The same year that Eric Newby published his memoir of being an escaped prisoner of war in ‘Love and Death in the Apennines‘, Spike Milligan published his own contribution to the roster of Second World War memoirs, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’.
In the preface Milligan says it was intended to be the first part of a trilogy about his war experiences, covering the period from his conscription in 1939 till the time his regiment landed at Algiers. Volume 2 would cover from going into action till VJ day. Volume 3 would cover from his demobilisation in 1945 to his eventual return to England. In the event, according to Wikipedia, Milligan ended up writing no fewer than seven (!) volumes of war memoirs:
Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall
‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’
Monty: His Part in My Victory
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall
Where Have All the Bullets Gone?
The Goons
A few year after the end of the war, Milligan would be central to setting up the fantastically popular radio programme, The Goon Show, which ran from 1951 to 1960 and created characters and catchphrases which entertained a mass audience during the decade of Austerity. (He has a brief passage explaining the origin of the word ‘Goon’ which he took from a US TV series about Popeye, on page 77 and further references to proto-Goon writing on pages.) In theory I ought to like The Goons, and I sort of enjoy the silly voices, but between my youth and the Goons lies, like an Iron Curtain, the vast presence of Monty Python, like an impassable barrier.
Monty Python
The thing about the Pythons, for me, was their intelligence and cultural capital; it was the logic and thoroughness of the thinking, where an idea is worked through with a thoroughness which takes it beyond the everyday and far into the surreal, such as the dead parrot sketch or ‘is this the right room for an argument’ sketch, combined with their easy familiarity with advanced cultural knowledge, for example the confidence with which they handle the material in the Philosophers’ Song. It’s written by someone who really has done a degree in philosophy and really knows what they’re talking about and it shows. They also had tremendous variety due to all the members being capable of writing material.
By contrast, The Goons always seemed very thin to me. It relied entirely on Milligan as the main writer and, although he has a fertile way in creating characters many of whom became popular figures, and it has silly voices and absurdist scenarios, for me it lacks the conceptual depth, the twisted logical thoroughness and the cultural confidence of the Pythons.
I’ve never met anyone who quote Goon Show sketches but all through my life I’ve met lots of bores who can reel off entire Monty Python sketches, and this is why. The Goons relied on silly voices and quickfire gags, whereas Python was all about very clever concepts worked out very cleverly, so that anyone repeating them not is not only funny but experiences the deep logic many of them follow.
So that’s why I feel the way I do about this book – that the comedy aspects of it depend entirely on the textual equivalent of him doing funny voices and pulling funny faces, and these are, frankly, pretty limited tricks and quickly become over-familiar.
Types of Milligan joke
What I mean is he has a limited number of types of gag and you quickly come to recognise and expect them. Most of them are types of wordplay. For example, over and again he quotes a common or garden English locution then takes it to extremes, exploiting its latent absurdity:
I heaved at the weights, Kerrrrrrissttt!! an agonised pain shot round my back into my groin, down my leg, and across the road to a bus stop. (p.19)
Father and son were then shown the door, the windows, and finally the street. (p.16)
The walls once white were now thrice grey. (p.27)
Very closely related is taking a common or garden phrase and taking it literally and/or giving it an unexpected (and therefore comic) spin.
I was put in Lewisham General Hospital under observation. I think a nurse did it through a hole in the ceiling.
The fog was very dense, as were Signallers Devine and White.
Sergeant Harris was a regular. He went every morning without fail. (p.50)
He said I couldn’t climb a tree for toffee. I said, ‘Who climbs trees for toffee? I get mine in a shop.’ (p.94)
We had arrived at a hundred-year old deserted chalk quarry. How can people be so heartless as to desert a hundred-year-old chalk quarry?
The dance was held in a large and comfortable countrystyle lounge: chairs and sofas clad in loose floral covers, plenty of polished wood, a few Hercules Brabizon-Brabizon water colours on walls, standard lamps with silk shades, a few oriental curios, traces of visits to foreign climes. (What are foreign climes? Waiter! A pound of foreign climes, please!) (p.98)
A deliberate misunderstanding can be worked up into a bit of repartee:
A worried officer rushed up. ‘Can you play “The Maple Leaf Forever”?’ ‘No sir, after an hour I get tired.’ ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said. (p.48)
[The cook] doled out something into my mess tin. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Irish Stew,’ he said, ‘Then,’ I replied. ‘Irish Stew in the name of the Law.’ (p.141)
There’s the verbal trick of offering a clichéd phrase then doing a comic reversal of it:
Occasionally he sang ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ in a quavering light baritone (or mighty like a baritone, in a quivering rose).
Taking words intended metaphorically literally:
The Catholic priest warned, ‘Avoid loose women.’ I never told him the women I knew were so loose they were falling to bits. (p.49)
These all strike me as variations on the same idea, the deliberate misinterpretation of an everyday phrase for comic effect, or the revealing of the comic implications laying dormant in a phrase which he makes explicit, or the taking of a common phrase to absurd extremes. Puns, in other words.
Another strand is what you could call English suburban surrealism like the jokey stuff at the beginning about his mum making an air raid shelter in the garden or his dad putting a road block across their street, silliness of a very ‘Diary of a Nobody’ kind. It’s surrealism but of a very mundane flavour. Of the statutory cross country run in the army he knocks off a quick one-line gag:
Many tried to husband their energy by running on one leg.
Or:
‘Silence when you speak to an officer,’ said Battalion Sergeant Major. (p.29)
All of his humour depends on a kind of rapid, quickfire delivery which, once it gets going, keeps you permanently off balance, vulnerable to the next gag, then the next one then the next one.
It can become quite painful. 1) Milligan’s humour is very hit and miss. On the radio it didn’t matter too much because the script was made up entirely of absurdist scenarios which carry you with them, and in whose chaotic context a barrage of one-liners worked. Plus, crucially, 2) the performance was shared between Milligan and two performers of genius, Harry Secombe and especially Peter Sellers.
But in static prose Milligan doesn’t have any of those resources. It’s just him and the written word, no silly scripts, silly voices or silly collaborators egging each other on.
Read cold on the page this reveals a number of things. One is that, after an opening flurry of silliness – taking the mickey out of Neville Chamberlain, the silly stories about his father and older brother trying to get the Ministry of Defence interested in patently absurd inventions, getting into trouble with the police for erecting a barrier across their road on the day war is declared and so on – the book settles down and becomes more factual and this is generally to the good.
Behind the tiresome gags is an interesting account of being conscripted and sent to join a gunnery regiment on the south coast. There’s all kinds of stuff about men in the army but what really comes over is how he set up a jazz band with three like-minded blokes and managed to play gigs and parties around the region, sometimes picking up hefty fees. The story of him being invited to the BBC studios in Maida Vale to play with a scratch band and actually record some tracks is memorable because it is sincere; his love of music and of performing shines through.
A second thing which emerges is that his style is wildly uneven, veering from semi-illiterate, passing through competent enough, and on to the extremely idiosyncratic. Here he is, struggling to write a sentence.
From motor vehicles we went on to Bren Carriers, they were marvellous, they’d go anywhere, and didn’t we just do that. (p.111)
At the other end of the spectrum his attempts at normal prose are liable to be interrupted by his fondness for staccato and/or telegraphese: he is very partial to one-word sentences, verbless sentences and abrupt transitions.
At six o’clock we arrived at the night rendezvous, a field of bracken resting on a lake. We got tea from a swearing cookhouse crew, who took it in turns to say ‘piss off’ to us. We were given to understand we could have a complete night’s sleep. Good. We tossed for who was to sleep in the truck. I lost. Sod. Rain. Idea! Under the truck! Laid out ground sheet, rolled myself like a casserole in three blankets. I dropped into a deep sleep. I awoke to rain falling on me. The truck had gone. Everybody had gone. (p.85)
There’s one particular passage where he attempts to describe the simple beauty of lazing around in the sunshine on the South Downs and his attempt to write descriptive prose is so weird it’s worth quoting in full:
No matter what season, the Sussex countryside was always a pleasure. But the summer of 1941 was a delight. The late lambs on springheel legs danced their happiness. Hot, immobile cows chewed sweet cud under the leafchoked limbs of June oaks that were young 500 years past. The musk of bramble and blackberry hedges, with purpleblack fruit offering themselves to passing hands, poppies red, red, red, tracking the sun with open-throated petals, birds bickering aloft, bibulous to the sun. White fleecy clouds passing high, changing shapes as if uncertain of what they were. To break for a smoke, to lie in that beckoning grass and watch cabbage white butterflies dancing on the wind. Everywhere was saying bethankit.
All that said, I liked the descriptions, right at the end, of going aboard ship. The vividness of the experience has obviously stayed with him and brings out some of his best description.
Nobody wanted to sleep. I worked out we were waiting for the tide. About one o’clock the ship took on an air of departure. Gangways were removed. Hatches covered. Chains rattled. The ship started to vibrate as the engines came to life. Waters swirled. Tugs moved in. Donkey-engines rattled, hawsers were dropped from the bollards, and trailed like dead eels into the oil-tinted Mersey. We were away. Slowly we glided downstream. To the east we could hear the distant cough of Ack-Ack. The time was 1.10 a.m., January 8th, 1943. We were a mile downstream when the first bombs started to fall on the city. Ironically, a rosy glow tinged the sky, Liverpool was on fire. The lads came up on deck to see it. Away we went, further and further into the night, finally drizzle and darkness sent us below. (p.130)
Q TV
In the 1970s when I started watching TV as a boy, Milligan wrote and presented the Q series of absurdist, surreal comedy sketches. He seemed to have a lot more fun making them than it was to watch them. Even as a boy I felt there was something wrong about them. I wasn’t surprised, later on, to learn that Milligan had had a mental breakdown towards the end of the war and that it was the start of a lifelong battle against depression. He didn’t seem to be master of his material but letting it gush out and master him. Well, the same feels true of the passage I’ve just quoted – he’s letting the first things that come to mind, the gags, verbal fizzes and bangs, have their way. Possibly the text took ages to compose and revise and hone but I’m talking about the final effect, which is of a man carried away by the exuberance of his own deranged antics.
Class and education
What also comes over is a class thing, that Milligan was lower-middle class with little or no higher education. His humour, and this text, entirely lacks any cultural or intellectual depth. Most male British writers of the twentieth century went to a) public school and b) Oxford or Cambridge, where they were pumped full of the Latin classics and English literature’s greatest hits. Those kinds of authors (and their fictional protagonists) feel perfectly at home dropping quotes and references from the standard Western canon of poets, playwrights, philosophers and so on. These kinds of knowing references are the natural accompaniment of the smooth narratives, rounded sentences and well-shaped paragraphs which they were taught to write at school and which are so enjoyable to read in their novels, poems, autobiographies and so on.
Milligan has absolutely none of this. There are no literary or intellectual or cultural references of any kind anywhere in the book (actually I spotted two things: one where he paraphrases ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll, and another occasion where he spoofs the style of the King James Bible. That’s it as far as cultural references go.) Lacking any literary or cultural depth, there’s just the basic narrative of events during his period of service in a gunnery battery based on the south coast of England, which is continually interrupted by the incessant fizzing and banging of his literalism, puns and wordplay.
This inability to create larger structures or develop a flowing narrative is connected to the way the text isn’t structured in chapters (which you strongly suspect he wouldn’t have been able to plan and flow over a long stretch) but into short sections given blunt headings such as RELIGION, FOOD, SPORT, BARRACK ROOM HUMOUR and so on. Rather as the Q TV series was almost like notes for a comedy show, with the half-finished chaotic nature of the notes left in full view, so ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ feels like notes for an autobiography, a ramshackle rummage of sections devoted to specific themes, pasted together in roughly chronological order, with no attempt to join them together into a coherent narrative.
And all of this is connected with what I mentioned earlier about class. Although Milligan was in the army there’s surprisingly little about the army as a career – nothing like the earnest engagement in the RAF of Geoffrey Wellum, for example. Instead, army life is depicted from the classic perspective of the non-officer class, as a predicament to be mocked with work and duties to be dodged whenever possible.
Spike is determined to make you see life and the Army from the squaddie’s point of view, as an organisation characterised by mismanagement and shambles, as an opportunity for pranks and practical jokes, and a set of rules and enforcers (for example, scary sergeant-majors) to be broken, dodged and avoided – all with the aim of furthering the three classic interests of uncultured working class life – grub, booze and shagging.
Anti-romance
He warns us in the preface that it’s going to be ‘bawdy’ and it is, indeed, crude bunk-up-behind-the-bike-sheds stuff.
If we take John Buchan in his Sir Edward Leithen books, as a type of the very upper-class, tight-lipped, chivalrous view of women and romance, then Spike is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. He, like, one suspects, many of his fellow 20-something conscript soldiers, is permanently on the lookout for sex. Whichever bars, pubs or clubs they visit or his band plays in, he’s always got an eye open for the birds, makes a point of chatting them up, is constantly aware of then. The main reason he applied to join the RAF in 1940 was that men in RAF uniform were always surrounded by the best birds in pubs (‘All the beautiful birds went out with pilots’) and he wanted some of that. Nothing to do with wanting to fly let alone serve his country. Birds. Women. Chicks.
Whereas Eric Newby’s war memoir contains a chaste and sensitive and romantic portrait of the woman who helped him on the run and went on to become his wife, a typical Milligan anecdote describes the way the high-minded Jehovah’s Witness in his unit, Bombardier MacDonald, was slowly degraded by military life until one night the guard on duty, Gunner Devine, was puzzled to hear a funny rhythmic thumping noise coming from the back of the coal sheds. Upon investigation he found Bombardier MacDonald, his trousers round his ankles, ‘having a late-night knee-trembler with a local fat girl.’ But that’s not the end of it.
Gunner Devine watched until the climax was nigh, then shouted, ‘Halt! Who comes there?’ The effect was electric. MacDonald ran into the night shouting ‘Armageddon’. The girl, still in a sexual coma, was given Gunner Devine’s rifle to hold, while he terminated her contract.
The picture of the local fat girl holding the gunner’s rifle while he took his turn screwing her is about as far from the upper-class nobility of Buchan or the romantic love affair of Newby as it’s possible to get.
But ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ is packed with incidents like this – blunt descriptions of crude practical jokes, awful food, the odd characters you’re forced into proximity with in the army (the soldier who turned up on parade naked, the hypochondriac, the madman), silly escapades and shagging stories – only Milligan’s love of jazz and the regular playing of his band offer any sort of escape, the one place, you feel, where he can be himself and stop having to be the relentless gagster.
Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it’.
It’s a great feeling playing jazz. Most certainly it never started a war. (p.135)
Birds
We had three [observation posts]: Galley Hill, Bexhill; a Martello Tower, Pevernsey and Constables Farm on the BexhillEastbourne Road. Most of us tried for the Martello on Pevensey Beach as the local birds were easier to lay, but you had to be quick because of the tides.
After a quick drink in The Devonshire we ended up at the Forces Corner to finish off the evening. I started chatting up the birds, one especially, Betty Aspnel, a plain girl who made up for it with a sensational figure, man has to be satisfied with his lot, and man! this girl had the lot.
In the evenings after dark, one or two of our favourite birds would visit us and bring fish and chips; once in we bolted the door.
That night there was an Officers’ and All-Ranks’ dance in the Drill Hall. We all worked hard to extricate all the bestlooking A.T.S. girls from the magnetic pull of the officers and sergeants. Alas, we failed, so we reverted to the time-honoured sanctuary of the working man – Drink.
Sex
At this new billet we received morning visits from a W.V.S. Canteen Van. A very dolly married woman took a fancy to me and one night, after a dance, she took me home.
