rhyme” of aba-bcb-cdc-ded-efe etc, with each tercet linking ahead and behind. It’s elegant, beautiful when done well, and theologically significant. (Dante’s three-part epic ends with a vision of the Trinity, after all.) All well and good, but it’s also a bear to work with. As many, many translators have noted, the lack of inflected endings on English words severely limits possible rhymes in comparison with a Romance language like Italian.

What’s an English translator to do, then? The solutions depend greatly on a given translator’s priorities, which usually boil down to choices between the following:

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

Wording, of course, is the most flexible of the three. Dante wrote in medieval Italian. The particulars of how one renders that in English is going to depend greatly on the latter two priorities. Most translators go for tone, capturing Dante’s force and directness while using an unmetered or loosely metered line and little or no rhyme. The most literal translations—Hollander and Singleton, for example—do this successfully. Dante comes through even if a notable aspect of the form doesn’t.

But there are rare translators who do chase the white whale of rhyme. The most successful have typically done so only when natural-sounding rhymes present themselves, like Anthony Esolen, long my favorite for reading, or by limiting or altering the rhyme scheme in some way, like John Ciardi, who rhymes the first and last lines of each tercet and doesn’t worry about the rest. Both suggest what Dante sounded like without straining.

Much more rare is the translator who tries to do the entire Comedy in Dante’s rhyme. Dorothy Sayers is the most famous example. While her notes are rightly praised and valued, her translation, in retaining terza rima, lengthens the poetic line to accommodate involuted English constructions, the contorted grammar of which is larded with archaisms. One feels at all times the effort she is putting into achieving end-rhyme. While she manages to keep the rhyme, she loses Dante’s concision, energy, and wording. I’ve never found that a worthwhile sacrifice.

I mention all these technical considerations and poetic hazards to highlight Palma’s achievement in his Divine Comedy. He has successfully translated the Comedy in terza rima from start to finish—one hundred cantos!—without strain or contortion, without reaching for rhymes, and while accurately capturing both Dante’s wording and his forcefulness, directness, and every subtle emotional register. Words, tone, and form all align effortlessly. I didn’t think it was possible.

The greatest pleasure of this reading of the Comedy, which I undertook at leisure over the last five weeks, was to glance up from the page and realize I’d been reading English terza rima without even noticing. Palma has made this great work, which I’ve read umpteen times over the quarter century since I discovered it in high school, fresh and powerful again. Dante’s final vision in Paradiso XXXIII, which I read this afternoon while giving an exam, was vivid to me in a way it has never been before.

Given recent receptiveness to formalism in translation—such as Emily Wilson’s blank verse Iliad and Odyssey—I hope Palma’s Comedy will find enthusiastic widespread appreciation. It will certainly take its place on my Dante shelf alongside Esolen, Musa, and Ciardi as one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a good opportunity to reread Dante or to read the Comedy for the first time, I heartily recommend it.

Summer reading 2025

My reading has tipped more toward fiction than non-fiction for the last couple years, and this summer may be the most fiction-heavy season yet. I try to read at whim, but I plan to correct that a little this fall. I have a lot of good history and biography sitting around, waiting. In the meantime, I enjoyed a lot of good books this summer, and the following—presented in no particular order—are my favorites. As always, I hope y’all can find something here to enjoy.

For the purposes of this blog post, “summer” runs from mid-May to Labor Day. And, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A short, beautifully written Western novella based on a real person, an orphan boy taken in and raised by Comanches who nevertheless becomes their destructor. This story defies easy summary but is totally absorbing and breathtakingly dramatic. One of the rare short books I’ve actually wished were longer.

A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—An old friend of “salvage consultant” Travis McGee pays a visit after several years’ absence and shows him a solid gold Aztec idol. He also asks McGee to set up a meeting with Nora, the girlfriend he unceremoniously abandoned, and is unceremoniously killed. In the aftermath, Nora hires McGee to investigate the provenance of the idol, where the rest of the treasure his friend mentioned has disappeared to, and who had him killed. McGee, eager to avenge his friend, travels to luxury villas in Mexico and the estates of pervy millionaires in California and gets entangled with the illicit antiquities trade, killer guard dogs, multiple women, and Cuban exiles along the way. Gripping throughout.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s first postwar novel. A British playwright is recruited to report on the Stalinist show trial of a leftwing anti-Communist in an unnamed Eastern European state just after the end of World War II, as the Iron Curtain falls and Soviet puppet governments consolidate control and eliminate rivals. Intricately plotted and, unfortunately, all too realistic. Full review on the blog here.

The Schirmer Inheritance, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s second postwar novel, a legal thriller in which American lawyer George Carey attempts to find the heir to a fortune with tangled roots the Napoleonic Wars. The last surviving descendant of a Bavarian soldier who deserted following a battle against Napoleon has died intestate, and before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seizes the inheritance they must first confirm that there are no other potential heirs. As it turns out, there may be one—a German soldier who went missing in Greece near the end of World War II, but hasn’t been confirmed dead. Carey must either him or confirm that he was killed by guerrillas. His search will take him across Europe and closer and closer to danger. I read this one before Judgment on Deltchev, and while that is clearly the superior novel, The Schirmer Inheritance offers a solid, atmospheric slow-burn and the vintage Ambler pleasure of a glimpse into a complicated, unsettled, dangerous underworld.

The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—After a British agent retrieving a canister of film is run down by a car in Finland, the small, understaffed, impotent agency behind him attempts to run an infiltration operation in East Germany. The followup to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Le Carré—somehow—feared made espionage look too glamorous and exciting, this is a story of confusion and futility. Be prepared for that. It sags just a bit in the middle but has exceptionally gripping opening and closing chapters. Le Carré at his best still astonishes me with how effortlessly his novels read.

The Properties of Rooftop Air, by Tim Powers—A powerfully creepy novella set in the subterranean world of Regency London before the events of The Anubis Gates, which I read this spring. A satisfying and meaningful self-contained story.

The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin—A subtle and clever Odyssey for the age of presidents (instead of gods) and terrorists (instead of monsters). A US Navy officer in a dead-end career oversees the construction of a last-of-its-class small ship, and falls in love with a lawyer whose husband has abandoned her. His daring and courage and her commitment will be tested when he and his new ship, the USS Athena, deploy to the Indian Ocean to fight Iran, Somali pirates, and ISIS. Full review on the blog here.

Favorite non-fiction

Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—After Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent Ian Fleming biography and an older Poe biography back in the spring, I read two more big literary bios this summer, both new. One I had been anticipating, but this one, a new authorized biography of Elmore Leonard, was a great surprise. I learned about it only the week before it was published, and was gifted a copy by the publisher. It’s excellent—a comprehensive cradle-to-grave account that pays close attention to Leonard’s life, career, and craft. I especially appreciated the latter: Kushins notes key influences on Leonard’s imagination and writing at different stages of his life (especially crucial: All Quiet on the Western Front as a boy, For Whom the Bell Tolls as a young writer, The Friends of Eddie Coyle just as he pivoted from Westerns to crime) as well as his writing process. The book is also full of delightful stories: Leonard the Seabee sending coy letters to an old friend from the South Pacific, Leonard the ad man writing longhand in his desk drawer at work, Leonard, in mounting frustration, working on film adaptations with the mercenaries and prima donnas of Hollywood. The one area I wish were covered in more detail is the personal. Kushins pays close attention to the young Leonard’s devout Catholic faith but, though we sense a change comes during his divorce in the early 1970s as well as his struggle toward sobriety, why he ended up agnostic is left unclear. That said, the otherwise solid coverage of his life and the thorough attention to his work is wonderful.

Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris—From Yale UP’s Jewish Lives series, this is a short biography of the Russian-born Sigmund (or possibly Solomon) Rosenblum who, as Sidney Reilly, spied off and on for the British before becoming a professional agent during the First World War and committing himself to the defeat of Bolshevism. This is an extraordinarily complicated story with lots of points of confusion, myth, and missing information, but Morris tells it well. There are longer biographies of Reilly out there, which I am going to seek out, but this offered a solid introduction to a tumultuous life.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley—The other of the two big literary biographies I read this summer, Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe is comprehensive, sweeping, exhaustively researched, and combines a thorough account of Poe’s life with criticism of his work. Kopley demonstrates mastery of both, but has not grown too close to his subject; though charitable, especially toward Poe’s drinking and his feuds with other authors, which to some biographers smacks of jealousy or mere trolling, Kopley is not uncritical. He is especially good on Poe’s personal relationships, not only his fraught relationship with his foster father John Allan and his doomed wife Virginia, but also his friendships with other writers, childhood friends from Richmond, and the various women he loved both before and after Virginia. Kopley’s literary criticism is also insightful and thought-provoking. Though some of his interpretation is perhaps too autobiographical for my taste, I benefited greatly from his emphasis on structure and allegory, especially in Poe’s early work. This is probably the most thorough life of Poe that I’ve read, but is also probably too long and detailed for the casual Poe fan. But for anyone with more than passing interest in the subject I highly recommend it.

Julius Caesar: A Biography, by John Buchan—A succinct overview not only of its subject but of his life and times, with a special concern for the decline and collapse of republican institutions. See below for a link to the full John Buchan June review.

John Buchan June

This year for John Buchan June I emphasized Buchan’s short fiction, reading three collections of stories. I also read one of his short biographies and three novels, including his first full-length historical adventure. Here are all eight of this year’s reads, each linked to the full review here on the blog, in order of reading:

• The Runagates Club (1928)

• John Burnet of Barns (1898)

• Julius Caesar: A Biography (1932)

• The Watcher by the Threshold (1902)

• A Prince of the Captivity (1933)

• The Courts of the Morning (1929)

• The Path of the King (1921)

Of these, The Path of the King, particularly its early stories set in the Middle Ages, may be my favorite, though “No-Man’s-Land” in The Watcher by the Threshhold is a stellar bit of creepiness. Of the full novels, I think the early, flawed, overlong, but hugely enjoyable John Burnet of Barns was my favorite.

After four years of this event I’m running low on Buchan novels but there’s more short fiction and I’ve barely touched his biographical work. Looking forward to next year!

Rereads

Reading Cooler than Cool got me to revisit a few of my favorite Elmore Leonard novels on my commute. I’d recommend any of these. And though I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Hobbit, this is my second time through with the kids. A joy.

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

Looking ahead

I’m glad to say I’m already well into a couple of good reads for the fall, including Michael Palma’s recently published terza rima translation of my favorite book, The Divine Comedy, and I have a lot of classics lined up. I’m sure you’ll hear about some of them in the end-of-year recap. In the meantime, I hope y’all will check some of these out, and thanks as always for reading!

Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The Oceans and the Stars

A skilled mariner, gifted with leadership, cunning, and physical tenacity, longs to return home from a long and dangerous wartime voyage. Unaccountable powers hinder and undermine him and his stouthearted resistance brings down their wrath. They throw extra hazards and unreasonable anathemas in his way. Men die. He may never see home again. Meanwhile, the woman he left behind, a woman as smart and tough as him, is surrounded and menaced by men who see little in her but advancement for themselves. And every day they spend apart they grow older, that time together lost irrevocably.

One of the most remarkable things about Homer’s work and the Odyssey in particular is that no matter how familiar it becomes, it is always fresh. The Oceans and the Stars, the latest novel by Mark Helprin, clearly demonstrates that. Though not a retelling—Lord knows we don’t need any more of those—it draws inspiration from the Odyssey in new and exciting ways.

After a short prologue in which the Navy prepares a court martial against Captain Stephen Rensselaer on capital charges, The Oceans and the Stars flashes back to the moment that set him on course for this fate. Fifty-two years old, overdue for promotion to admiral and retirement, Rensselaer has been appointed to a cushy advisory job under the Secretary of the Navy. A SEAL during Operation Desert Storm and commander of a patrol coastal or PC, the smallest class of ship in the US Navy, Rensselaer learns that the unnamed president plans to scrap the PCs simply because they’re small and, in an Oval Office meeting to which his boss has brought him as an expert advisor, speaks his mind. The president has him transferred to New Orleans to oversee the construction of the final commissioned PC. It’s not a demotion, but it’s meant as an insult. Rensselaer takes the job seriously.

It’s in New Orleans that he meets Katy Farrar, a tax lawyer whose husband left her and whose children sided with him. Cut adrift and lonely, she and Rensselaer meet on a streetcar and fall in love. Both intelligent, good at what they do, but abandoned and railroaded into career dead-ends with not enough years left to start over, they are ideally matched. Rensselaer plans to complete this final, cutting-edge PC—which he has named USS Athena—turn it over to the Navy, cut his losses, and retire. Then war breaks out.