Sometimes he tells what you could call a straightforward anecdote, without the odd prose style and quickfire gags. Probably the best example is, again, about sex.
It was all sex in those days it was that or the ‘flicks’ and flicks cost money. There was a lovely busty bird called Beryl, who had hot pants for me. During the interval of our first dance at Turkey Road I took her to the lorry park, into the back of a fifteen hundredweight truck. We were going through our third encore when the truck drove off. Apart from the jolting it must have been the best ride we’ve ever had. It stopped at Hastings. Through the flap I saw our chauffeur was Sergeant ‘Boner’ Hughes who hated my guts (I don’t know why, he’d never seen them). He backed the truck up an alley and left it while he went into The White Lion for a drink with his bird who was barmaid. Slipping into the driving seat I drove it back, and arrived in time to play the second half of the dance. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ asked Edgington, sweating at the piano. ‘I, Harry, have been having it off in the back of a lorry, and I got carried away.’
Pranks
These include:
the variety of farting skills in the unit, including the man who had an assistant light his farts
the gunner who always reeled back to barracks blind drunk and had a piss in a corner of the dorm, till a new recruit asked where to sleep and they all told him to put a bunk in the corner with the result that that night he got covered in a stream of pee
the bombardier they all hated so when he passed out drunk one night they removed his trousers, then loaded him, in his bed, into a lorry and deposited him in Bexhill cemetery
the soldier who did impersonations with his cock and balls, arranging them to produce tableaux with titles such as ‘Sausage on a Plate’, ‘The Last Turkey in the Shop’, ‘Sack of Flour’, ‘The Roaring of the Lions’ and, by using spectacles, ‘Groucho Marx’
Spike worked in the signals part of the regiment.
One of the pleasures of Duty Signaller was listening to officers talking to their females. When we got a ‘hot’ conversation we plugged it straight through to all those poor lonely soldiers at their OR’s and gun positions. It was good to have friends.
Army foolishness
Allegedly when he arrived his unit had some Great War-period 9.2 inch artillery pieces with only one drawback. There were no shells. This didn’t stop their commanding officer insisting on training the correct drills over and over except, when it came to the crucial moment, the entire gun crew was trained to shout BANG in unison.
The actual war
The narrative does follow a simple chronology describing him and his family hearing Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war, the repeated official letters announcing his call-up and then, once he’s in the army, the months leading up to Dunkirk (26 May to 4 June 1940), the rest of 1940 and into 1941. During this entire period he and his battalion are shunted from one south coast posting to another.
In the passages about Dunkirk an unusual degree of seriousness breaks through:
Next day the news of the ‘small armada’ came through on the afternoon news. As the immensity of the defeat became apparent, somehow the evacuation turned it into a strange victory. I don’t think the nation ever reached such a feeling of solidarity as in that week at another time during the war. Three weeks afterwards, a Bombardier Kean, who had survived the evacuation, was posted to us. ‘What was it like,’ I asked him. ‘Like son? It was a fuck up, a highly successful fuck up.’
The same is even more true of the Blitz, which historians date from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. Milligan and his mates lie in their dormitories on the south coast and hear the German bombers fly over night after night. Sometimes they go outside and can see the sky to the north lit up orange as London burns. Lots of them are Londoners, so they lie awake at nights trying to cheer each other up with stories of how solid Anderson shelters are and how the bombs will never penetrate to the Tube shelters. Worried men.
Damage
This brings me to how the war quite obviously damaged him quite severely. In the preface he warns:
There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind…
He describes how in 1941 they made friends with a jazz drummer named Dixie Dean whose Dad owned a radio shop in Hailsham. On Sunday evening he invited the band over to listen to jazz records all evening. It was his greatest joy. When he was posted overseas he left his jazz record collection in Dixie’s dad’s care and, of course, his shop suffered a direct hit, destroying all his records bar one.
Among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I still have, Jimmy Lunceford’s Bugs Parade. I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have to go out for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down again. (p.102)
When he worked as a signaller, a wartime telephone exchange was set up:
It was installed in a concrete air-raid shelter at the back of Worthingholm. In 1962 I took a sentimental journey back to Bexhill. The shelter was overgrown with brambles; I pushed down the stairs and by the light of a match I saw the original telephone cables still in place on the wall where the exchange used to be. There was still a label on one. In faded lettering it said, ‘Galley Hill O.P.’ in my handwriting. The place was full of ghosts – I had to get out. (p.73)
‘I had to get out’ – just those five words, if you give them their proper weight, reveal the truth behind the entire book; almost buried in the welter of gags, one-liners, excruciating puns and absurdist flights of fantasy, lurks the deep, abiding mental anguish.
Credit
Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1971. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition.
The situation, I felt, was fraught with amusing possibilities.
(Fitzroy’s confidently aristocratic attitude in a nutshell, page 142)
Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet (1911 to 1996) was phenomenally posh, came from a landed Scottish aristocratic family with a long history of service in the British Army, and had the very best education Britain could provide (Eton, King’s College Cambridge), before joining the Diplomatic Service in 1933.
This classic, awesomely impressive (and surprisingly long) memoir reeks of the confidence and privilege of the class and generation of British aristocrats who ruled a quarter of the world at the peak extent of the British Empire between the wars, and then led Britain’s war against Nazi Germany.
The book covers the eight years from 1937 to 1945 and divides into three distinct periods of employment and adventure:
serving in the British Embassy in Moscow from 1937 until late 1939
as soon as the war broke out he enlisted (as a private in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, his father’s old regiment) but the adventure really kicks off when, in early 1942, he joined the newly formed Special Air Service and spent a year or so in the North African desert
in summer 1943 Churchill chose Maclean to lead a liaison mission (‘Macmis’) to central Yugoslavia to liaise with Josip Broz (also known as Tito) and his partisan forces, the longest, most detailed part of the book
It’s a long book at 540 pages. With a few more photos and maps, it crossed my mind that these three quite distinct adventures could possibly have been broken up into three smaller, more focused books. Combined like this, the range of the three subjects gives it an epic, almost unmanageably vast reach.
(Incidentally, the chapters in each of the three parts each start again at number 1, so there are three sets of chapters 1, 2, 3 etc.)
Part 1. Moscow and Central Asia (pages 11 to 179)
Paris politics
Maclean joined the Diplomatic Service in 1933 and in 1934 was posted to the Paris Embassy. The book kicks off with a brief summary of his experiences at the British Embassy in Paris and French politics of the mid-1930s i.e. hopelessly divided and chaotic, at times almost verging on civil war. It’s important to bear these divisions in mind when considering 1) the creation of the Vichy regime and how the Vichy French fought the British, especially in the Middle East (see A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barrine) and 2) the nature of the French Resistance which, as numerous eye-witness accounts in Ben Macintyre’s book about the SAS explain, was tremendously fractured and often bitterly divided, including everyone from right-wing monarchists to fiery communists who often fought each other as much as the Germans.
Moscow and the show trials
Anyway, after a few years Maclean bored of Paris and in February 1937 asked to be sent to the Moscow embassy. Here he discovers the small foreign diplomatic community lives very isolated from the ordinary Russian people who, he discover, live in terror of the regime, everyone scared of any contact with foreigners, repressed, tight-lipped because of the spies and informers everywhere.
He arrives at a fascinating moment, just as Stalin’s show trials are getting into their swing. For the political analyst this is the best part of this section. He describes how Stalin’s purges swept away huge swathes of the top leadership in the Red Army and Navy – notably the charismatic Marshal Tukhachevsky – and then leading figures in the Soviet administration – notably the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and other Old Bolsheviks in 1936.
The purges created a climate of terror in which the ordinary round of diplomatic parties and receptions became painful as all the Soviet officials stood on one side of the room, all of them terrified that the slightest contact with a foreigner would be reported and doom them, literally, to death. The centrepiece of all this is his eye-witness description of the trial of a dozen or so key figures in the Party, centring on Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.
Bukharin was tried in what came to be known as the ‘Trial of the Twenty One’, which took place on 2 to 13 March 1938, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to a so-called ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. The trial was designed to be the culmination of the previous show trials, a climactic Final Act. The prosecutor alleged that Bukharin and others had been traitors from the start, had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, had murdered Maxim Gorky with poison, and planned to overthrow the regime, partition the Soviet Union and hand her territories over to their foreign collaborators in Germany, Japan and Great Britain.
All this is given in great detail in the book’s longest chapter, chapter 7, ‘Winter in Moscow’, pages 80 to 121, with vivid portraits of the state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski and President of the Court Vasiliy Ulrich.
The purpose of the show trials
To many in the West the grotesque aspect of the show trials – the ridiculously lurid accusations and the grovelling obeisance of the accused – confirmed that Stalin’s rule was a dictatorship of the crudest kind. The trial was a breaking point for many western communists, the moment they were forced to concede that the dream of a communist utopia was in fact a totalitarian nightmare.
But Maclean spends a couple of pages explaining not only why the accused were reduced to grovelling self-accusation, but also the purpose the trials served within the Soviet Union. You should never forget that the majority of any population is not very well educated and not very interested in politics and this was especially true of the USSR where the majority of the population was still illiterate peasants. That’s why the accusations had to be so lurid and extreme, to create cartoon images of total iniquity – that the accused had conspired to murder Lenin, conspired with foreign powers to overthrow the regime, had kidnapped, tortured and murdered people. Their villainy had to be caricatured enough to be understood by the most illiterate peasants and workers.
The extremity of the alleged crimes was designed to scare peasants and workers into thinking there was a relentless conspiracy against the regime, even at the highest levels, and this justified the atmosphere of fear, paranoia and suspicion which characterised Soviet Russia. Everybody should be on their guard all the time because anyone – even the highest in the land such as those on trial – could turn out to be wicked traitors.
This worked in Stalin’s favour because it universalised the climate of fear in which people would barely be able to think about questioning the regime, let alone organising meetings or planning anything.
Stories about foreigners bringing their foreign plans to overthrow the Workers’ Paradise would also make the entire population suspicious not only of foreigners and foreign ideas and the whole notion of outsiders. Good. This suited Stalin, too.
And the trials also provided scapegoats for the failings of the state. If there were famines, if there were shortages, blame it on the wreckers and the saboteurs. Papa Stalin is doing everything he can to combat the traitors and it’s a hard struggle but you can help him and help your comrades by reporting anyone you see talking or behaving suspiciously.
So the very grotesqueness and extremity and absurdity which broke the allegiance of western intellectuals like Arthur Koestler were precisely the qualities Stalin was aiming at in order to spread his message to the furthest reaches of the Soviet regime and its dimmest least educated citizens (p.118).
Travels in Central Asia
But the show trial, dramatic though it is, only takes up one chapter. The Russia section is better known for MacLean’s extensive travels to legendary locations in Central Asia, namely the romantic cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara. Only a handful of Europeans had traveled to these places during the later Victorian period and then, with the war, revolution and civil war, then Bolshevik rule, they had been completely inaccessible under Soviet rule.
The chapters describing his attempts to visit them are, therefore, as much about his convoluted machinations to evade Soviet bureaucracy and play local officials and NKVD operatives as about the places themselves, with lengthy descriptions of the difficulties of travelling by Russian train, bus, lorry, horse or just walking, in his relentless odysseys around central Asia.
He undertook these epic journeys during periods of leave from the embassy.
Trip 1 – Baku
By train to Kharkov. Rostov on Don. Kuban Steppe. Baku. By boat (the Centrosoyuz) to Lenkoran. Boat back to Baku. Train to Tiflis, capital of Georgia, where he visits the British Military Cemetery and meets old English governess, Miss Fellows. By truck along the Military Road to Ordzhonikidze. Train back to Moscow.
Trip 2 – Alma Ata-Tashkent-Samarkand (September 1937)
Trans-Siberian train from Moscow. Alights at Sverdlovsk (former Ekaterinburg, p.54). Train to Novosibirsk. Changes to Tirksib railway (only completed in 1930) south towards Turkmenistan (p.56). The three categories of Soviet railway carriage: international, soft and hard. Alights at Biisk. Takes another train, south to Altaisk then onto Barnaul. Enter the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk. Alights and catches a lorry to Alma Mata ‘one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union’ (p.65), one of the first Russian towns built in Central Asia, in the 1850s, and which is ten miles from the railway. Lorry 40 miles to the village of Talgar in the foothills of the Tien Shen mountains. Dinner with locals then hitched a lorry back to Alma Ata. By dilapidated Ford motor car up into the mountains, to Lake Issik and magnificent view over the Steppe. Sleeps in a hut. Next morning bit of an explore then car back to Alma Ata.
Next day catches train the 500 miles south-west to Tashkent. It stops at Samarkand where he alights for a few hours and explores, seeing the domes of Shakh Zinda and the Gur Emir (p.73) then back onto the very crowded train. Extensive description of Samarkand pages 73 to 76. Tashkent, centre of the Soviet cotton industry (pages 76 to 78).
Having achieved his goals, by train back to Moscow, first across the Kazakh Steppe, then (in Russia proper) by way of Orenburg, Kuibyshev and Penza. But he had conceived two new goals: further south-west to Bokhara, and east across the Tien Shan mountains into the Chinese province of Sinkiang…
Trip 3 – Failing to get to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang province (June 1938)
(Chapter 8) To Maclean’s delight he is given an official mission to travel to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang, to ask the Chinese authorities for better treatment of Indian merchants. After comic wrangling with the Chinese embassy in Moscow he sets off on the 5-day rail journey to Alma Ata, two days across European Russia arriving at Orenburg ‘base of the imperial Russian forces in their campaign against the rulers of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara during the second half of the last century’ (p.125). On past the Sea of Aral and along the course of the river Syr Darya, through Arys, Chimkent and Mankent to Alma Ata. Change rail lines to the Turksib line and head north and east 400 miles to Ayaguz, where starts the main road out of Soviet Russia and into Sinkiang.
At Ayaguz the Soviet officials and local NKVD are surprisingly helpful and lay on a bus (which quickly fills up) to take him to the border town of Bakhti. Overnight in the village of Urdjar, next morning arrive in Bakhti (p.130). Here a Sovsintorg official commandeers a lorry and they set off on the 48-hour journey to Urumchi.
However they barely get across the border with China, and arrive at the Chinese border post, when there are problems. His passport is taken off him and he is detained for hours. He discovers the passport has been sent by special messenger to the governor of the local area, Chuguchak, and they have to wait for a reply. Eventually a car returns from this mission and a sleek Chinese official informs Maclean the governor has received no information or authorisation about him and so, despite all his protestations, he must return to the Soviet Union, in fact all the way back to Alma Ata where he must contact the Chinese consul.
At the border Maclean gets the impression the Soviet officials knew all along this would happen and gently mock him. As it happens, one says with a smile, the same bus that brought him is still waiting. He can board it now and return to Bakhti. After driving all night he arrives at Ayaguz in time to catch the train back to Alma Ata.
Here there is more fol-de-rol between the Soviet authorities and the local Chinese Consul, a seedy man residing in a rundown building. The Soviet plenipotentiary instructs the Chinese to send a message to Urumchi. Next day the Chinese inform him that he is not allowed into the country, and an imposing NKVD officer tells him he must leave Alma Ata immediately, as it is a restricted area. The entire trip has been a complete failure (p.137).