Interestingly, as The Oceans and the Stars was published two years ago, the war pits the United States against Iran. With the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean aflame, Rensselaer finds himself with a war command. He takes aboard supplies, ammunition, and a half-squad of SEALs and steams out of Norfolk. He has just enough time before he ships out to ask Katy to marry him.

The bulk of the novel concerns Rensselaer and the Athena’s combat cruise, which I don’t want to spoil by summarizing here. Pitted against an Iranian battleship equipped with new Russian technology, a band of ISIS pirates operating out of Somalia, hazardous seas, inhospitable terrain along the coasts, and a chain of command reaching all the way up to the president who booted Rensselaer from the Pentagon, Rensselaer, the Athena, and her crew are sorely tested. And, as that prologue reminds us, there looms on the horizon a court martial—final judgment.

I led off with the Odyssey and though Helprin models the story on Homer, it is not a slavish retelling or adaptation. This makes his actual use of the themes and rhythms of Homer as well as specific episodes not only feel organic to this modern story but much, much more clever. One example from early in the book: as the ship passes through the Straits of Gibraltar, so many men crowd the port rail to ogle the load of topless women aboard a British millionaire’s yacht that the Athena rocks underfoot. Rensselaer has to call them back to themselves and remember their duties as American sailors. Their unseriousness and lust is a threat not only to good order but to the entire ship—the sirens, transferred effortlessly to our world.

Helprin, a veteran of the IDF, renders the voyages, shipboard life, and military culture realistically. And as in any good war novel, he prepares both his characters and readers so carefully for combat that the action offers a breathtaking release of tension. Athena’s confrontations with her enemies, whether the more powerful Iranian vessel or the more ruthless ISIS pirates and the hostages they take aboard a cruise ship, are intensely suspenseful and both horrifying and exciting once they spill over into combat. I’ve seldom been as absorbed in a character’s situation as I was in Rensselaer’s confrontation with ISIS, whose tactics are accurately and disturbingly portrayed.

Though The Oceans and the Stars is a good war story and treats its military setting and technological aspects seriously, with well-explained detail that doesn’t bog the story down, it is also character-driven in a way that similar novels often aren’t. Rensselaer and Katy (her first name is Penelope, by the way) are the most fully formed characters, but supporting characters like Holworthy, the disgruntled Texan commander of Athena’s SEALs, who nurses a childhood wound that drives his service in the Navy, or Movius, Rensselaer’s Jewish XO, who falls in love with a girl while in port at Haifa on the way to the Indian Ocean, are excellent supporting characters. And looming above and at the edges of the story is the president, a capricious autocrat behind much of the misery Rensselaer endures—and overcomes.

There is politics in this novel, but of a refreshing kind. The president is an almost perfect blend of the worst qualities of the last several, and even his political party is not mentioned. The words “Republican” and “Democrat” are used once apiece, by my count, and in no way affect the plot. Rensselaer’s voyage takes place during an election cycle, and just as the lofty machinations of the gods change things for Odysseus, the election matters in unexpected ways for Rensselaer.

What matters to Rensselaer is his duty as a sailor, as an officer of the US Navy, and his love for Katy. He is clear about this. (If The Oceans and the Stars has any fault, it is a tendency toward speechifying in the characters—Rensselaer offhandedly lectures his crew on several occasions—but this is a vestige, I think, of that classical imprint on the story.) As with the nonpartisan politics, it was refreshing to read a story in which courage, duty, and love of country were straightforwardly and unironically spoken of an acted upon. Helprin doesn’t explicitly draw a contrast between Rensselaer and his crew and the gods in Washington, but it’s there, and it’s razor sharp.

While I enjoyed The Oceans and the Stars for its sailing, strategizing, and combat, it most moved me in its love story. I just turned forty-one, perhaps too young to be feeling this way, but Rensselaer and Katy’s predicament—alone, adrift, failed, and unable even to look forward to children—filled me with a powerful wistfulness I still find hard to describe. This is the nostalgia of Homer’s original—nostalgia being the pain of longing to go home. Like Homer, Helprin makes us feel it achingly. And like Homer, he brings his characters redemption in surprising and beautifully satisfying ways.

I’ve heard a lot about Mark Helprin over the years but this is the first of his novels that I’ve read. I will read others. Suspenseful, exciting, realistically and disturbingly violent without getting lost in the horror, The Oceans and the Stars is also powerfully moving—one of the most vivid and engaging novels I’ve read so far this year.

The Path of the King

This year’s John Buchan June, in which I’ve tried to focus more on Buchan’s short fiction, draws to a close with a book that is both a collection of short stories and a coherent novel and may be my favorite read this month, a sweeping set of interconnected tales spanning a thousand years: The Path of the King.

Beginning in the 9th or 10th century with the son of a Norse king, Buchan follows his descendants through multiple countries and widely varying fortunes. In the first story, the king gifts his son Biorn with a golden arm-ring. Biorn has just come of age to sail to war with his father, and in the year the story takes place famine and bad weather have placed greater than usual pressure on the outcome of their Viking raids. They strike west, avoiding Britain because of the hard-earned vigilance of its kingdoms, and settle on pillaging Frankish lands along the English Channel. When they are ambushed, Biorn is one of the only survivors, snatched out of the fight by a foreigner in his father’s war band and left in the woods. He wanders until he finally begs help at a peasant’s hut, where the story leaves him—alone, bereft, with nothing left to him but his arm-ring and an old woman’s prophecy that a great kingdom would one day arise from him.

The ring reappears in the next story on the finger of one of William the Conqueror’s more principled knights, and then on the finger of an impoverished descendant, a girl who escapes England by marrying a Bruges cloth merchant and making a fortune in commerce. One of her descendants goes on Crusade with St Louis and departs on an ill-fated mission to meet the Mongol Khan Houlagou, a mission from which only his arm—still wearing the ring—returns. One of his descendants hosts Joan of Arc, who convinces her to marry a good knight when she has doubts about the future, and one of their children becomes a Renaissance Humanist scholar and, finally, a voyager with Columbus.

A generation on, the ring returns to England with an aristocratic Huguenot refugee following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, is on the hand of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s men during one of Raleigh’s last voyages to Virginia, and on the hand of one of the regicides who signs Charles I’s death warrant at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

This marks the beginning of a descent in the line, and the next generations we meet are skulkers and spies. One, the regicide’s grandson, works half-heartedly as a Catholic spy in England and, fearing he will be exposed by a judge who has discovered his secret, has decided to murder him when someone else does it first. Caught in an arcane plot, he is himself killed and used as manufactured evidence of a Catholic plot to invade England. His grandson, spying on the Jacobites for the Duke of Marlborough, is caught by Jacobite agents and forced to admit that, though he comes “of an ancient house” it is “somewhat decayed.” The ring is his only proof.

Spared, he vows to change his way of life, though the decay of the house seemingly continues. The next story finds one of his descendants in the wilderness of Kentucky with Daniel Boone. Like the ancestors who populate the previous stories, he is bold, intelligent, and restless. Also like them, he is ill-fated. Boone retrieves his ring and we next find it, in The Path of the King’s next-to-last story, in the possession of Nancy, a dying frontierswoman in a rickety cabin. In her final day of life, her beloved son Abe loses the ring while using it as a sinker on a fishing line and she has a vision of all the boys through her ancestry who had desired and proudly worn the ring. Whatever the ring signified, she decides, has reached its end.

The final story, told in four vignettes spanning four years of war and upheaval, follows her son Abe as President of the United States.

The first story in the first book covered this month, “The Green Wildebeest” in The Runagates Club, is introduced by Richard Hannay as a meditation on the way ancient things survive and recur in groups of people. The Path of the King is a book-length elaboration on this theme as well as many other familiar Buchan motifs, especially providence. Denied his father’s throne, Biorn and all of his descendants nevertheless keep the kingliness of their blood alive, and all of their actions and decisions—from the Conquest, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years’ War to the Reformation, English Civil War, and the American frontier—prepare the way for the man who will close the circle and fulfil the promise made to Biorn, ruling as “the last of the Kings.”

But as I’ve written before, a theme by itself is nothing. The power of a theme grows from particularity, the concrete specifics with which an author dramatizes it. The great strength of The Path of the King lies in Buchan’s vividly imagined historical vignettes. Each is populated by distinct characters in well-realized historical scenes that, despite their brevity, breathe the spirit of each story’s age strongly and authentically. It is totally absorbing. The book’s thematic connecting tissue, much like the ring itself, is always present but never the point, which gives The Path of the King both subtlety and a staggering cumulative effect.

Also crucial to this effect is the elegiac tone of much of the book. Though a few of the stories at the beginning and end span years and are long enough to be subdivided into chapters, many of them are vignettes—single historical moments. Most of them concern death. The stories, small instances in the thousand years of this family line, are moments of handing over and transition. Epiphany plays an important role, especially as the family’s fortunes rise and fall—and fall and fall—and more than one character has a deathbed vision, a glimpse of past and future. All of this, rooted as it is in the lifelike detail of the individual stories, creates a profound sense of the passage of time and the brevity of life. Ubi sunt?

I could quibble with a few things. The historical tone in places is a bit whiggish, but Buchan, ever fair-minded, does not present a straightforward progressive picture of upright Protestant modernizers triumphing over the backward. The Puritans and Parliamentarians of the Civil War and the anti-Catholic Whigs of the Restoration come off looking especially bad and Buchan presents the Jacobites, as in A Lost Lady of Old Years and Midwinter, as noble, principled, but doomed—more obsolete than evil. A bit more galling is the celebration of Lincoln as a ruling like a king. For a Southerner and an Anti-Federalist sympathizer, this is not the endorsement Buchan thinks it is.

But those are quibbles. The final story about Lincoln is of a piece with the others in its imaginative qualities, in its portraits of real people—Lincoln’s story is told from the perspectives of Edwin Stanton and William Seward, who are as vividly drawn as St Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Cromwell, Titus Oates, and Daniel Boone in others—and in its emotional strength. The scenes of Lincoln’s death, at least when Stanton is not opining on his majesty, are a fittingly moving conclusion to the story.

Perhaps my favorite stories in The Path of the King were the first two, “Hightown under Sunfell” and “The Englishman,” which is unsurprising since they’re set in my beloved Early Middle Ages. Buchan imagines the Viking Age and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England brilliantly. “Eyes of Youth,” the Crusader’s adventure into Central Asia, and “In the Dark Land,” with Daniel Boone, offered the most adventure of the lot, with men striking into vast wildernesses full of alien dangers. The two spy stories, “The Marplot” and “The Lit Room,” offer some quality Buchan espionage in a historical vein. The most moving, for me, may have been “The Maid,” in which a young noblewoman who has just rejected an offer of marriage receives a visit from Joan of Arc and, a year later, has a vision of her on the day of her martyrdom. Buchan’s Joan is refreshingly both pious and human, an earthy farm girl in armor fired by love of God and France. And the penultimate story, “The Last Stage,” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln is gifted a vision of her ancestors and her son’s future, has a similarly mystical power.

The Path of the King was serialized over a year from the fall of 1920 to 1921 and published in book form in 1921. It was Buchan’s first historical fiction since Salute to Adventurers before the First World War and would be followed not only by more great thrillers but by the best of his historical novels—Midwinter, Witch Wood, The Blanket of the Dark, and The Free Fishers. Elegantly constructed, rich in meaning, and beautifully imagined throughout, The Path of the King is a fitting beginning for the peak of Buchan’s literary career.

* * * * *

Thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June. I’ve greatly enjoyed the four years of this project, most especially because of the people it’s brought me into contact with. I’m looking forward to next year, though with twenty-nine books under my belt—including the overwhelming majority of Buchan’s novels—I’m already trying to plan what to read. I may have read all of his most famous books by now, but as The Path of the King, The Watcher by the Threshold, and John Burnet of Barns show, there is still plenty of wonderful reading among the more obscure Buchan.

I hope y’all have a pleasant July, and that these posts can guide you toward something good to read in the long hot evenings. As always, thanks for reading!

The Courts of the Morning

This year’s John Buchan June enters the home stretch today with one of Buchan’s later thrillers, a South American adventure featuring filibustering European adventurers, American big business, kidnapping, regime change, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and two favorite recurring characters—The Courts of the Morning.