It is interesting to read that Sinkiang was a rebellious troublesome province for the Chinese ever since it was incorporated into their empire and was in Maclean’s time because of course, it still is today:
Trip 4 – through Soviet central Asia to the Oxus and on to Kabul (autumn 1938)
(Chapter 9) He sets his sights on visiting Bokhara, former capital of the emirs, of reaching the fabled river Oxus, and crossing into Afghanistan. Leaves Moscow on 7 October on a train bound for Askabad. Third evening arrive at Orenberg ‘which for more than one hundred years marked the furthest point of Russia’s advance against the Kirghiz and Turkomans and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva.’ Two more days the train passes through the Kara Kum or Black Desert past the bleak mud flats of the Aral Sea. On the fifth night reached Tashkent and woke not far from Samarkand but he decides not to revisit it, but to continue on the train, west, following the river Zaravshan, to Bokhara.
He alights at Kagan. He learns that the daily train to Bokhara has left so, on impulse, seeing a lorry laden with cotton bales just starting off down the road to Bokhara, he runs and jumps in the back. Unfortunately so does one of the NKVD minders who’ve been following him, and he’s been reported so after a short stretch a car packed with officials pulls the lorry over but by this time it is packed with Uzbeks who’d followed his example so Maclean is able to sneak off and hide behind a tree. Eventually, after the lorry has been thoroughly searched and no foreigner found it is allowed to continue on its way and the NKVD car turns back to Kagan. There’s nothing for it but to walk. It’s a very long walk, into the night, until he tops a slight rise and finds himself looking at the legendary city of Bokhara by moonlight.
(Chapter 10) Story of the Reverend Joseph Wolff. He explores Bokhara, finds no inn to take him so sleeps rough in a public garden, which irks the NKVD agents who he knows are tailing him. Next day he’s up and exploring again, seeing the ‘Tower of Death’, the principal mosques, the Kalyan, or Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome), the grim thousand-year-old Ark or Citadel of the Emirs. He gives us a characteristically pithy historical summary.
With the capture in 1868 of Samarkand and the upper reaches of the Zaravshan by the Russians, who thus gained control of his water supply, the Emir of Bokhara was obliged to accept the suzerainty of the Tsar and Russian control of his relations with the outside world; but inside his own dominions he maintained his own army and enjoyed absolute power of life and death over his unfortunate subjects. The Russian population was limited to a few officials and merchants, while the Emir excluded other Europeans from his domains with a jealousy which has been emulated by his Bolshevik successors. Bokhara thus remained a centre of Mohammedan civilization, a holy city with a hundred mosques, three hundred places of learning, and the richest bazaar in Central Asia. It was not until 1920, three years after the downfall of his imperial suzerain, that the last Emir, after vainly invoking the help of both the Turks and the British, fled headlong across the Oxus to Afghanistan, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope of thus retarding the advance of the pursuing Red Army, who, however, were not to be distracted from their purpose by such stratagems. (A leading part was played in these events by the same Faisullah Khojayev, whom I had seen condemned to death in Moscow six months earlier.)
He could have stayed a month but his leave is limited, so he catches a train back to Kagan, then another one south, heading towards Stalinabad, the capital of Tajikistan. The last section follows the course of the Oxus (Amu Darya) passing through eastern Turkmenistan. The far bank of the river was Afghan territory and that’s where he wanted to head next.
(Chapter 11. Across the Oxus) He alights at Termez, which he explores then seeks out the chief of police and presents his diplomatic laisser passer which should allow him to the exit the Soviet Union anywhere, in this case crossing the river Oxus into Afghanistan. The chief of police gives him permission but when Maclean arrives at the actual frontier post at Patta Hissa, they haven’t been notified. By gentle persistence Maclean eventually persuades the officer in charge to arrange for the repair of one of the three paddle boats kept to cross the river but which had fallen into disrepair. Soldiers and engineers get the most viable steamer, ‘which rejoiced in the name of Seventeenth Party Congress,’ working and fix it up enough to put-put him across the river, it takes half an hour because of treacherous sand banks.
On the Afghan side some locals take his bags and him under their wing. They examine his passport without understanding it and he manages to convey he wants to head to Mazar-i-Sharif. Dinner and sleep. Next morning a horse is provided and he sets off under escort. the riverside reeds give way to desert. He is detained at a saria or mud fort by fierce locals before being grudgingly allowed to continue.
Off to the west are the ruins of Balkh, the ancient Bactria. The oasis of Seyagird. Tea with the headman who provides a cart for his baggage, then a further trek across desert eventually arriving at Mazar. He discovers a Russian couple who take him in but inform him of the cholera epidemic sweeping the area which means it is quarantined. He locates the local Director of Sanitation who agrees, after some negotiation, to sign a medical certificate declaring Maclean has had cholera and recovered. Portrait of Mazar, main point being it is the capital of what he calls Afghan Turkestan, which is cut off geographically and ethnically from Kabul and the south (p.164).
A truck was scheduled to drive the 300 or so miles to Afghanistan and the authorities assign him a seat. Tashkurgan and then up into rocky mountains to a place named Hai-Bak and, at 3 in the morning, to Doaba in the Andarrab valley, where he sleeps in a government rest house. In the way of British aristocrats, especially the Scots, he discovers ‘a fellow clanswoman’ Mrs Fraser-Tytler who, it turns out, he had known during his childhood in Inverness.
He takes a detour west to the Bamyan valley to see the two immense Buddhas carved in the rock. Then across the mountain which is the watershed between the Oxus and the Indus at a height of 12,000 feet and soon arrives at Kabul.
(Chapter 12. Homeward bound) He had hoped to head west to Herat and cross back into the USSR at Kershk and join the railway at Merv but none of this was to be. the Soviet consulate in Kabul made it quite clear that, because of the cholera epidemic, nobody was being allowed back into the USSR from Afghanistan.
Instead he is forced to head south into British India and fly. The route is: Kabul. Jalalabad. The Khyber Pass. Into British India and the town of Peshawar. Train to Delhi. As a pukka diplomat he meets the most senior British officials, dinner, good beds, a world away from his recent experiences. He obtains the visa he’ll need to exit Persia into the USSR.
From Delhi by plane to Baghdad, stopping over in Basra. After staying over in Baghdad, ‘a disappointing city’, he takes a car towards Tehran. Across the border into the Persia at Khanikin. Along a road built by the Brits to Kermanshah, and then to Hamadan, ‘the Ecbatana of the ancients’ (p.170). Changes car and car shares with four bulky Iranians driving north for the border with the USSR at Djulfa. Stops at Kavin (to eat), Zenjan (to sleep), through Mianeh, arriving at Tabriz the capital of Persian Azerbaijan.
Two days hobnobbing with the British Consul and haggling with the Persian governor about the validity of his exit visa. Eventually given permission to head north to the border, Djulfa in the valley of the Araxes. Comic scene where the Persian guards happily allow him onto the bridge across the river but the Soviet guard at the other end refuses to let him enter the USSR and when he turns to re-enter Persia the Persian border guard says this is impossible. Luckily a car arrives with a Soviet official who, reluctantly, accepts his diplomatic laisser-passer and lets him enter. He cashes money at the post office and checks into an inn.
Train to Erivan, capital of Soviet Armenia, running alongside the river Araxa which forms the border. Portrait of Erivan. Train to Tiflis, capital of Soviet Georgia, and so on to Batum, the second largest city in Georgia, on the banks of the Black Sea. He observes that so many of these central Asian towns were only conquered by the advancing Russian from the 1870s and many only began to be developed in a modern way after the Russian Civil War, so many of them have the same air of being half built, of having grand central squares full of vast totalitarian Soviet buildings, quickly giving way to a few streets of bourgeois wealth, and then extensive hovels and shacks.
He had hoped to sail from Batum but storms meant departures were cancelled. So by train back to Tiflis. It was 18 months since he was last there (on his first trip) and he finds it has been noticeably Sovietised and security tightened. He is arrested by the NKVD and spends a day arguing with NKVD officers until the commander returns and releases him back to his hotel.
Next morning he takes a lorry to Ordzhonikidze by the Georgian Military Road which is covered in snow; they regularly have to stop and dig the lorry out of drifts. From Ordzhonikidze he catches the sleeper train back to Moscow, arriving two days later in time to receive an invitation to dinner from the Belgian chargé d’affaires (see below).
What an extraordinary adventure! What a mind-boggling itinerary! It is a mark of how backward we have gone that Maclean was able to travel through all those countries in complete safety whereas now, in the supposedly enlightened and progressive 2020s, I don’t think any Westerner in their right mind would want to travel through central Asia, let along Afghanistan, or contemplate a jolly car trip across Iraq and Iran.
The glamour of central Asia
For those susceptible to it, all these places – Tashkent, Samarkand, the Oxus, western outposts of the legendary Silk Road – have a tremendous glamour and attraction. Reading his account you realise it’s 1) partly because they’re so remote and inaccessible and so simply to have visited them is an achievement which gains you kudos in a certain kind of upper-middle class circle; 2) partly because of the wonders and treasures when you arrive, such as the grand Registran in Samarakand; but also 3), as so often with travelling, because it is an escape from the humdrum modern world. A number of throwaway remarks indicate this, including one which leapt out at me: ‘Uzbek houses have changed very little since the days of Tamerlane‘ (p.143). These are places where you can, for long spells, believe that you have travelled back in time to the Middle Ages and not just of banal Britain, but to the glamorous days of Tamerlane and such legendary figures, or even further back, visiting the ruins of cities founded by Alexander the Great! It is, in a way, an escape back to the Arabian Nights wonderlands of childhood.
And picking up on the previous section, reading it now, in 2024, one can only marvel at the relative peacefulness and security and scope of where you could travel freely in the 1930s – albeit the entire system was about to be plunged into a global holocaust.
The methodology of Soviet imperialism
On a political level his travels in Central Asia give him an insight into the effectiveness of the Soviet empire:
As the basis for a policy of imperialism, this system has much to recommend it. Power is vested in the hands of a group of reliable natives, who are responsible for seeing that the wishes of the central authority are carried out. If they prove unreliable, they can be replaced by others, while, if the worst comes to the worst, an emissary of the central authority can be sent to put things right. By this means, no risks are taken and an appearance of autonomy is preserved. Moreover it is a system which is capable of application to any new country which happens to fall under Soviet dominion. Thus, more recently, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Soviet Socialist Republics have been set up and politically reliable governments formed from members of the local Communist Parties. It is, we are now learning, a stereotyped pattern into which almost any people or country can be made to fit with a little squeezing and pushing. (p.35)
A German official predicts the course of the war
All this took place at the end of the 1930s as Europe hurtled towards war but there is surprisingly little about Hitler and the Nazis; in fact, given that MacLean was a diplomat, there’s surprisingly little about international affairs at all.
It’s only at the very end of the Asian adventures section, after he’s arrived back in Moscow exhausted, filthy and unshaven from his final trip to discover an invitation to a formal dinner being given by the Belgian chargé d’affaires that very evening, that there’s finally something about the broader international situation. And this is given as a prediction by a friend of his, his opposite number at the German embassy, Johnny Herwarth von Bittenfeld.
Herwarth (in MacLean’s account) makes a number of predictions which all were to come true. He thinks Britain backing down at Munich (September 1938) is a disaster because:
it will embolden Hitler to make more and more outrageous demands
it will weaken all voices within Germany calling for restraint
it will, thus, make war inevitable
war is only tenable if Germany can make peace with the Russians
if not, there will be a war on two fronts which Germany will lose and be utterly ruined
Part 2. War (183 to 299)
Coming from a long line of soldiers, when war breaks out Maclean wants to fight but discovers that it is impossible for someone serving in the Diplomatic Service to join the army. He is not allowed to resign in order join up. So he studies the Foreign Office rules intensely and realises there’s a loophole. He is allowed to resign from the service in one situation – if he wants to go into politics. So he contacts the Conservative Party who say they’ll be happy to have him as a candidate for the next constituency which becomes vacant and, armed with this, marches into his boss’s office (the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alexander Cadogan) and declares that he wants to go into politics, resignation in hand. As he predicts, his superiors are unable to stop him and so let him resign.
He promptly walks round to the recruiting office of his father’s regiment, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, where he enlists as a private soldier. (p.184). But, when the next by-election crops up he is legally obliged, under the terms of his resignation letter, to stand and so finds himself the Conservative candidate and then wins the election to become Conservative MP for Lancaster in 1941 (p.189). He hadn’t hidden from the electors that he was in the Army and first duty was to serve and all through his subsequent service he remains, I think, Tory MP for Lancaster.
There are some pages about basic army life and training. As you might expect of someone so over-qualified to be a simple squaddy he is soon promoted to lance-corporal. Among other things he confirms that, in the Army, almost every other word is the F word which he demonstrates by quoting conversations or orders with the offending word bleeped out (pages 184 to 186).
Desert War
After two years of training and exercises he is, as you might expect, in 1941 commissioned as an officer and receives orders to fly to Cairo (p.189). After the retreat from Dunkirk, apart from a few abortive expeditions (a failed attack on Norway or on the French coast) North Africa was the main area of British overseas military activity.
Because I myself am not too clear about this and Maclean’s book refers only to some aspects, I’m going to cheat and quote Wikipedia’s summary of the entire Desert War:
Military operations began in June 1940 with the Italian declaration of war and the Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya in September. Operation Compass, a five-day raid by the British in December 1940, was so successful that it led to the destruction of the Italian 10th Army (10ª Armata) over the following two months. Benito Mussolini sought help from Adolf Hitler, who sent a small German force to Tripoli under Directive 22 (11 January). The Afrika Korps (Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel) was formally under Italian command, as Italy was the main Axis power in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
In the spring of 1941, Rommel led Operation Sonnenblume, which pushed the Allies back to Egypt except for the siege of Tobruk at the port. At the end of 1941, Axis forces were defeated in Operation Crusader and retired again to El Agheila. In early 1942 Axis forces drove the Allies back again, then captured Tobruk after the Battle of Gazala but failed to destroy their opponents. The Axis invaded Egypt and the Allies retreated to El Alamein, where the Eighth Army fought two defensive battles, then defeated the Axis forces in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The Eighth Army drove Axis forces out of Libya to Tunisia, which was invaded from the west by the Allied First Army in Operation Torch. In the Tunisian campaign the remaining Axis forces surrendered to the combined Allied forces in May 1943.
North Africa was so important because of the Suez Canal in the heart of Egypt. If the Germans captured Cairo it would have at least three results: 1) they would cut off easy communications with India (a huge source of manpower) and with the entire theatre of war in the Far East (Burma). More importantly 2) the Germans would be able to push on through Palestine to Iraq and Persia, source of much of the oil which was fuelling the British war effort. 3) This oil would be sent to support the German war effort in Russia and German troops coming up from Persia through the Caucasus would open a new front against Russia leading, perhaps, to the decisive defeat of Russia and to Germany, in effect winning the war.
Those were the ultimate stakes behind the Desert War and explains the genuine concern and even panic when the Afrika Corps, at its furthest extent, got within 80 miles of Cairo, and that explains why the (second) Battle of El Alamein was so important, signalling the definitive end of German advances, the beginning of German defeats, and the widespread sense that the tide of the war was changing.
Chapter 1. Special Air Service
Maclean had been invited to join some sort of commando but this fell through. Instead he literally bumps into David Stirling (who he knows vaguely because he’s good friends with Stirling’s brother, Peter, and they’re both from another grand, ancient, noble Scottish family) who invites him to join the SAS.
Stirling explains that the idea is to parachute small numbers of men behind enemy lines in North Africa and cause as much mayhem as possible, thus drawing vital resources away from the front line. After various experiments they’ve discovered that attacking lightly defended airfields is the most destructive thing they can do. They use the Lewis Bomb, a clump of explosive with a pencil fuse developed by SAS founder member Jock Lewis (p.194). Profile of the dedicated fighting machine, Paddy Mayne (p.195).