After a introduction by Richard Hannay in which he explains some of the background to the novel’s events, The Courts of the Morning picks up with Sir Archibald Roylance and his new bride Janet as they begin an overdue honeymoon. They decide to visit the small, prosperous Republic of Olifa on South America’s Pacific Coast. Meanwhile, Sandy Arbuthnot, now Lord Clanroyden, has grown restless in peacetime Britain—always the first tremor of adventure in a Buchan novel—and set off into the wild as a knight errant.

Olifa impresses Archie and Janet. Economically booming thanks to its copper deposits, the republic boasts a thriving capital city with both picturesque Latin American charm and every modern convenience, a smooth, charming president with modern ideas, a modern transportation network, and a modern, motorized army and air force staffed and advised by officers collected from around the world. Modernness—their guide insistently emphasizes it.

And yet, the more Archie and Janet see of Olifa, the more unease they detect. It takes enormous effort to get permission to tour the copper mines in the arid Gran Seco region near the mountains, as if someone is hiding something, and the presence of the mining company’s paramilitary guards and police forces strikes a discordant note. Castor, head of the mining conglomerate and de facto ruler of the Gran Seco, strikes Archie and Janet as superficially charming and cultured but cold, methodical, and ruthlessly pragmatic toward his workers, who sometimes end up in cities looking like the used up husks of human beings. The old families of Olifa, people who can trace their ancestry back to the soldiers of Pizarro, are unhappy. They resent the protection of a class of international mercenaries, and Castor’s mining has gained the unwelcome attention of the United States, which has begun to throw its weight around in Olifa in order to protect its interests in the mines.

Olifa sits poised between two fates: to become a commercial satellite of the United States or to become a vestigial attachment to Castor’s mining company.

Sandy and another old Buchan stalwart, the American spymaster John S Blenkiron, reappear. They’ve been spying on Olifa and Castor both as outsiders and, having infiltrated Castor’s operation, from the inside. They have uncovered extensive abuses by the company, which has functionally enslaved the local Indians and used a powerful local narcotic to keep employees like Castor’s bodyguards compliant, as well as Castor’s personal ambitions: to sweep away “the debris of democracy” in Olifa, establish himself as ruler, and use economic power to sow discord in the divided, restless United States.

With this intelligence in hand, Sandy and Blenkiron convince Archie to join them in a plot to foil Castor and shore up Olifa’s independence through revolution. Having kidnapped Castor and whisked him into protective isolation in the remote coastal plateau known as the Courts of the Morning, Blenkiron leads the mines and the Gran Seco in open revolt to Olifa’s government while Sandy takes to the hills and wages a guerrilla war with the help of the Indians. Castor, watched over by Janet and Barbara Dasent, an old acquaintance from America who has fallen for Sandy, bides his time, waiting—and slowly being transformed.

Even this thin summary covers only the first part of The Courts of the Morning. The civil war sparked by Sandy and Blenkiron goes on for weeks and becomes more and more complex. Castor’s drug-addicted “Conquistadors” reenter the story, kidnapping Janet Roylance in one of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, and become the most dangerous, unpredictable element in the plot against Castor. This is a rich, detailed, busy novel.

Perhaps too busy. Buchan’s fictional Olifa is convincingly imagined—much better than the Evallonia of his later, more straightforwardly Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds—and the war unfolds plausibly. An extended passage late in the book in which Olifa’s commanding general surveys the military situation is thoroughly thought-out and casts what we’ve already read of Archie and Sandy’s adventures into realistic relief. But, as multiple Buchan biographers, the John Buchan Society, and contemporary reviewers have pointed out, this level of detail sometimes overwhelms the novel. JB Priestley, in his review at the time, captures exactly my experience of the novel:

It begins very well indeed with a convincing South American republic, mysterious copper mines in the mountains and a first-class villain on the grand scale. Somewhere about halfway through I found myself losing interest. To begin with, there is no longer any mystery. Then the villain begins to change character, and nobody effective takes his place. And the long and involved accounts of guerrilla warfare that take up most of the later chapters seemed to me below the usual Buchan level of interest. In many ways this is a more ambitious tale than most of his old ‘thrillers’ but it does not seem to me so successful.

With the outbreak of the revolt, the mystery and espionage end, and the novel follows parallel tracks of war and spiritual transformation. It is good—I was not as disappointed as Priestley professed himself earlier in that review—but does not fully deliver on the promise of the absorbing opening chapters.

I’m struck that Buchan returned so often in his later fiction—here, in Castle Gay a year later, in The Blanket of the Dark a year after that, and in A Prince of the Captivity in 1933—to the kidnapping of a villain as a plot element. In all of these stories there is some hope that, cut off from their power and networks of cronies and henchmen, the villains can reconnect with something they have forgotten and repent and use their gifts for good—transformed by the renewing of their minds.

It doesn’t always work. In The Courts of the Morning it does, but this development is only partly convincing. Would Castor, under the influence of a woman like Janet, really turn from his greed, ruthlessness, and lust for power and embrace the cause of Olifa? I have my doubts, but was carried along by the story despite them. Others have flatly rejected it. You’ll have to read The Courts of the Morning for yourself to decide.

And read it you should. Despite the ponderous campaigning of the second half and its debatable conversion of Castor, The Courts of the Morning is good entertainment. There is intrigue and action aplenty, kidnappings and rescues, airplane crashes and sabotage campaigns, and many near misses. And however convincing one finds Castor’s change of heart, the climactic chapter, a nighttime assault on an old Olifero family’s home and a showdown between the last remaining groups of antagonists, is suspenseful and moving.

The Courts of the Morning is, in its way, a fantasy novel, and Buchan’s attention to sub-creating Olifa is one of the book’s joys. Discovering the country alongside Archie and Janet in the first chapters of the novel is almost as fun as the emerging mystery itself. And this vivid, realistic account of Olifa gives weight to the struggle in the majority of the book—whether Olifero nationalists who wish to wrest control of their homeland back from both the mining tycoons and the Yanquis, the Indians who wish to be left alone, or even the déraciné, mercenary henchmen of Castor’s company, the stakes are clear and important. It matters who wins.

The story is also thematically rich. The characters at various points discuss the laxness that comes with affluence, the dilution or corruption of national cultures by wealth and globalism, the abuse of power when centralized in a single man, the fleeting, fallible natures of all governments, and, as mentioned, the need not only for political but for spiritual transformation. Without the latter the former will mean nothing.