Maclean describes the Free French who were part of the unit almost from the start. The physical training i.e. long hikes in the desert and practice parachuting. He has to make six jumps and hates it. All a bit futile seeing as by the time he joined, the unit had settled down to being taken and collected from missions by the Long Range Desert Group (p.196).
Chapters 3 and 4. Raid on Benghazi
May 1942: Detailed description of the build up to, and execution of a ‘daring’ raid against Benghazi led by Stirling, accompanied by Randolph Churchill (compare and contrast the account of the same farcical raid given in Ben Macintyre’s SAS: Rogue Heroes).
I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout. (p.221)
They manage to penetrate into the highly defended city and find a safe (bomb-damaged) house to hole up in but that evening both the inflatable dinghies they’ve brought to paddle out to enemy ships and attach limpet mines to them, turn out to have leaks and simply won’t inflate. Disheartened, they spend a tense day hiding out in this damaged house, petrified of discovery, before exiting the city in the same clanking car they’d entered by, bluffing their way past the Italian guards thanks to Maclean’s fluent demotic Italian and everyone’s (Maclean, Stirling, Randolph Churchill’s) aristocratic confidence.
Chapters 5 and 6
Having extricated themselves from this failed and farcical attempt, they withdraw to Cairo. He mentions the dinner he and Stirling were invited to which was given by Winston Churchill, Chief of the General Staff General Smuts and General Alexander, the first time he meets Churchill.
The strategic situation has deteriorated and Rommel is now at El Alamein just 90 miles from Alexandria. So the SAS’s plans for a second go at Benghazi escalate into a full-blown raid by some 200 men backed by aerial bombing. Trouble is so many people are involved that security is breached and word gets around. Thus, after a very long and painful 800 mile drive of a lengthy convoy across the desert, with many mishaps, our boys finally get to the very edge of Benghazi but are greeted by a hail of machine guns and mortars, are forced to make a hasty retreat, and are pursued up into the Gebel mountains by squads of Italian warplanes who strafe and bomb them. Several trucks full of explosives and stores are blown up and it’s a miracle they weren’t all killed.
There then follows the very long account of their perilous escape across the desert, driving by night, by day being seriously bombed and strafed by Italian planes, running so low on food that eventually the entire day’s ration was one spoonful of bully beef.
A number of good men are killed on this mission. Maclean initially thought it had been a futile waste of time but GHQ assured them that it had kept a lot of enemy resources tied up, extra men to guard Benghazi and then squadrons of airplanes to search for them which were, therefore, not at the front i.e. it had been useful (p.256).
Chapter 7. Persia
Maclean explains that the British now faced the threat of an enormous pincer movement, with German forces trying to take Stalingrad up in southern Russia and pushing forward in north Africa towards Cairo and, ultimately, the Suez Canal (p.263). If you look at a large-scale map you can see how, if the Germans were victorious, they would not only take the Suez Canal, lifeline to British India, but push on through Palestine to take Iraq and Iran, meeting up with their comrades who would have pushed on south through the Caucasus. And the point of Iran was the oil. Command of Persia, and to a lesser extent Iraq, would give the Nazi empire all the oil it ever needed to maintain its war industry.
Which is why Maclean found himself posted to the Middle East and Persia service. Here, conferring with the commanding officer, General Maitland Wilson, he discovered the problems facing the British occupation of the country, most obviously that there were very few British soldiers involved. He had been summoned to discuss with Wilson the possibility of setting up an SAS-style outfit to operate behind enemy lines if the worst came to the worst and the Germans conquered Persia (p.264).
Kidnapping the general
Out of this conference comes the specific idea of kidnapping a man named General Zahidi, an unpleasant type who had sway over the tribes of south Persia, was known to be hoarding grain to inflate the price but, most importantly, was thought to be in communication with the Germans and helping them make plans to conquer Persia.
This chapter describes in great detail the preparation and execution of ‘Operation Pongo’ which, despite all the hoopla, boils down to parking a lorryload of British soldiers out the front and back of the General’s house in Isfahan, and then Maclean accompanied by a few other officers walking in, insisting to see the General, then holding him up at gunpoint, walking him out to a waiting car, and driving him off to the nearest military airport where he was flown out of the country and interned under British custody in Palestine.
On searching Zahedi’s bedroom Maclean confirms British suspicions, discovering ‘a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium, an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan and correspondence from a local German agent’ (p.274).
Incidentally, remember how I suggested part of the appeal of the mysterious cities of Central Asia was the sense of stepping back in time into the Middle Ages or beyond, well the same goes for the Persian city of Isfahan, one of the few cities Maclean has been to which lives up to its reputation, and of which he writes:
Despite the hideous modern statue of the late Shah still standing there and despite his misguided attempts, fortunately abandoned by his successor, to bludgeon Persia into giving a half-hearted and entirely superficial imitation of a modern Western industrial state, Isfahan recalls the great capital city of the Middle Ages. (p.270)
And the whole notion of kidnapping an enemy general recalls the comparable exploit, the kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander of Crete, by a group of super-pukka chaps, as described in Ill Met by Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (1950), albeit it considerably more fraught and dangerous for being carried out in enemy territory.
Chapter 8
The strategic situation changes. The Germans are checked in North Africa and at Stalingrad. The immediate threat to Persia has abated. After the capture of David Stirling in January 1943 the SAS had split up into different units (including a Special Boat Service run by George Jellicoe).
Maclean is summoned back to Cairo and told that, with North Africa on the verge of being secure, the Allied focus is turning to Italy. He is ordered to plan for SAS-style raids on Sicily but the mission is called off at the last moment. He’s at a bit of a loose end when he is summoned back to London where he meets Churchill for a weekend conference at Chequers (p.280). Here he is told he is going to be dropped into Yugoslavia (spelled ‘Jugoslavia’ throughout the book) to find out more about the partisans who have been fighting against the Germans and to contact their supposed leader, ‘Tito’. Nobody’s sure, at this point, whether Tito exists, whether he’s a man (or even a woman) or maybe the name of a committee of some kind?
Churchill tells him to establish the situation on the ground, find out whichever partisan group is killing most Germans, and help them to kill more. Churchill wrote that he wanted: ‘a daring Ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted people’ (p.294).
What we knew for sure was that the partisans were communists and so likely to be in thrall to Soviet central control so Maclean asks Churchill directly, should he be worried about the political aspects of the situation. The straight answer is No. His mission is to find out who is killing the most Germans and help them to kill more (p.281), a point reiterated when he meets Churchill in Cairo (p.403).
He gives a detailed and very useful summary of the origins of Yugoslavia, going back to the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and the long struggle of the Balkan Christian nations to free themselves, leading into a detailed description of the region before, during and after the Great War and leading up to the Nazi invasion (pages 279 to 293). He’s especially good on the deeply embedded enmity between Serbs (Orthodox Christians who fought hard against the occupying Turks i.e. have a paranoid embattled mindset) and the Croats (Catholic Christians who were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so considered themselves civilised and superior to their barbarian neighbours) still a good read for anyone interested in the background to the ruinous civil wars of the 1990s. Right at the end of the Yugoslavia section he comments:
In the Balkans the tradition of violence is old-established and deep-rooted. (p.524)
Part 3. Yugoslavia
Zivio Tito. Smrt Fašismu. Sloboda narodu.
(‘Long live Tito. Death to Fascism. Liberty to the People.’ Partisan slogans, page 345)
Maclean is now aged 32. He selects a team of a dozen or so men who are trained, equipped and parachuted into Yugoslavia a week after the Italian capitulation i.e. early September 1943. They are met by Partisans and efficiently taken to Tito’s headquarters in an old castle. Maclean introduces himself and his team and makes it plain he is here on an investigation into the overall situation.
His description and analysis of the situation in Yugoslavia is fascinating and spread over many pages as new facts come in and shift his understanding. It contains many insights into the situation in Yugoslavia and of partisan fighting in general.
– Occupation mentality Nobody who hasn’t lived under enemy occupation, specially Nazi occupation, can understand the bitter enmities, rivalries and retaliations it triggers.
For anyone who was not himself in German-occupied Europe during the war it is hard to imagine the savage intensity of the passions which were aroused or the extremes of bitterness which they engendered. In Jugoslavia the old racial, religious and political feuds were, as it were, magnified and revitalized by the war, the occupation and the resistance, the latent tradition of violence revived. The lesson which we were having was an object-lesson, illustrated by burnt villages, desecrated churches, massacred hostages and mutilated corpses. (p.338)
– Tito’s intelligence and independence What makes Tito so impressive is his readiness to argue any point out with a completely open mind then make a decision, which is generally the right one.
– Tito’s name derives from this quickness to make decisions. He so regularly said to his men ‘You will do this, and you will do that’ which, in Serbo-Croatian, is ‘Ti to; ti to’, hence his nickname (p.311).
– Maclean concludes that the partisans are so numerous (at least 100,000 under arms) and well organised that they will probably emerge as the major element in post-war Yugoslav politics. At which point the big question will be: Will Tito, a dedicated communist, fall into line behind Moscow as all other communist parties have? (p.339) But Maclean quotes a conversation he had with him where Tito emphasises that so many Yugoslavs have been killed or tortured that they won’t willingly throw away their hard-earned independence (p.316) and Tito himself has undergone the experience of building up and leading a national resistance movement from scratch, a position, Maclean thinks, he will be reluctant to surrender (p.340).
– The Četniks The other resistance fighting organisation is the Četniks led by Draža Mihailović. Two points: 1) they were Royalists who took their orders from the king who was in exile in Italy and so fundamentally detached from the realities on the ground. 2) They were demoralised by the Nazis brutal reprisals for their activities (p.336). This contrasted with the Partisans who ignored Nazi reprisals and won a grudging admiration for fighting on regardless of how many men, women and children were murdered, tortured or burnt alive by the blonde beasts from Germany.
– The Ustaše (also called Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement, active from before the war (1929) which during the war was allowed to implement a reign of terror. Their genocide of the Orthodox, murdering priests, locking villages in churches and burning them down (p.334). Events which shed light on or explained the brutality of the Bosnian war of the 1990s:
This kaleidoscope of heroism and treachery, rivalry and intrigue had become the background to our daily life. Bosnia, where we had our first sight of enemy-occupied Jugoslavia, was in a sense a microcosm of the country as a whole. In the past it had been fought over repeatedly by Turks, Austrians and Serbs, and most of the national trends and tendencies were represented there, all at their most violent. The population was made up of violently Catholic Croats and no less violently Orthodox Serbs, with a strong admixture of equally fanatical local Moslems. The mountainous, heavily wooded country was admirably suited to guerrilla warfare, and it had long been one of the principal Partisan strongholds, while there was also a considerable sprinkling of Cetnik bands. It had been the scene of the worst of the atrocities committed by the Ustase, of the not unnaturally drastic reprisals of the Cetniks and Partisans. (p.337)
– The power of communism In guerrilla warfare ideas matter more than material resources (p.331). This is where the devoted belief of the communists comes in and Maclean’s analysis suggests a very profound historical point that he doesn’t quite articulate: that communism flourished in countries all round the world, and particularly among guerrillas, partisans and militias all across the Third World after the war, not because it was right, but because it was the most effective ideology for binding together and motivating those kinds of liberation fighters. Communism triumphed in the Darwinian struggle of ideologies for a number of obvious reasons:
it promises a better fairer world; if you care for humanity, you must be a communist
it is based on scientific principles and a teleological view of history which means it is inevitable, unstoppable
it transcends ethnic or national rivalries, purports to unite all people, races and creeds, in a transnational crusade for justice and equality
these and other considerations bred a fanatical adherence
(Seen from this strictly utilitarian point of view, communism’s modern equivalent would be militant Islam, extreme Islamic groups across the Middle East and North Africa being shown to create not only fanatical devotees but to unite fighters from all backgrounds and races (a theme mentioned in The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson, 2013).)
He gives a good potted biography of Tito, son of a Croatian peasant (pages 310 to 313).
The epic trek to the Adriatic
The army engineer he’s brought with him supervises the flattening of a likely looking field to make a runway for the RAF to fly in much-needed supplies to the Partisans, but HQ back in Cairo make it clear the RAF aren’t keen on entrusting their pilots’ lives to amateur airfield builders. A new plan is suggested: that the Royal Navy brings supplies to a port on the coast of Dalmatia, until recently held by the Italians and not yet annexed by the Germans. In fact the Navy are wary, too, and prefer to drop supplies at an island off the coast.
Anyway, Maclean agrees a plan with Tito (impatient to get supplies anyway he can) who gives him Partisans to escort Maclean and a few of his team (Street, Henniker-Major and Sergeant Duncan) across country to the Adriatic coast, there to assess the situation and suggest the best island. Thus commences a long and arduous trek across mountains, through woods, crossing a German-patrolled road, fording a river, meeting all kinds of eccentric characters along the way and seeing for themselves the carnage meted out by the once-occupying Italians.
The itinerary is: Jajce (Tito’s base in Bosnia). Bugojno. Kupres. Livno (recently recovered from the Germans amid much fighting). Arzano (‘a few tiny white-washed houses, clinging to the side of a hill’). Zadvaije.
Then, at last, we heard the dogs barking in Baska Voda, were challenged once more, and, between high white-washed walls, found ourselves on a narrow jetty, looking out over a tiny harbour.
Then by local fishing boat out to the island of Korcula. They are treated royally, swim in the sea, taken round all the villages on the coast and greeted with acclaim. Trouble is, the bloody radio has stopped working so he can’t radio his whereabouts back to Cairo HQ. In the event a Navy motorboat turns up with, of course, an old chum of his from the navy and some tons of equipment.
Summary
An enormous amount happens in the next year and a half, described in 120 closely-written pages. Here are some highlights in note form:
The Germans consolidate their hold on the Dalmatian coast thus slowly squeezing off possible places for the Allies to land munitions for the partisans.
He is collected by Royal Navy motor boat and taken across the Adriatic to Allied HQ in southern Italy for orders. He is flown to Malta, then on across Libya to Cairo. Preparations are underway for a Big Three conference in the Middle East. Maclean submits his report, conclusion so far about the situation in Yugoslavia and the central importance of the partisans.
On return to Bari he finds the situation has deteriorated the Germans have seized more of the coastline. Repeated attempts to fly him back in are defeated by fog and snow. A captured German airplane is filled with top envoys from Tito to fly to Allied HQ but it has just loaded up when a German plane appears out of nowhere, attacking it with bombs and machine gun fire, killing some of Tito’s top lieutenants and some of Maclean’s British friends.
Finally he gets to land, drops some equipment and British officers, takes on board a new selection of Tito representatives, and flies back to Bari with a view to taking them on to Allied HQ in Egypt. Churchill and staff have returned from the Tehran conference with Stalin and Roosevelt (28 November to 1 December).
The central problem is that Britain has, up until now, been giving official support to the Royal Yugoslav Government in exile, appointed by King Peter, and sending arms to the Royalist Cetniks led by by Draža Mihailović. Now Maclean has to tell Churchill and other bigwigs that the Cetniks are not only not very effective on the ground but strongly suspected of acquiescing or even helping the Germans. Meanwhile, the real anti-German force is the partisans. So Maclean’s meetings with Churchill are designed to make him switch official British government support from the Cetniks to the partisans. But this leaves the big problem that Maclean is reporting that Tito’s partisans will not only be the biggest force in post-war Yugoslavia but will probably form the government. Therefore British support for the King and the royal government in exile is increasingly irrelevant and backing the wrong horse. But how to switch British support without alienating the king, the Cetniks and the large proportion of the Yugoslav population which remains royalist? (Later on Maclean says that even the communists conceded that over half the population of Serbia was monarchist, p.490.)
This tricky diplomatic challenge runs throughout the rest of the Yugoslav part of the book and negotiations, between so many different parties, moving through so many different stages, are impossible to summarise. In a nutshell, young King Peter acquiesces in the decision but, as so often, it is his older advisors and other members of the royal family, who prove intractable and complicate the situation.
Maclean is flown back to Bari and then makes the dicey crossing back to an unoccupied Yugoslav port in a RN motor-torpedo boat. He reunites with his small staff and Tito’s staff and, after studying maps and latest German troop movements, they all agree the only viable island base for operations is the island of Vis. He then travels back to Bari to meet the Commander in Chief, General Alexander, to persuade him to assign the resources and troops required to convert Vis into a stronghold, for example building a large airfield and barracks for a permanent British force.
Yet another flight, from Bari to Marrakesh in Morocco where Churchill is recovering from flu, to persuade the great man to sign off on the Vis plan. they learn that Tito’s old headquarters in Jajce has fallen to the Germans and so, thinking they need some bucking up, Churchill writes a personal letter to Tito for Maclean to deliver by hand (p.413).
He is flown back to Bari and then parachuted into Bosnia to find and report the decision to Tito.
(Chapter 10) He is taken to meet Tito at temporary headquarters and discovers a Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Council has bestowed in Tito the rank of Marshall. Tito is delighted by the letter in which Churchill flatters him and readily agrees with the plan to make Vis a major support base for his partisans. They move about a lot and finally make a new HQ in caves overlooking a valley.
Chapter 11. New deal
Increasing air drops from the RAF and USAAF. Maclean is responsible for assigning officers to work with partisan units throughout the country.
Despite occasional stoppages, air-supplies were now arriving on a far larger scale. Air-support, too, was increasing by leaps and bounds….It was now possible, owing to the presence of my officers with Partisan formations throughout the country, to co-ordinate their operations with those of the Allied Armies in Italy. (p.429)
A Russian Mission arrives led by a Red Army general. This is the thin end of the wedge as East and West start to compete for the allegiance of Tito and his partisans.
A passage giving the decision, context and implications of the British government decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and diplomatic negotiations with King Peter (in exile in London) to see if he’s prepared to form a government of national unity i.e. let communist partisans enter his government in exile (pages 438 to 441). This would be best achieved if Maclean flies back to London to give advice, preferably accompanied by a representative of Tito.
Chapter 12. Change of scene
So he’s picked up by Dakota and flies to Algiers to meet with the new Supreme Allied Commander, General Wilson. Here, among many other decisions, it is decided to set up a Balkan Air Force which would train partisan volunteers and be responsible ‘for the planning, co-ordination and, to a large extent, execution of air operations in the Balkans’ (p.444). Long-distance phone call to Churchill with comedy because neither of them know how to use the newfangled scrambling equipment.
Next day he flies to London with the Tito delegate, Major Vlatko Velebit. It’s the spring of 1944 and England is overflowing with Americans and rumours of D-Day. He is summoned to a meeting with General Eisenhower, then to another one at Number 10. the military side – more supplies to the partisans – is easily agreed. The political negotiations with King Peter and the Royalists much more challenging. Peter has by now made an important public announcement telling his people to drop the Cetniks and support the partisans but this only has the effect of weakening his own support among disgruntled royalists without much increasing support for the partisans which was already strong.
Maclean receives a call from Buckingham Palace to go and brief the king who he finds to be surprisingly well-informed about the situation in Yugoslavia (p.449).
Then they get a radio message from Vivian Street, British officer with Tito HQ, that the cave hideout came under heavy attack from a co-ordinated German attack, many partisans were killed through Tito and senior officers made their escape. (Maclean gives a sustained description of the attack and gripping escape, pages 450 to 452.)
The HQ had been near the village of Drvar. In retaliation for supporting the partisans the Germans exterminate every man, woman and child in the village. That level of barbarism is what we were fighting to liberate Europe from.
The Germans pursue and harass Tito’s team who eventually radio for help. A date is made for a US Dakota to land at a cleared strip and Tito and key staff (and his dog Tigger) are loaded aboard and evacuated to Bari, the first time he’s been forced to leave Yugoslav soil since the conflict began (p.454).
Everyone agrees that, in order to continue functioning and provide a figurehead he must be returned to Yugoslav soil as soon as possible and the island of Vis, so long pondered as a new HQ, is agreed. Tito and his staff are taken there by Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Blackmore.
Chapter 13. Island base and brief encounter
Maclean drily observes that Tito likes caves. He makes his base on the island of Vis three-quarters up the side of Mount Hum. Since he was last there the island has been transformed with a huge Allied airfield built with as many as a dozen huge American bombers parked up.
The narrow roads were crammed with Army trucks and jeeps, stirring up clouds of red dust as they rushed along. Every few hundred yards dumps of stores and ammunition, surrounded by barbed wire and by brightly painted direction posts, advertised the presence of R.E.M.E., of N.A.A.F.I., of D.A.D.O.S., and of the hundred and one other services and organizations… Down by the harbour at Komisa was the Naval Headquarters, presided over by Commander Morgan Giles, R.N., who had what was practically an independent command over a considerable force of M.T.B.s and other light naval craft, with which he engaged in piratical activities against enemy shipping up and down the whole length of the Jugoslav coast… (p.458)
Also the establishment of the Balkan School of Artillery, set up on Vis as part of Maclean’s Mission under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Kup:
whose life-work it became to instruct the Partisans in the use of the American 75-mm. Pack Howitzer. This was a light mountain gun, transportable on mule-back, if there happened to be any mules, and in general ideally suited to the type of warfare in which we were engaged. (p.459)
Also a partisan tank squadron being trained up in North Africa (p.464).
The Germans undertake another offensive, called the Seventh Offensive, against the partisans which starts with fierce fighting but then, like all the others, peters out.
The tide of the war is really turning. On 5 June 1944 Rome fell to the Allies. The following day saw the D-Day landings in Normandy. The Allies need to co-ordinate attacks on the Germans with the partisans; there needs to be discussion of the parts of northern Italy Tito wants to claim for Yugoslavia; plus the ever-intractable problem of the king and royalists. So it is that Supreme Allied Command in Italy ask for him to visit and Maclean organises the trip, accompanied by senior advisers, bodyguards and the faithful dog, Tigger.
It had been kept secret from Maclean, Tito and others that Churchill himself intended to fly in and meet Tito for the first time, and so the so-called Naples Conference came about. Churchill is fulsome in his praise, Maclean thinks Tito is amazed and pleased, the one-time peasant and revolutionary now sitting at the same table as one of the big three world leaders.
The high political problem is still how to reconcile with communist partisans with the royal government in exile, which has now crystallised round its prime minister, Dr Ivan Subasic. After ten days the Naples Conference ends and Subasic flies with Tito, his staff, Maclean etc back to Vis where the two Yugoslav parties hold a series of negotiations while the Brits sunbathe and swim in the beautiful aquamarine sea.
In the end a deal of sorts is agreed and Subasic flies back to London to put it to the king and his government.
Chapter 14. Ratweek plan
June 1944. Rumours that the Germans might retreat, withdrawing to a line they could better defend to the north of Yugoslavia. To do this they will need the central railway line from Belgrade to Salonika. Therefore it is the Allied aim to blow up the line and trap German forces in Yugoslavia.
The scheme was called ‘Operation Ratweek’. My proposal was that, for the space of one week, timed to coincide as closely as possible with the estimated beginning of the German withdrawal, the Partisans on land and the Allies on the sea and in the air, should make a series of carefully planned, carefully co-ordinated attacks on enemy lines of communication throughout Jugoslavia. This would throw the retiring forces into confusion and gravely hamper further withdrawal.
In drawing up these plans, we had recourse to all available sources of information concerning the enemy’s order of battle and the disposition of his troops, while at every stage we consulted by signal the British officers and the Partisan Commanders on the spot. Thus, the whole of the German line of withdrawal would be covered and every possible target accounted for. In the light of what we guessed the enemy’s plans to be the attack was fixed for the first week of September. (p.471)
Maclean decides to go from Bosnia to see for himself the situation in Serbia. Flies in and rendezvous with John Henniker-Major who’s been with the Serb Partisans since April. The Serb Partisans the Cinderellas of the movement, with less support from the local population, fewer rough mountains to hide in (unlike Bosnia), less successful against the Germans and so seizing fewer arms and so less well supplied than elsewhere. Lucky they have a good leader in Stambolic.
In April/May had come a change. The King announced his rapprochement with Tito and that led many to switch from supporting the passive Cetniks. Tito sent some of his best commanders to shake up the Serbian operation, notably Koca Popovic. And the Allies made a decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and supply the Partisans. As a result the latter began undertaking more operations and having greater success. Those who wanted to fight the invader went over to them, more successes, more seized arms and more prestige and respect, created a snowball effect. But still the deadly civil war between Partisans and Cetniks persisted.
So Maclean has been flown in to liaise with the Serb partisans. He is introduced to Koca, they pull out maps and have a comprehensive review of the situation, with Koca explaining where his forces can attack by themselves and where they’ll need air support, and what supplies.
Chapter 15. Ratweek fulfilment
He marches with partisans to Bojnik then onto the village where the Commander of the 24th Partisan Division, the formation responsible for the attack on the railway in the Leskovac area, had set up his Headquarters and where he finds Johnny Tregida, his liaison officer with the 24th Division. He kips in a courtyard full of Bulgarian prisoners. Next day they ride horses to Leskovac, where the attack on the railway is to take place. Information has found the town packed with German armour and motor transport and so HQ back in Bari had decided to send an unusually heavy fleet of bombers, some 50 Flying Fortresses. Maclean and his partisans watch from a nearby hill as these silver planes from high in the sky unload a huge payload on Leskovac and flatten it.
That night he observes the partisan attacks on the railway line, tackling enemy pillboxes while they set charges to blow up bridges and culverts, then tear up the railway itself and burn the sleepers. The idea is to delay or even trap the German forces in Greece and Yugoslavia, to prevent them being transferred to north Italy and Austria, to make the Allies job in those places easier.
All over occupied Yugoslavia similar attacks take place to destroy communications and bottle up the German forces. They notice enemy planes flying north and suspect they are carrying senior staff officers, communicate this to HQ who undertake attacks of these little convoys which promptly cease.
Maclean rides north to reunite with Boca, and is struck by the lush fertility of the Serb countryside and its rural prosperity, compared to rockier, poorer Bosnia. It’s a long journey over many days and Maclean gives a wonderful impressionistic account of the small villages of whitewashed houses, the locals bringing food, waking up in an orchard of plum trees, and so on. What experiences he had!
News comes through that the Bulgarians are negotiating an armistice and then that they have come in on the Allied side, with the result that Bulgarian forces throughout Yugoslavia switch sides. He meets up with Boca and Partisan headquarters which is itself riding north, now making a convoy.
They enter Prokuplje as liberators and are feted and feasted. He has just rigged up a bath and is having locals boil water when news comes of a German counter-attack, they have to quickly load their belongings and ride out.
He really enjoys life on the move in Serbia, the lush countryside and friendly villagers and wonderful food and so is annoyed when he receives a direct order from General Wilson. Tito has disappeared from Vis and Maclean is to report to the nearest partisan airstrip in order to be flown out of Serbia and find him.
Chapter 16. Grand finale
Tito has disappeared from Vis and his unexplained absence causes quite a bit of resentment among the British who had been entirely funding the partisans and lost good men among their liaison officers. After confirming his absence Maclean returns to Serbia, to hook up with the troops of Peko Dapcevic at Valjevo in time to see it fall to the partisans, helped by British Beaufighters. He finally locates Tito who’s in the Vojvodina and replies equably enough to a letter he sends him.
The second half of the chapter, pages 504 to 514, is devoted to Maclean being in at the liberation of Belgrade, the notable aspects of which are: 1) that the advance and battle are dominated by the Red Army which has crossed the Danube into Serbia – there’s lots of fraternising with Russians so lucky that Maclean speaks fluent Russian and also has received a Russian military medal which he dusts off and pins prominently to his uniform; and 2) the Germans put up a fierce resistance as they retreat, some of which Maclean witnesses at close quarters.
Chapter 17. Who goes home?
A few days after the conquest of Belgrade, Tito flies in and holds a victory march where Maclean is much moved by the ramshackle, dirty, patched-up appearance of the partisans, indicative of years of struggle, living off the land, guerrilla warfare. Now the partisans set about consolidating their grip on power. Tito negotiates a power-sharing deal with Royalists but it is plain this is only a temporary agreement.
On 27 October Maclean has his first meeting with Tito and conveys British irritation at his unexplained disappearance. In fact by this time the mystery has been cleared up because Stalin, at their most recent meeting, had told Churchill that Tito was visiting him in Moscow.
Maclean’s team of officers who had each been assigned to various partisan groups, now assemble in Belgrade and quickly convert themselves to a working British embassy. The last few pages describe this transition of the partisans from wartime guerrillas to peacetime administration. There is still fighting in the north but Tito has settled into the White Palace, Prince Paul’s former residence on the outskirts of the city (p.523). Maclean is still involved in negotiations with the king and royal government in exile, featuring Dr Subasic (who flies to Moscow to get Stalin’s blessing, p.520) which are detailed and complex but ultimately futile, for the partisans are solidly in power, with the numbers, the arms and the organisation to enforce it.
There is a lot of detail about the negotiations which dragged on until early March 1945 (p.530). But for Maclean the glory days of guerrilla warfare and living in the field were over and he asks to be transferred away from Yugoslavia. In mid-March he flies out after 18 months’ very intensive engagement, before the geopolitics and diplomacy get complex and messy. The book ends with his description of getting into the plane, taking off and watching the coastline disappear behind him. He had just turned 34. What an amazing series of adventures to have had by such a young age!
It’s very striking that the book ends with no summary, no conclusions, no Final Thoughts, no analysis of the political situation, let alone a retrospective description of how the war ended, how relations with Russia deteriorated, the start of the Cold War, Yugoslavia’s evolution under Tito’s rule or any of that – nothing, nada.
Maclean restricts himself very consciously to a first-person account of the immediate, of what he saw and thought and said and experienced. He gets on the plane and flies West and it’s over. It’s a very abrupt but totally appropriate ending.
In his father’s footsteps
Very slightly and subtly, Maclean’s father hovers in the background. Once or twice he casually mentions that some of the places he visits in Central Asia were visited by his father 30 years earlier. He enlists in the same regiment as his father. His father fought in the North African desert in the First World War and at some points MacLean passes through some of the same places e.g. Matruh (p.204). Living up to his father’s achievements.
Private school
Maclean’s aristocratic upbringing and bearing are present throughout, in his confidence and savoir vivre, in his practical skills (skiing, camping, hunting and shooting), in his urbane easiness in the company of filthy partisans or prime ministers and kings. Only once or twice does he explicitly refer to his privileged upbringing, but then in the same kind of way that all his generation and class did (the tones collected and defined by Cyril Connolly for so influencing the mindset and writing of the 1930s generations of poets and novelists):
The M.L. arrived that night and I went on board, as excited as a schoolboy going home for his first holidays.
Upper-class chums
A central characteristic of the posh, of aristocrats, of the landed gentry, reinforced by the network of private schools they attend, is that they all know each other, they are all ‘old friends’. Not only that but it only suffices to work with someone for a bit – in the Foreign Office or the Army, say – for them to be recruited into your cohort of ‘old friends’. And so these people move in a kind of gilded world filled with old friends and bonhomie.