But my primary interest in this book, and perhaps the best reason to read it beyond enjoyment, is to see two favorite characters as the protagonists of their own novel. One of the delights of reading through Buchan’s vast body of fiction is the large cast who drift in and out of each other’s stories. Archie and Sandy are two of the most frequent supporting characters. Both appear in Richard Hannay’s First World War adventures (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast) and Archie plays a crucial role in the Sir Edward Leithen adventure John Macnab, which is where he meets and falls in love with Janet.

Blenkiron also appears and others are namedropped, but Archie and Sandy, so often side characters, did not disappoint. Archie and Janet turn out to have a much more eventful honeymoon than they could have imagined, with their devotion to each other as well as their courage tested, and Sandy again proves himself a master of disguise, of irregular warfare, and—for the first time—of a woman’s heart. He also faces a challenge he has never faced before: the allure of earthly power.

The Courts of the Morning has its flaws, but it is an engrossing adventure with enough suspenseful set pieces to satisfy any Buchan fan. It may not be top-tier Buchan, but it is entertaining, and it offers a rare glimpse of two favorite characters on their own, embracing danger, and emerging triumphant and beloved.

A Prince of the Captivity

John Buchan June enters its second half today with one of Buchan’s lesser known works, a sprawling tale of a man’s spiritual journey through shame, prison, war, espionage, and politics, ending with a final showdown between himself alone and the agents of a group clearly meant to be the Nazis. This is the 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity.

The story begins just before the First World War. Adam Melfort, an honorable officer whose life is devoted to the army, is drummed out of the military and tried and imprisoned for forgery. It is clear to those in the know that he has taken the fall for his wife, a fashionable spendthrift who tried to extract more than her usual allowance from a wealthy uncle. Their imprudent marriage ends when his wife, as a final thank you for covering for her, divorces Adam during his prison sentence.

Adam’s loss of his commission and his imprisonment rob him not only of time but purpose. In prison, he ruminates. He retreats into memories of his son Nigel, he and his wife’s only child, who died of a fever at age five. He imagines Nigel and himself on a favorite island off the west coast of Scotland—visions that will grow more vivid and more powerful over the next years.

After prison, war comes. Adam, adrift, desperately wishes to be of service but cannot return to the army. A friend connects him to the intelligence service, and after being tested in both body and mind by eccentric figures like the elderly Mr Scrope or Macandrew, a man with a Scottish name who is clearly a European Jew, he is sent to Belgium, behind German lines, as a spy. He excels at his job and by the time of his hairsbreadth escape from German counterintelligence he has established a vast network feeding vital information to the British.

The end of the war casts Adam adrift again. When Jim Falconet, an American millionaire with an interest in exploration, goes missing in Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, Adam sets himself the task of finding and rescuing him. He does so at enormous risk and through massive, arduous effort, with the two men—eventually all that is left of either Falconet’s original expedition and Adam’s rescue team—alternately nursing one another back to health through the long march southward.

Falconet, once returned to civilization, agrees to Adam’s request to downplay his role in the rescue. He will prove valuable ally to Adam in what lies ahead.

After this first third of the book, A Prince of the Captivity settles into politlcal and business intrigue. Adam’s experiences in the war and the near-death of his Arctic rescue mission convince him that what the world needs is strong, principled leadership to save it from the barbarism left in the wake of the war. When friends suggest that he is the one most suited to the leadership role he so wishes to see filled, he disagrees. His job, as he sees it, is to midwife the man or men who will help save civilization.

He sets his sights on three—Kenneth Armine, a young aristocrat and old friend, a people-person whose wife, Jackie, comes to love and respect Adam; Joe Utlaw, an up-and-coming Labour politician; and Frank Alban, Jackie’s brother, a young Anglican churchman with a powerful gift for speaking and persuading. All three, representatives of the aristocracy, the workers, and the Church, with their natural gifts, good character, and connection to the people have enormous potential to become exactly the leader Adam hopes to see set the world right.

And yet Adam, despite enormous efforts on their behalf, finds himself stymied at every time. His plans and hopes for all three, through various circumstances, come to nothing. Present in each failure and intimately involved at some crucial point is a man Adam has known about for years, Warren Creevey.

An admired and much-sought-after public intellectual and a well-connected and fantastically successful businessman, Creevey has interests everywhere, travels widely, and seems to know everything. Scrope, Adam’s mentor from his intelligence days, predicts early in the novel that Adam and Creevey will find themselves on opposite sides of some great contest and will be forced into confrontation. Adam, who naturally enough dislikes Creevey—and the feeling is mutual—tries to avoid and ignore him. By the final act of the novel, that strategy has become impossible.

The final portion of the story involves German politics, which one need not be reminded were unstable during the 1920s. Hermann Loeffler, the intelligence officer who came closest to capturing Adam during the war, has slowly emerged as a leading moderate and unifier but is opposed by the Communists on one side and, on the other, a group called the Iron Hands. Both desire “short cuts,” but the Iron Hands develop a special reputation for unscrupulous tactics and violence. When they become a clear danger both to Loeffler and to Creevey, Adam lays plans to intervene.

The climax of the novel, taking place at a high Alpine retreat to which Creevey has been kidnapped and smuggled for his own safety, brings the two rivals together for their long-anticipated confrontation. Present also is Jackie, who will turn out to have an important role to play, and slowly closing in from all directions are the henchmen of the Iron Hands.

A Prince of the Captivity is one of Buchan’s longer novels, with a plot playing out over about a decade and sprawling across wartime espionage, Arctic survival, practical politics, and social commentary on the dislocated world of 1920s Britain. Each component part is well done. The sections on Adam’s recruitment into the world of espionage—more grounded, unglamorous, and harder-edged than the seat-of-the-pants amateur adventures of Richard Hannay—feels very much like a precursor to John le Carré and are especially good. Adam’s rescue mission to the Arctic is perhaps my favorite section of the novel, and one of the most dramatic and compelling in any of Buchan’s novels. And the climactic struggle in the mountains, in which Adam’s story is brought full-circle and the longings created by his deep wounding at the start of the story are finally fulfilled, is powerfully moving.

But between these episodes, the middle sections, in which Adam very deliberately works his way through the social fabric of Britain in search of his new leaders, felt not just like a change of pace but a bit of a letdown. Most of Buchan’s contemporaneously-set novels of the 1920s and 30s, when he was serving as an MP, involve the nitty-gritty of practical politics at some point, but seldom does it dominate their plots the way it dominates A Prince of the Captivity. While all of the characters are finely drawn—especially Jackie and Utlaw—and the story intricately and believably plotted, it drags.