And so, leaving them in the able and experienced hands of Jim Thomas, an old friend from Foreign Office days, I went…
In Mrs. Fraser-Tytler I found a fellow clanswoman with whom my friendship dated back to the days of my childhood in Inverness…
It was in this frame of mind that I went to see Rex Leeper, an old friend from Foreign Office days, and now His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Greek Government then in exile in Cairo… (p.278)
One of the sailors I recognized as Sandy Glenn, an old friend with a number of adventurous exploits to his credit… (p.373)
I recognized the work of my old friends Mark Chapman Walker and Hermione Ranfurly, the Commander-in-Chief’s highly efficient Military Assistant and Private Secretary… (p.401)
John Clarke and Andrew Maxwell were both old friends of mine… (p.432)
The problem which had been exercising me for some time, namely, how to get my old friend Sergeant (now Sergeant-Major) Charlie Button into Jugoslavia… (p.435)
Ralph Stevenson…British Ambassador to the Royal Jugoslav Government…was an old friend from Foreign Office days… (p.468)
The example of a partisan they worked with closely – ‘Brko, by now an old friend…’ (p.491) – indicates how it’s not length of time that makes someone an ‘old friend’, but depth of experience and closeness of companionship. Old friends need not, in fact, be old friends at all, just people you’ve gotten to know and trust, sometimes over comparably short periods of time.
This is a quality I commented on in my reviews of John Buchan, whose fabulously posh protagonists are continually bumping into ‘old friends’ whenever they need help. Not being plugged into a network of successful, well-connected ‘old friends’ in commanding positions across politics, business, the forces, the arts, I can only marvel at the ease and confidence with which these privileged creatures lived out their charmed lives. For example, take this profile of David Stirling’s Intelligence Officer, Gordon Alston:
By the time he reached the age of twenty-five Gordon had managed to have a remarkably full life. Having got off to a flying start when he left Eton at seventeen to become a racing motorist in Italy, he had later tried his hand at journalism in France and brewing beer in Germany. Since early in the war he had served in Commandos or Commando-type units. This varied experience had left him with a taste for adventure, a knowledge of foreign languages, and, most conveniently for us, an altogether remarkable flair for military intelligence.
How ripping! A big part of the pleasure of reading books like this is not only all the operational war stuff, but simply marvelling at the wonderfully varied, adventurous lives these privileged people seemed to live.
(And, as a digression, it crosses my mind that it’s the quality whose degraded, shabby, poor relation – a seedy, fake bonhomie – is satirised and ripped to shreds in William Boyd’s comic novel A Good Man in Africa.)
Upper-class manners
Being phenomenally posh, being a polished specimen of the British upper class, gives him the impeccable manners, savoir faire and confidence to meet and socialise with all ranks, from peasants to monarchs. The book invites us into this world, lends us the cloak of his manners and politesse, so that we are not as surprised as we maybe should be when Maclean calmly records being sent to meet the future leader of Yugoslavia, invited to spend the weekend with Churchill or to dine with exiled King Peter. Other countries will continue to have kings and emperors and aristocrats and leaders who reek authority and stickle for etiquette and procedure, so it makes sense that we should have a cohort of impeccably turned-out sophisticates who can match them at their game.
It is a symbol of how far Britain has fallen that the shambling liar Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, embarrassing Britain at international events around the globe purely because Theresa May needed to keep a potential usurper and his faction in the ever-fractious Conservative Party onside. Shaming.
Roughing it
Aristocrats aren’t all floppy haircuts and parties in Chelsea, especially the Scottish variety. Instead, Maclean really loves roughing it, and takes to life on the road in Central Asia or on the run with partisans in the forests of Bosnia with equal alacrity. He likes the simple life.
Having eaten my breakfast, I cleaned out my mess tin and used it for boiling some snow-water on the stove, to shave in. It was an agreeably compact mode of life, with no time, space or energy wasted on unnecessary frills. (p.420)
Time after time he tells us that sleeping rough, bunking down in an orchard wrapped only in his greatcoat and with his backpack for a pillow, eating primitive food in a cave in Bosnia or bully beef in the Libyan Desert, this is what he wants, this is how he likes it, pure and clean and simple.
Lols
Maclean has a dry, understated sense of humour, the true aristocratic drollness, an unflappable ability to put up with discomfort and find the amusing in every situation. The book is studded with a number of comic setpieces.
Our short train journey had an improbable, dreamlike quality, which even while it was actually in progress, made it hard to believe that it was really happening. From the inside, Tito’s special coach was even more like a hut than from the outside, with an open stove in the middle and benches round the wall. The stifling heat of the stove induced sleep. The benches on the other hand were just too narrow to sleep on with any security. On the floor lay Tigger, in a bad temper and snapping at everyone’s ankles. At last, after a great deal of fussing and settling down, he went to sleep, only to be woken again almost immediately by a Cabinet Minister falling off one of the benches on top of him, whereupon pandemonium broke loose. It was not a restful journey… (p.421)
Also the story of the British officer, living and working with the partisans who, wherever he puts his sleeping bag and goes to sleep, always fidgets and ends up rolling yards, sometimes quite a distance away, one time being found wrapped round a tree stump, another time on the edge of a precipice, each time fast asleep and snoring his head off.
An eye for the ladies
There’s no mention of a girlfriend, lovers, no romance and certainly no sex of any kind. It’s part of the book’s tact and discretion. But Maclean does have what we used to call ‘an eye for the ladies’ and permits himself regular mention of particularly toothsome young women whenever he encounters them:
[In Korcula] a small crowd had soon collected to look at us. It included, I noticed with pleasure, one extremely pretty girl., (p.366)
From now onwards [Charlie Button] took charge of the Mission’s administrative arrangements, and ‘Gospodin Charlie’, as he was known, could be seen planning moves, negotiating for pack-horses, bartering strips of parachute silk for honey or eggs with buxom peasant girls… (p.435)
The technicalities involved were explained to me by an officer of the United States Army Signal Corps, while a pretty W.A.C. Sergeant prepared to take a recording of what was said. (p.444)
The Americans furnished me, in case of need, with a stenographer, a blonde young lady of considerable personal attractions wearing a closely fitting tropical uniform… (p.466)
Most of them [the population of the little Serbian town of Dobrovo] were rosy-cheeked, stolid-looking creatures, broad in the beam, with thick arms and legs, but amongst them, I noticed, was one exceptionally pretty girl, slim and dark, with classical features and a clear, pale skin, holding a little curly-haired child by the hand. (p.492)
And many more.
Upper-class tact
A crucial aspect of good manners, as of diplomacy, is tact. As the book progressed I became increasingly aware of the narrative’s tact. What I mean is that he is very discreet and polite about the many individuals named in it. About his army colleagues, first in the SAS then on location in Yugoslavia, he is uniformly full of praise, especially praising those who won medals. He has to use tact when dealing with all manner of Soviet officials and local peasants and brigands in Central Asia. He has to be tactful in his dealings with Tito, and in Yugoslavia has to train his officers in how to interact with the partisans tactfully i.e. show them how to use equipment without insulting their manhood or achievements. (Maclean has some comic stories about illiterate partisans eating various supplies such as plastic explosive, stories echoed in Ben Macintyre’s stories about the French Resistance.)
This quality comes out into the open, as it were, in the various descriptions of Winston Churchill, where Maclean allows himself to mention Churchill’s eccentricities:
at Chequers insisting on spending the evening with senior military staff watching Mickey Mouse cartoons in his private cinema
meeting underlings at his Cairo villa lying in bed in a silk dressing gown smoking a cigar (p.401)
But he only goes exactly to the same point as the common myth of Churchill’s whimsical personal style and no further. He tells humorous anecdotes about people but is never indiscreet. That would be bad form.
Once this had occurred to me I realised you could regard the abrupt ending of the book as itself an act of tactfulness. If he’d gone on to describe events after his departure from Yugoslavia in March 1945 (the final months of the war, conflict with Russia, the Cold War and scores of other issues such as the election defeat of Churchill) it would have stained and muddied the purity of the kind of narrative he wants to tell. Ending his text so abruptly is an aesthetic statement – less is more – and supreme act of tactfulness.
H.G. Wells
Happening to be reading a lot about H.G. Wells at the moment, I was struck when Maclean makes a reference to him, describing the American Lightning aircraft, with their twin tails and bristling cannon, as ‘like something out of H.G. Wells’ (p.393) – presumably he’s referring to Wells’s Edwardian novels about the war in the air, although also, maybe, to his description of apocalyptic war in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ (1933) – either way, testimony to the grip on the popular imagination, about the future and disastrous wars, that Wells continued to exert.
Penguin are pants
I’m reluctant to buy new paperback books because they’re generally such poor quality. This book is a case in point. The typeface was degraded and poor quality on every page. Random words appear in lighter typeface than their neighbours. Random letters within words are partly effaced. Entire lines have either the upper or lower part of the letters distorted. You know when you make a photocopy of a document and position the original badly so that the photocopy misses off one side of the page? Like that, the final parts of letters are cut off all down the right hand side of the text. Some pages are in a different font from the main text (pages 152 to 153).
Precisely 24 hours after it arrived I noticed that, looked at side-on, the middle pages of this brand new book had ceased to lie flat but had become wavy. When I opened to these pages I discovered they were the ones containing half a dozen or so very very very bad quality reproductions of photographs, and something about reproducing these photos in plain ink on normal paper must have somehow made them absorb moisture from the atmosphere and become wrinkled and creased. They look like they’ve been dropped in the bath.
Only occasionally did all this make it impossible to actually read, but these marks of poor quality appeared on every one of the book’s 543 pages and were a constant distraction. They made me think what a mug I was to spend £12.99 on such a shoddy production. Never buy new Penguin books. Very poor print standards.
Credit
Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean was published by Jonathan Cape in 1949. All references are to the 2019 Penguin paperback edition – printed to a very poor standard.
This is, to begin with, a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and then, as it develops, a thoroughly harrowing and upsetting, and then, at the end, some kind of redemptive and redeeming, novel. But whatever the changing subject matter and mood it overflows with old-fashioned pleasures of narrative, character and plot. It fully deserved the prizes it won and its widespread popularity. To cite the facts of its success: it was on the Times bestseller list for four years, has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than 17 languages. It also won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and I’m surprised it didn’t win more.
Overview
It’s set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War and its aftermath. The narrative follows a core handful of characters through:
the golden days of peace (1939 and 1940)
the advent of war i.e. having promised they wouldn’t Italy declares war on Greece (October 1941)
the Greco-Italian war (28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941)
the island’s lazy, peaceful, comic opera occupation by the Italian army from May 1941 to September 1943, with a token presence of the German army which mostly kept itself to itself
the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943 which placed all Italian forces in an ambiguous and confusing position, and triggered the awful massacre by the Germans of every Italian soldier on the island – a total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the resultant, 5,155 were executed, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were accidentally bombed by the Allies: the mass murder is considered a war crime second only to the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn
the period when the island was occupied solely by the German army, hugely more brutal and rapacious than the Italians (September 1943 to October 1944)
the troubled period after ‘liberation’ of the Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949) when, in de Bernières’ view, the Communist forces of ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós – the Greek People’s Liberation Army) behaved with even greater brutality to anyone they considered traitors, bourgeois or just wanted to loot and rape, than the Nazis
Having got to about page 370 and supped deep of horrors, massacres and mutilations, you’d have thought de Bernières would draw this sorry sage to a conclusion but there’s more.
Central characters
For the first hundred pages or so we are introduced to the central characters of a small village not far from the town of Argostóli, on Cephallonia, being:
Dr Iannis, a widower, small, alert, curious wise old bird, who has a gift for healing despite not actually having a medical degree
Iannis’s wife died some time ago (of tuberculosis) so he lives alone with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Pelagia, who has picked up much of her father’s medical knowledge and secretly wishes to become a doctor herself
dodging around is the 6-year-old girl Lemoni who’s always getting into pickles ‘in her capricious and erratic manner’ (p.175) from which Pelagia rescues her
The first hundred or more pages consists of a slow, relaxed and deeply pleasurable introduction to the peacetime life of a Greek town, with its annual festivals described in great detail along with its charmingly picturesque characters, including:
huge local strongman, Velisarios, whose party trick is to pick up mules
Father Arsenios, a fat, roly-poly drunken priest, always sweating like a pig and dogged by his failure to live up to his calling
Kokolios the cartoon communist
Stamatis the cartoon monarchist
This is all hugely enjoyable because it is how we Brits imagine Greek rural life to be. the narrative is peppered with the many sweet and eccentric little incidents in the village and the characters’ reactions to them. Every morning Dr Iannis goes off to the kapheneion to meet up with Kokolios and Stamatis where – being a republican, a monarchist and a communist – they have the same grumpy old arguments, very much like a Greek version of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.
And behind the individual characters and chapters what comes over is the wonderfully urbane, amused, wise and droll attitude of the ‘implied author’ i.e. the authorial voice created by the text. To put it more simply, de Bernières’ voice. His treatment of his characters, his focus on the eccentric and charming, his immense good humour, radiate through every sentence and make it an immensely warming, lovely read.
A narrative of sorts gets going when, during the feast of the island’s saint, Saint Gerasimos, Velisarios does his party trick of holding an enormous heavy Venetian gun while the local kids stuff it with all the junk and rubbish they can find, then he gets someone to light the fuse and holds it while it goes off, a deed which requires staggering strength.
Anyway, on this particular occasion he fires it at the empty end of the street just as the handsome young fisherman Mandras comes round the corner. He isn’t badly injured but is taken to the house of Dr Iannis where he comes round to find the beautiful face of Pelagia looking down on him and promptly falls in love.
This Mandras proceeds to hang around the doctor’s house, continually bringing them offerings of fish for Pelagia to cook, until one day he’s fooling around in a tree and falls out, landing on an urn below and getting loads of shards of terracotta stuck in his bum, an absurdity which endears him even more to Pelagia.
On one occasion Pelagia goes down to the sea and not only sees Mandras setting out his nets to catch whitebait naked – i.e. sees what a dazzlingly lithe, fit young body he has – but is then astonished to see him whistle to three tame dolphins and allow himself to be pulled out to sea holding their fins.
Mandras’s mother is Drosoula, a strikingly ugly woman whose bad looks everyone forgets after a few moments in her company because of her warm nature. (On one occasion Drosoula tells Pelagia she only secured a husband because he had ‘unusual desires’ which she was prepared to satisfy – sodomy?).
Anyway that gives you a flavour of the charming and gently amusing first 100 pages or so.
A chapter per character
I haven’t yet mentioned the key ‘formal’ aspect of the novel, which is that each chapter represents the point of view and voice of a different character. The chapters are relatively short (5 or 6 pages) and each time you start a new one, you know it will be a new character and a new point of view.
In fact the chapters come in (at least) two flavours. First of all, there are chapters where the narrative is told by a third-person narrator but with a strong leaning towards a specific character’s point of view. The character in question is usually indicated in the first sentence if not in the very first words, making it pretty easy to understand and orient yourself:
Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse… (first words of the novel)
Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis… (p.36)
Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder… (p.127)
The second kind of chapters are those told from a first person point of view, which I’ll elaborate below.
Politicians
What this technique allows de Bernières to do with tremendous effectiveness is cut between scenes and settings: it allows him to move the story along without having to set scenes each time; he can just cut away to a new character in a new setting in a very effective, filmic kind of way. Thus although the book is quite long, and very packed with text, it feels relatively light because you can just take it one bite-sized scene at a time.
In the early parts, the most striking use of this technique is when he cuts away from the idyllic island altogether to give us entire chapters devoted to the international statesmen responsible for running affairs in the early 1940s.
Thus we get chapters taking us into the mind of the Greek leader, Ioannis Metaxas, a Greek attempt at the kind of strongman leader typified by Hitler and Mussolini. The chapter devoted to him reveals a man who is browbeaten by international events and defeated by his disreputable daughter, Lulu.
But it’s also in these chapters that we get the first use of the other type of narrative, first-person narratives. The most recurring of these first person narratives is, unexpectedly, by a hulking Italian soldier who is in fact a repressed homosexual, and who, indeed, appears in chapters titled (all the chapters have titles) ‘L’Omosessuale’. Like the third-person chapters and to make it pretty simple and clear, the protagonist of these first-person chapters tends to be introduced in the first sentence:
I, Carlo Piero Guercio, write these words with the intention that they should be found after my death… (p.22)
This touchingly sweet, gentle giant and his inexpressible homosexual yearnings turn out to be a major thread running through the whole narrative.
At the furthest extreme of this spectrum is the sole chapter in which we hear the non-stop speech of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, chapter 2 given as a Joycean monologue. It’s only seven and a half pages long but it is priceless, wonderfully conveying Il Duce’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, his vanity, his posing, combined with his madcap military schemes and would-be clever-clever ruses. He comes over as a dangerous idiot but is brilliantly conveyed and satirised. Just this one chapter could be presented as a hilarious short story or short prose text standing by itself.
Captain Antonio Corelli
So that’s a summary of all the elements of the text, namely ten or so characters on the island of Cephallonia, the Greek Prime Minister, the Italian dictator, an Italian soldier, plus a few other characters, so what happens?
What happens is the novel covers the true historical events leading up to and then during the Greco–Italian War of 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941; which was followed by the German invasion and conquest of Greece in the summer of 1941, and the occupation of Greek territories by German and Italian forces. We follow our cadre of characters through several years of occupation up till armistice made between the Italian government and the Allies in September 1943, at which point the German army was ordered to regard their erstwhile allies, the Italians, as enemies, with the result that they rounded them up and massacred them.
These are the high-level historical events which provide the backdrop to developments among the characters we’ve slowly got to know on the island of Cephallonia. So who is Captain Corelli?
Well, from a technical point of view it’s interesting that Corelli only turns up on page 157 i.e. a little over a third of the way through the text. Corelli is a handsome, charming, charismatic Italian officer who inspires love and affection in his men and finds himself billeted on Dr Iannis and Pelagia with, as they say, comic and romantic consequences. Oh and he plays the mandolin which he takes everywhere with him (and which he calls ‘Antonia’) because he is a music lover and also to charm the ladies.
Detailed plot summary by chapter
1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated
Introduces us to humane and humorous Dr Iannis as he removes the dry pea lodged in the ear of his friend Stamatis then returns home to carry on composing his ‘New History of Cephallonia’, an ongoing project which allows de Bernières to fill in the backstory of Greek and Cephallonian history. And introduces his humorous, chiding daughter, Pelagia, 17 years old (p.19).
2. The Duce
Rome. The hilarious chapter given as the free-associating, idiotic ranting of Mussolini to secretaries and underlings and introduces his illogical reasons for declaring war on Greece – i.e. it will make Italy look strong, put him up in the same league as Hitler, the war will only last a few weeks etc.
3. The Strongman
Introduces us, first, to Alekos, a goatherd who lives high up on Mount Aenos and who will, from time to time, cast a cold, detached, uninvolved eye on events down n the plains. But the chapter is titled after Megalo Velisarios, the famous strongman. We also meet the cheeky little girl, Lemoni, who’s constantly getting into mischief. And fat waddling Father Arsenios who waddles into the square as Velisarios is entertaining the crowds and who Velisarios picks up and places on a wall to great cheers and Arsenios’s mortification. Velisarios fires the ancient (1739) Turkish culverin and accidentally hits Mandras the fisherman coming round the corner (the wound is caused by an old donkey nail). So Velisarios carries the wounded boy to Dr Iannis’s house where he first meets Pelagia.
4. L’Omosessuale (1)
First person account by the Italian Carlo Piero Guercio, a sensitive man tortured by his homosexuality:
I am exploding with the fire of love and there is no one to accept it or nourish it. (p.23)
He joins the Italian Army to be among men and escape conventional expectations. In a novel full of good things this sensitive portrayal of a vexed homosexual is one of the best.
5. The Man who Said ‘No’
Third person account of authoritarian Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas (1871 to 1941) in which he surveys the course of political events which brought him to power, his motivation for enforcing an authoritarian form of rule, to befriend Hitler and Mussolini and his dawning realisation that they are about to betray him and invade his country (‘Why had his international brothers betrayed him?’ p.29). Interspersed with rueful regrets about his wayward daughter, Lulu. All building up to his decision to say NO to Mussolini’s bullying ultimatum.
6. L’Omosessuale (2)
Guercio describes being a member of the Italian Julia Division sent to fight in Albania.
No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. (p.31)
The joy of being among young, beautiful, virile comrades. Unfortunately, he learns from bitter experience that the Italian chain of command is an inept joke, led by the idiot Mussolini, with the result that there isn’t enough support, organisation, arms, equipment or winter uniforms. He falls in love with a young married corporal from Genoa named Francesco (p.34) but becomes disgusted by the squalid lies and deceptions imposed on the Army and the public to justify Italy’s invasion of Albania.
The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom April 7 to 12, 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighbouring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown. (Wikipedia)
7. Extreme Remedies
Father Arsenios is at the back of the church and feeling sorry for himself for being a fat, useless, vice-ridden priests when he realises villagers are coming to leave gifts in the main body of the church, to apologise for the indignity he suffered when the strongman, Velarios, picked him up and place him atop a wall to general laughter. There follows a comic scene where Arsenios, dying for a pee, can’t bring himself to exit through the church and be seen by everybody (there is no toilet in the church) so he employs the desperate remedy of drinking one of the bottles of wine brought for him so as to have a receptacle to pee in. He does this several times with the result that he is completely plasters and lying in a pool of his own piss by the time that Velisarios comes to apologise in person.
Velisarios carries the unconscious priest to the house of Dr Iannis who forces him to drink vast amounts of water. Then Iannis is visited by Stamatis, whose ear he unblocked and now comes comically complaining that for the first time in decades he can hear his wife’s endless nagging and asks if the doctor can put the pea back in his ear.
8. A Funny Kind of Cat
Dr Iannis departs for the kapheneion to meet his friends Stamatis and Kokolios the communist for their daily argument. But the little girl Lemoni begs him to come and see the funny kind of cat she’s found deep in a labyrinth of brambles. Undignifiedly crawling on his hands and knees the doctor discovers it is a pine marten caught on wire and carefully detaches it.
Dr Iannis takes it back to his house to treat where, incidentally, Mandras is still laid up with his ‘wound’ and still flirting like mad with Pelagia, who he has just kissed. Iannis contemplates simply snapping the marten’s neck but then is overcome by humane sympathy and instructs his daughter to being straw and dead mice. He’s going to nurse it back to health.
9. August 15, 1940
Dr Iannis returns to the kapheneion encountering Lemoni on the way who is taunting a dog with a stick. She tells him she has decided to call ‘the strange kind of cat’ Psipsina (apparently this is a common Greek word meaning something like ‘puss’, p.374). Back drinking coffee with his mates a good hearty political argument swiftly ensures, with the communist Kokolios telling everyone they’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes etc. In casual conversation Iannis delivers what might be the central message of the entire novel:
‘We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.’ (p.52)
As usual, the menfolk gather round an old radio set to listen to the BBC news and learn the latest (Churchill has allied with the free French, there’s been another Albanian revolt against Italian occupation).
Pelagia runs in to inform him that Mandras was fooling about in the olive tree in their yard and fell out of it and landed on his bottom on a terracotta pot. His buttocks are packed with shards and bleeding. Iannis has to rush home and spend hours with Mandras lying with his pants down on the kitchen table, while he carefully extracts every fragment (later commenting that Mandras has: ‘the arse of a classical statue, a very fine arse,’ p.69).
When Iannis returns to the kapheneion for the third time it is to find an extraordinary change in atmosphere. Martial music is playing on the radio, both his friends are weeping and the priest is striding up and down declaiming from the Old Testament. They’ve just heard that the Italians have sunk a Greek battleship, the Elli while it was anchored in the harbour at Tinos, participating in the celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (sinking of the cruiser Elli). Everyone in the café knows this has brought the possibility of war closer.
10. L’Omosessuale (3)
Guercio and Francesco are chosen for a mission by their officer Colonel Rivolta (p.58). They are to dress in Greek uniform and make an attack on an outpost of what they are told are Greeks masquerading as Italians. When they dress up and sneak up to this border post they realise a) the guns they’ve been given don’t work and b) the Italians really are Italians and c) there are many more of them than they were told and they are expecting them. In other words they’ve been conned into doing one of those ‘border incidents’ which cynical leaders throughout the twentieth century used to justify wars.
In the event they arrive early (at midnight not 2am) discover a big drum of kerosene under the tower and set it alight, causing panic in the tower at which point they open fire with a machine gun massacring the men in the tower. It’s only when one of them falls out of the tower and they recognise him as a fellow Italian that the full depth of the deception dawns on them.
11. Pelagia and Mandras
These two beautiful young people fall in love. The chapter contains a slight formal innovation which is that it contains alternating sections describing first Pelagia and then Mandras’s points of view as they: have a poo in the outhouse and worry about menstruating (Pelagia); load nets onto a boat (Mandras); draw water from a well (Pelagia); sings to his tame dolphins (Mandras). Mandras is given a little speech typifying the motivation of so many men to go to war, to prove themselves a man etc.
I know I will never be a man until I’ve done something important, something great, something I can live with, something to be esteemed. That’s why I hope there’s going to be a war. I don’t want bloodshed and glory, I want something to get to grips with. No man is a man until he’s been a soldier. (p.68)
It’s also tied up with marriage. He envisions going down on one knee and proposing to Pelagia. Pelagia thinks adoringly of the way Mandras now arrives every late afternoon with a gift of fish which she cooks and he sits at the table being polite to her father and rubbing her shin with his foot.
12. All the Saint’s Miracles
An extended and wonderful description of the feast of the local saint, St Gerasimos, with stories of his wonderful miracles. the chapter focuses in on inmates from the local lunatic asylum who have been brought to join the crowds watching the procession of the saint’s mummified body, notably Socrates and Mina. Mandras gets drunk and proposes to Pelagia (p.80) before drinking more and passing out. The day continues on into the evening which is a time of wild partying, music and celebration.
13. Delirium
Mandras doesn’t come for two days and Pelagia is reduced to agonies of worry. Lots of stuff about what traditional marriage meant for a Greek woman back then i.e. consigned to a life of endless labour and childbearing but arguably better than the fates of spinsters and widows.
This is why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. (p.86)
As in the description of the delusions of the madwoman Mina, so throughout his characterisation of Pelagia, de Bernières displays a supernatural level of insight and understanding. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not only deeply pleasurable to read but deeply instructive, too.
On a typically warm and beautiful evening the doctor and his daughter sit outside looking at the stars, thinking about the future. She is fantasising about married life with Mandras until her father gives her a small pistol, warning that war is coming and in war bad things happen to women i.e. rape. She will use this gun only once, and with deep irony, in chapter 63.
The next day is the day when Pelagia goes down to the seashore and stumbles across Mandras, naked, setting his nets then going frolicking with his tame dolphins and is dazzled by the perfection of his young body (p.89).
14. Grazzi
Despite the picture postcard charm of all these village scenes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a historical novel and contains descriptions of, and even soliloquies by, real historical figures. After the chapters devoted to Mussolini and Metaxas we have this one, told in the first-person by Emanuele Grazzi, Italian ambassador to Greece during World War II, who was given the shameful job of delivering Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas on 28 October 1940. Grazzi’s account gives a vivid sense of the incompetence, bad faith and lies of the Italian government which told neither its Army Chief of Staff nor ambassador that they were about to go to war with Greece, operating on Mussolini’s idea of taking everyone by surprise – which just ended up covering everyone in shameful dishonour.
15. L’Omosessuale (4)
Guercio and Francesco keep quiet about the farce they were involved in and are sent to train Albanian guerrillas who they discover to be unreliable lying thieving murderers (p.98). Guercio then goes on to give a vivid description of the chaos and mismanagement of the Italian invasion from Albania into northern Greece, the lack of ammunition, transport, air cover, the right equipment or uniforms for the freezing mountain tops, pages 99 to 104.
Incidentally, in among the memoirs he describes himself as he currently is i.e. sunning himself on the peaceful island of Caphallonia and, on page 100, makes the first reference n the novel to Captain Corelli:
a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.
16. Letters to Mandras at the Front
Italy and Greece are now at war. These are detailed, worried missives from Pelagia, increasingly begging for some kind of response. What she doesn’t know is that Mandras can’t write (p.130). She describes the inhabitants of their village rallying round to support the war effort and how everyone thinks Metaxas is a hero for standing up to the bully Duce. She describes an outbreak of fortune telling because Mandra isn’t the only son who’s been conscripted and sent to the front – hundreds of families have sent their main earners and supports to the war. She describes the beating up of some unfortunate Italians who live among them:
Why are people such animals? (p.107)
Because dear 17-year-old Pelagia, people are in fact animals, just another species of animals among the 1.2 million species so far identified by scientists. Everything your teachers and priests and leaders told you about humans not being part of the natural world, about our special soul given us by a loving God, was lies which left you completely unprepared for the world as it is and human beings as they are, and so asking such soppy, pointless questions.
Food is becoming short so Christmas Day 1940 wasn’t its usual festive celebration. On Christmas Day the Italians bombed Corfu, the bastards. de Bernières only gives us a selection three (fairly long) letters but the last one states that she has written one hundred letters to Mandras and is becoming frustrated and disillusioned at his lack of reply.
17. L’Omosessuale (5)
Continuation of Guercio’s account of the Greco-Italian War, piling detail on detail of Italy’s mind-boggling incompetence and the bravery, ferocity and effectiveness of the Greek counter-attack which drives the Italians right back to their starting points and then further back.
18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis
Pelagia sinks into a deep depression from which the doctor seeks to rescue her by various ruses like rearranging utensils or stealing stuff from the kitchen, anything to provoke anger and get her out of her mood. War is producing a shortage of medical supplies. He soldiers on with his history of Cephallonia, describing the brutality of the Balkans, crossroads between East and West, and the indolent pederasty of Turkish rulers.
19. L’Omosessuale (6)
Another little formal experiment or piece of playfulness. De Bernières gives a description of Francesco’s miserable death (half his face blown off by a mortar) in the form of an interview Guercio has with his beloved’s mother whereby Guercio tells her heroic patriotic lies, and each of his lies is offset by a long passage in parentheses describing what really happened, in those freezing, lice-infected trenches.
It ends by explaining how the Italians had, to all intents and purposes, lost to the Greeks when the Germans intervened, invading from Bulgaria in the East and opening up a second front which the Greeks couldn’t defend, especially since the Germans sent in 1,100 Panzer tanks against the Greeks 200 light tanks (many taken from the useless Italians).
20. The Wild Man of the Ice
One day Pelagia returns from the well to discover a wreck of man, covered in hair and beard, dressed in animal skins with red eyes and sunburned skin, infested with lice, sitting at her table. She is terrified and it takes several pages of scared enquiry before she eventually realises it’s Mandras back from the front in terrible state, having dodged the Germans and walked hundreds of miles.