This is probably intentional. Adam’s work is laborious and Buchan conveys this vividly. But it is not as fun or compelling as the earlier chapters. Only as Adam’s plans begin to unravel and he is once again placed on the backfoot does the pace revive.

That is the only criticism I can level against A Prince of the Captivity. The plot, after all, is secondary to Adam’s character. The language I used in the introduction, of Adam undertaking a “spiritual journey,” comes from biographer Andrew Lownie. What Adam is searching for, in a metaphor introduced by Macandrew, a staunch Zionist who hopes the war will provide an opportunity for his people to reestablish their homeland, is a personal Jerusalem. The story is therefore one of pilgrimage.

Having honorably taken the blame for his wife’s crime and lost everything, Adam spends these years searching for purpose and belonging, taking on bigger and bigger tasks—from simply being useful in the murky, disreputable world of spies to saving a man’s life to saving civilization. Only in the final pages, in developments I don’t want to spoil, does he find the peace that has eluded him and everyone around him for the entire story.

Even as I read A Prince of the Captivity I was aware that Buchan was doing a lot more with this story than was immediately detectable on the surface. Though I’m not confident I grasped everything in Adam’s rivalry and final contest with Creevey, it moved me and has stayed with me. I see more and more in it and it continues to escape me. A Prince of the Captivity is not my favorite of Buchan’s novels, but it has several episodes as gripping as anything in his best novels and is the one I feel most compelled to revisit, and soon.

The Watcher by the Threshold

Today John Buchan June continues with our second short story collection of the month, Buchan’s early anthology of weird fiction set in Scotland, The Watcher by the Threshold.

Buchan published these five short stories and novellas in magazines—four of them in Blackwood’s—between 1899 and 1902, as he was developing his greatest strengths as a writer. I called the stories “weird fiction” above, but they are hard to categorize. Buchan’s dedication perhaps best expresses what unites them. Addressing the stories to fellow Scot Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan invokes a Scotland they know well that lies behind the stereotype of “kirk and marketplace,” of a land of hard, business-minded Calvinists: “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

Literal remoteness and inaccessibility are crucial elements of the first story, “No-Man’s-Land.” In this novella, an Oxford linguist named Graves, a specialist in the ancient and medieval languages of the Celts and Norse, embarks on a long hike through rough and desolate sheep country in search of good fishing. He decides on a small mountain loch as his destination but, when he tells the old shepherd who hosts him, the shepherd warns him off of that area. Graves presses for details but the shepherd refuses to explain why he should stay away.

Superstition, the educated Graves concludes. The old shepherd and the sister who lives with him are in the grip of old beliefs about brownies, small creatures that harass the locals and occasionally spirit children away. This would also explain to Graves’s satisfaction the strange recent killings of some of the shepherd’s lambs. They were found “lying deid wi’ a hole in their throat.” The shepherd superstitiously blames this one demons and, Graves notes, refuses to believe it was sheep thieves.

Despite the recent events and the shepherd’s dire warnings, Graves sets off for his fishing hole. Before long he is lost in the rugged terrain and the dense mountain fog, where, slowly, he realizes that something is in the fog with him. He gets one glimpse—a short, man-like figure covered in hair—before he is captured by a mob of the creatures and taken to the cave where they live. There, in the midst of a throng of small, squat, hairy, powerful creatures, he has the second great shock of the day: he can understand some of what they’re saying to each other. Far from fairytale brownies, these are the last remnant of the Picts who lived in Scotland before the Scots.

He learns some of their terrible story. Driven underground centuries before, they have survived through theft and murder and have reproduced by kidnapping women and girls from nearby settlements. Horrified, Graves seizes his first opportunity to escape. He barely makes it to the shepherd’s hut. Afterward, back at Oxford, but can’t make use of his discovery and can’t shake the feeling that he has left something undone back in the hills. He returns to Scotland to discover that the old shepherd has abandoned his cottage following the disappearance of his sister in the night. Graves, the only man who understands what has actually happened to her and knows where she has gone, decides that it is up to him to rescue her.

The remote “back-world of Scotland” is even further away in the supernatural story “The Far Islands.” In this short story, young Colin Raden grows up in a family pulled inexorably westward. Ancestors who disappeared on voyages to the west are many and legendary.

Colin has, from his early days, dreamlike visions of being in a boat at sea, looking to the west, but with his view blocked by a wall of mist. This vision recurs throughout his life—at school, at university—with Colin always yearning to see beyond the mist but unable to approach it. Gradually new details intrude: the sound of waves on a beach just out of sight beyond the mist, the scent of apple blossoms. He learns from a friend of an old story in Geoffrey of Monmouth about an “Island of Apple-trees” far to the west, reserved for heroes to “live their second life.”

After university, Colin joins the army and is sent to the desert. There, his visions reveal more and more of the world beyond the mist, and reach their final, fateful consummation.

Buchan develops overtly supernatural moods in the title story, “The Watcher by the Threshold,” another novella that is less plot-driven than “No-Man’s Land” and more of a character study. Henry, the narrator, is called upon for help by Sybil, the wife of an old school friend named Ladlaw, and travels to their home on the Scottish moors. The wife, anxious and drawn, is obviously distressed, but Ladlaw must be drawn out. Gradually he reveals that he believes himself haunted by a devil. There is a shadowy figure, he says, always just out of sight on his left-hand side. He begs Ladlaw not to leave him alone, even for a moment.

Henry complies and notes the odd changes in Ladlaw from the man he knew at university, most notably an intense interest in esoteric scholarship and a fixation on Emperor Justinian. He comes to believe that Ladlaw is haunted by a “familiar” from the ancient world. His presence helps ease Ladlaw’s mind, but when Henry is called away on urgent business he recruits the local minister, Mr Oliphant, to look after him. Oliphant is the modern, openminded kind of minister who both balks at talking about the devil and also thinks his Christianity rules out the existence of the pagan supernatural (“Justinian was a Christian,” Henry reminds him) and wonders whether Ladlaw is simply a drunk. Ladlaw is not in the best of hands, but Henry must go and returns as quickly as he can.

When he does, he finds Ladlaw’s house empty. Oliphant, terrified of the man he was asked to help, has fled, and Ladlaw has taken to the moors, raving. Henry joins the search, which ends in a dramatic hilltop fight that doubles as an exorcism.

The next story, “The Outgoing of the Tide,” is a historical tale of forbidden romance and witchcraft set on the West coast of Scotland. Alison Hirpling is an old woman reputed to be a witch and a devil worshiper—a rumor that turns out to be true. By contrast, Ailie Sempill, a young girl who lives with her and is probably her daughter, is as devoted to Christ and the Kirk as she is beautiful.

One day the swaggering, ne’er-do-well laird Heriotside, in his regular ride through the countryside, sees Ailie and falls in love with her. He strives to woo her but she, knowing his reputation, is standoffish and hesitant. Gradually she falls for him, too, and Alison seeks to use their love to bring about their destruction and damnation. She sows doubt in both their minds but holds out the offer of magic as a way to seal their love. A midnight tryst on Beltane’s Eve, she tells each of them, at a particular spot along the coast where a river flows into a bay will bind them to each other forever.

Ailie and Heriotside find this hard to resist. What they don’t realize, however, is that for Alison this time and place are sources of immense satanic power as well as treacherous tides that have claimed more than one life. Whether Ailie and Heriotside will realize what Alison is up to and what kind of danger—both physical and spiritual—they have placed themselves in drives the suspenseful conclusion of the story.

“It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories.”

— John Buchan

The final story, “Fountainblue,” has no supernatural elements but nevertheless depicts a haunted man. The main character, Maitland, comes of Scottish stock but has spent years in business in the south. Hard, distant, and ruthless in his dealings, he has achieved fame and immense wealth through his disciplined, machine-like work and has returned to his late aunt’s castle, Fountainblue, with one object in mind: pay court to the beautiful Claire Etheridge and convince her to marry him.

Despite his difficult personality—those who don’t immediately dislike him still can’t make up their minds whether they actually like him—Maitland nurses fond memories of his childhood on the coast, adventuring among the rocks and learning the ways of the sea. This deeply buried imaginative sense and yearning for the wild comes in handy as he attempts to woo Claire, though not for the reasons one might expect.

On a boat trip along the coast with Claire and Despencer, another young man he correctly views as a competitor, Maitland is caught in a terrible storm. Only his knowledge of the tides, currents, isles, and rocks can save them. But his heroism at the tiller of their boat and in the wreck afterward will not have the consequences Maitland hopes for.

Read about The Watcher by the Threshold in Buchan’s major critics and biographers and the recurring theme is that the stories, while entertaining, are mostly noteworthy for prefiguring his later themes and preoccupations. There is some truth to this. It’s hard, having read so many of Buchan’s later novels, not to be reminded of Witch Wood when reading “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or of The Dancing Floor or The Gap in the Curtain when reading of the intrusion of the supernatural into the chummy world of late Victorian England in “The Watcher by the Threshold,” or of A Prince of the Captivity, with its hero’s cherished dream of a peaceful island, when reading about Colin Raden’s visions in “The Far Islands.” Both Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan, in their biographies, note in “Fountainblue” the foreshadowing of Lumley’s speech about the fragility of civilization in The Power-House. Lownie further notes in the same story the theme of the emptiness of worldly success which, he reminds us, animates Buchan’s great final novel, Sick Heart River, almost forty years later.

But while it is interesting to note the way the stories provide early riffs on ideas and concerns that Buchan developed and explored more fully in his later work, the stories are also worth considering on their own terms.

These stories are early Buchan, and Buchan himself, when mailing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold to Susie Grosvenor, the woman who would become his wife, described them as “pretty crude.” As with his embarrassed assessment of John Burnet of Barns, I think he’s underrating himself. Susie would agree. Writing to thank him for the book, she said that she had “just finished devouring” it: “I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting.”

This is certainly true. The later short stories in The Runagates Club may be more polished, but in The Watcher by the Threshold Buchan shows all the strengths of his later work and few of his earlier weaknesses. The Scottish settings are beautifully and evocatively described, presenting a picture not only of places but of their moral import—their atmosphere. One feels this most pointedly in the darker stories like “The Outgoing of the Sea” and especially “No-Man’s Land,” with their oppressive, desolate landscapes haunted by incomprehensible dangers.

The pacing of the stories is also good. Graves’s escape from the troglodyte Picts in “No-Man’s Land” is as suspenseful as anything in the Hannay novels, and “The Far Islands” flows with ethereal, dreamlike ease through an entire life. The stories are also, like Buchan’s entire body of work, wonderfully varied. What unites them is his intense interest in the relict, atavistic, and uncanny hidden just below the smooth polished surface of modern life—most obviously in “No-Man’s Land” but through the collection from beginning to end—and the palpable atmosphere he creates around the stories.

Where The Watcher by the Threshold’s stories differ most from his later work, I think, is in their interiority. All five take place largely inside a single character’s head, and hidden worlds that belong to or effect a single individual are a repeated motif. This is most extreme in “The Far Islands” and “Fountainblue,” which are entirely about the imaginations and ruminations of their main characters and whose plots turn on moments of revelation and self-knowledge—metanoia, in theological terms. These epiphanies lead, more or less directly, to Maitland’s and Colin Raden’s deaths, but also to the fulfilment of their longings. In the other stories, these hidden worlds are overtly threatening and the characters must be saved from them, whether the Picts of “No-Man’s Land,” the schemes of a devil-worshiping crone in “The Outgoing of the Tide,” or demonic possession in “The Watcher by the Threshold.”

My personal favorite from The Watcher by the Threshold was “No-Man’s-Land,” a genuinely scary and suspenseful story. Last night I started to summarize the story for my kids. My wife stopped me—it was too close to bedtime and even she was creeped out. My kids begged to know what happened. A useful test of a story’s power. (Reflecting on Buchan’s choice of The Watcher by the Threshold to send to Susie Grosvenor, Ursula Buchan writes, “Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine.”)

The Watcher by the Threshold is a strong early sample of Buchan’s work that I found immensely enjoyable. Not only good entertainment, they are also well-written and richly imagined, with thematic depth as a wonderful bonus. For anyone wanting a small dose of Buchan or a glimpse of Buchan working in a decidedly different mode from his thrillers and much of his historical novels, this is an indispensable read.