21. Pelagia’s First Patient
Shrewdly, Pelagia co-opts Mandras’s mother, Drosoula, herself one of the million Greeks who were ethnically cleansed i.e. deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey after the First Word War. Together they strip and set about healing this broken skinny wreck of a man. Long gone is his god-like arse. De Bernières gives a vivid and extensive catalogue of Mandras’s appalling symptoms (worms, parasites, ticks, fleas, ezcema, gangrene) and shows Pelagia treating them all efficiently. Drosoula is impressed.
‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ (p.138)
Dr Iannis had been up in the mountains checking Alekos and his herd of goats (who are always in perfect health). Now, upon his return, he is astonished to discover a huge ugly woman sleeping with Pelagia in his bed, and an emaciated malnourished man sleeping in Pelagia’s. When he listens to the detail of her treatment he is extravagantly proud of his daughter.
22. Mandras behind the Veil
A monologue from Mandras who resents how he is ignored in the Iannis house and realises Pelagia is horrified by him. This is a bitter pill since it was only a hallucinatory determination to get back to Cephallonia and see her again which kept him going after his entire unit was wiped out and he set off on the huge treks through ice and snow and mountains and forests and seas to reach her.
His account includes the magnificently mad episode of him coming across a stone hovel and lying down to sleep, only to be woken by an incredibly ugly old crone with only one eye. She feeds him and he starts to recover a bit but on the third night has a sex dream in which he imagines he’s sleeping with Pelagia but wakes up to discover it is the withered old hag writhing under him.
‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. (p.144)
I thought this was inspired in its mocking lunacy, and captured the insanity of the war, and of human existence, in one magnificently grotesque image.
I laid back down next to her and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.
Exactly. If there is a God and he claims to love the human race, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Mandras tells us that the disillusionment of his reception by Pelagia has been absolute. Now he just wants to return to the front to fight.
23. April 30, 1941
On 6 April 1941, the German Army, supported by Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler launched the assault in order to overthrow the recently established pro-Allied government in Yugoslavia and to support the stalling Italian invasion of Greece. By 30 April the Germans had taken Athens and the Greek king and government had fled to Crete.
There is a hiatus on the island as people wait to see what will happen. They prepare for death or rape. The priest curses God for letting this happen. The doctor starts reading up in his ancient medical textbook, ‘The Complete and Concise Home Doctor’, about wounds.
Mandras is mentally disturbed. Back staying with his mother, he withdraws into himself, except for sudden moments of lucid normality, such as when he joins the celebrations on National Day, 31 March, and Easter on 19 April. Other times he rants and raves. he tells the priest his legs are made of glass. He tries to amputate on with a spoon. He shouts at Pelagia. In one scene he makes her read every one of the 100 plus letters she sent him, humiliating her by pointing out how they got slowly shorter and shorter until in the final ones she asked him to call off the betrothal. Pelagia realises with anguish that she now hates Mandras.
At that moment the Italian invasion starts. Planes fly overhead and landing craft beach and disembark thousands of Italian troops. The islanders are surprised at how diffident and polite they are. At the head of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery of the Acqui Division marches Captain Antonio Corelli, the first time we’ve seen him, so to speak, page 157. He confirms everyone’s stereotypes of Italian men by spotting Pelagia and instructing his men to turn eyes right in order to appreciate the ‘bella bambina’. One soldier does a goose-stepping impersonation of Hitler. Another walks like Charlie Chaplin. Dr Iannis tells Pelagia not to laugh, they are the enemy.
24. A Most Ungracious Surrender
Back to the first person narrative of Carlo Piero Guercio who, for some reason, has stopped being referred to as l’omosesualle. He explains how he was posted to the 33rd regiment in May and how Corelli became a kind of saint to him (p.159). Origin of La Scala club, a group of Italian soldiers who all went to the latrine together and covered up their lavatorial sounds by singing opera (p.160). He receives typically whimsical instructions from the head of La Scala, Corelli, for example rule 4 is that all aficionados of Wagner to be shot out of hand.
He tells the story of the ungracious surrender, namely that the Italian CO and officers marched to the Cephallonia town hall and sent in messages demanding a surrender to which the reply was ‘fuck off’. The Greek authorities said they had defeated the Italian army and refused to surrender except to a German officer so one had to be flown in specially from Corfu.
25. Resistance
The islanders’ response to occupation e.g. graffiti, insubordination and jokes (‘Why do Italians wear moustaches? To be reminded of their mothers.’) A quartermaster arrives to tell Iannis and Pelagia an officer is going to be billeted on them. Iannis gruffly agrees so long as the quartermaster can get him medical supplies. The officer turns out to be Corelli who is driven up by Bombardier Guercio. He is charming and humorous from the start but it is a joy to watch him being steadily put in his place by the doctor and Pelagia who confuse and embarrass him, humiliation doubled when the doctor diagnoses him as having hemorrhoids and then assigns him Pelagia’s bedroom (Pelagia will sleep on the kitchen floor) which destroys Corelli’s sense of himself as a gallant gentleman.
Corelli shyly reveals to them that he plays the mandolin. He joined the army when there was no war and it was a way to get paid for lazing around. That night there’s a scream and he comes running from the bedroom because the pine marten routinely sleeps on Pelagia’s bed and bit him.
26. Sharp Edges
The truck Guercio’s driving to collect Corelli breaks down. Walking, Guercio encounters Velisario, two hulking giants of men who cannot communicate but offer each other cigarettes, nod before going their ways. Velisario comes across the broken down truck, gets a friend, steals the wheels and pours petrol in the radiator.
Corelli is his usual charming self and chats merrily with the little girl Lemoni. When Pelagia breaks them up he asks why and it’s Pelagia’s turn to feel unworthy. These little domestic events and their psychological consequences are so wonderfully done, so real and vivid.
Mandras surprises her by appearing silently. Their every meeting is awkward now. He makes a joke which offends her. She gives him the waistcoat she sewed for him but his first comment is that the pattern is asymmetrical (p.177).
Mandras announces he is leaving now to return to the fight. The army is over but there are partisans in the mountains. Pelagia tells him that every time he is about to do something bad, he is to stop, think of her, and not do it. They hug like brother and sister. Their love is over. Then he walks away.
That evening Corelli finds the hand-made waistcoat on the back of a chair, marvels at its craftsmanship and says he will pay Pelagia anything for it but she insists it’s not for sale.
27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert
Next morning Corelli wakens Pelagia by practicing his mandolin in his/her bedroom. She had been dreaming about the afternoon before when Corelli had arrived on a horse and managed to make it caracole. Corelli explains the structure of a mandolin, how to play it and why he switched to it from the violin which he was useless at. His playing enchants her (p.186). That evening Corelli agrees to perform for the doctor but irritates him by merely tapping the instrument till Iannis loses his temper and makes an outburst. Offended, Corelli explains that he’s playing Hummel’s concerto for mandolin and was tapping out the first 45 bars before the mandolin enters. And now he’s made him lose his place!
28. Liberating the Masses (1)
Describes Mandras’s career as an andarte i.e. partisan. By chance he falls in with the ELAS, the communist group. The resistance is being led by British officers parachuted in to organise and direct assaults, in this case a Brigadier Myers (p.190) who warns his superiors that a lot of their arms are going to communists and storing up trouble for the future (i.e. the post-war civil war).
Anyway, by chance Mandras falls in with a troop of ELAS led by pitiless martinet Hector, wearing his trademark red fez. He is broken in by being led to a village where they drag out a harmless old man, make him kneel then brutally beat his back with a knout before shooting him in the head. His crime? Not reporting a British parachute drop of supplies to ELAS, pilfering a bottle of scotch from it and being found unconscious under the parachute.
Hector makes it quite clear they are going to liberate the people by killing a lot of traitors, royalists, bourgeoisie, lackeys, saboteurs and so on. He is fluent in the death speak of Stalinism. It becomes just as clear that de Bernières loathes and despises the communists.
29. Etiquette
Joke chapter in which Corelli, embarrassed by his inability to communicate with the locals asks for basic phrases from the doctor who waggishly tells him phrases to formally greet all the Greeks he meets which, in reality, mean ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’ (p.196).
30. The Good Nazi (1)
Historical background to the two towns of Argostoli and Lixouri, with explanation that the Italians garrisoned the former and the Germans the latter. Hitler didn’t trust the Italians an inch and sent to Cephallonia 3,000 Germans of the 996th Regiment under Colonel Barge, who were to carry out one of the war’s worst crimes.
One of these is young Leutnant Günter Weber, humourless, obedient, only free when he takes his uniform off at the beach. He is there when the Italians roll up in lorries along with a load of whores shipped there from Libya and much preferring relaxed Greece. They merrily strip off and splash about in the sea to the horror of conservative peasants. Weber is 22, a virgin and has never seen a naked woman before.
Correli introduces himself and when he asks whether Weber is any relation to the German Romantic composer Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the son of a pastor in the Tyrol and knows nothing about culture. In the event, they get him drunk, the whores flirt with him, they throw him in the sea, and manage to break down his prim reserves. He becomes an honorary member of the La Scala club.
31. A Problem with Eyes
Two months go by and Pelagia does everything she can to discomfit the captain, almost always spilling food on his uniform when she serves it. She prepares a great speech of outrage at being occupied but somehow never finds the moment to deliver it. He leaves his pistol lying around and then catches her red-handed dunking it in a bowl of water to as to render it inoperative.
Infuriated by his unflappable good humour and manners Pelagia slaps him then throws unripe olives from the tree at him. More months go by and he becomes a fixture. She finds herself looking forward to his morning greeting and then becoming a little concerned if he’s later than usual coming back from the barracks.
He spends his time doing vast amounts of paperwork, or writing music and plucking the mandolin and sometimes watching her crochet. They begin to realise they’re looking at each other and eventually having a childish staring competition which Corelli wins with much laughter. Dr Iannis realises his daughter is falling in love with the enemy occupier.
32. Liberating the Masses (2)
These chapters are about the cruel and heartless communist Hector and his indoctrination of the uneducated lost soul, Mandras. Mandras learns to intimidate the peasants to steal from them, which is fine because Hector dismisses them all as Royalists, petit-bourgeois sympathisers, republicans etc.
33. A Problem with Hands
One dark night the doctor, Pelagia and Corelli are all in the living room, the latter composing music on sheet music paper. Pelagia walks over to look and places her hand on his shoulder as if it’s the most natural thing in the world until she realises what she’s doing and is then crippled by self consciousness. Luckily at that moment Psipsina scratches at the door and Pelagia lets her in from the storm outside and the marten promptly sits on Corelli’s lap make it water-soaked. Pelagia laughs and scoops the marten off his lap then starts to wipe it down, but when Corelli looks into her face she realises the sexual overtones of what she’s doing and straightens up with scorn.
This sets him fantasising, for some reason remembering that Vivaldi taught at a convent full of young women and suddenly Corelli is imagining loads of nubile girls pressing up against him and kissing and caressing him. He now has a prominent erection sticking up through his trousers and when Pelagia calls him to help her with her wind her wool he can’t stand up without revealing it so he makes a big performance of pretending to be a dog and going across to her on all fours which, of course, makes her smile, and they flirt and banter some more. The doctor sighs.
34. Liberating the Masses (3)
Hector is summoned to the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers to be given a bollocking. Nobody had warned Myers that he would be spending 90% of his time trying to stop the Greeks being at one another’s throats (p.217). He finds Hector double dealing, dishonest and barbarous, meaning given to torturing and killing any peasants who don’t give him what he wants. Myers gives details of how Hector and his group torture peasants, gouge out their eyes and slit their throats. He knows Hector and his like don’t pay the peasants with the money the British give them a) because they’re greedy b) because they’re storing it up to fund the coming revolution.
Mind you, de Bernières is happy to take the mickey out of the Brits, who are routinely portrayed as upper class twits: ‘Top hole explosion, Absolutely ripping!’ Bertie Wooster meets the Greek communist partisans.
35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’
A satirical pamphlet which takes eight pages to rip the piss out of the intellectual pygmy, liar, coward and rapist, Mussolini. At the very end of the book we learn that it was written by Carlo and Dr Iannis (p.424).
36. Education
Back with Hector and the partisans, showing that most of his group are thoroughly disillusioned: all they do is loot peasants and avoid any attacks on Germans, leaving everyone else to fight the war. This chapter is another exercise in style because it consists of a brilliant pastiche of a speech by a communist saturated with the self-serving rhetoric and justification for every kind of iniquity characteristic of communist ideology. Compare and contrast the revolting cowardly criminal communists described in Evelyn Waugh’s war novel Unconditional Surrender.
37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense
Carlo and the doctor come across Corelli reading the pamphlet quoted in chapter 35, leaping up and hurriedly tearing it in two. But this leads into debate about who wrote it, whether it was an Italian or a Greek and Pelagia, clever woman that she is, begins to speculate out loud that it might have been written by a Greek who was fluent in Italian, had access to BBC broadcasts, and someone who cold distribute it around the island when…she notices her father and Carlo both shuffling in embarrassment and concern. My God – it’s them! And her burbling nearly gave it away to Corelli. She goes inside to prepare dinner.
38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March
It’s the morning after Corelli returned to the house disgustingly drunk, declared his love for her, fell over and was sick. Now he has a crushing hangover and is crushed with embarrassment at his behaviour while Pelagia pours him cold water and berates him. His excuse is his battery’s football team won last night, but she says Weber has been by to explain that the Italians cheated.
While she stands there berating him, into Corelli’s head comes the theme and rhythm for a march which he will compose on the mandolin and write down, hence ‘Pelagia’s March’.
39. Arsenios
The war is the making of Father Arsenios. He quits his parish and takes to walking the length and breadth of the island preaching against the invader and iniquity and the fast-coming arrival of God’s wrath. He is cared for by nuns and monks at monasteries where he stops and by the peasants who feed the itinerant monk and the Italian soldiers enjoy his regular visits and obvious sincerity even though none of them can understand a word. For two years he tramps the length and breadth of the island, burning off his obese bulk, becoming thin and wiry and brown as teak.
40. A Problem with Lips
Short chapter in which Pelagia is passing out of the house as Corelli comes in and she finds herself absent-mindedly kissing him on the cheek. it’s only a few paces later that she realises what she’s done and then tries to furiously back peddle, claiming she though Corelli was her father, a mistake Corelli mocks by saying yes, they are both old and small. Then he throws himself on his knees and makes a comic opera declaration of love, before kissing her on the forehead and running off before she can slap him.
41. Snails
The three adults, Iannis, Pelagia and Corelli, go snail hunting led to a particularly rich briar patch by the ever-inquisitive girl Lemoni. Here Pelagia manages to scratch herself on a bramble then get her hair caught and Corelli can only unravel it by leaning in very close. He takes advantage to kiss her cheek. Suddenly Pelagia bursts into tears. When he asks why she says she can’t take it any more, any of it. He agrees and suddenly they are locked in their first embrace of long passionate kisses.
42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin
For the first time we go inside the mind of Corelli in a first-person chapter devoted to his thoughts which are, predictably enough, all fantasies about Pelagia, some sexual about her breasts and so on, but mostly lovely scenarios or fantasy scenes or thinking of her actions in terms of musical chords, different moods reflected by different chords, which build together to make Pelagia’s March which he is writing.
43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball
The adults are in the fiddly process of preparing the snails for cooking when the never-mischievous Lemoni comes to the house to announce that she has discovered a big rusty ball on the beach. Carlo and Corelli both realise from her description that it’s a mine, the floating kind used for attacking ships, which has washed ashore.
This longish chapter describes their attempts to clear the villagers out of the way and blow it up safely. In this Corelli is hampered by an officious engineer who tells him all his preparations are inadequate. Corelli gets Stamatis and Kokolios to dig a trench in the sand just 50 metres away and the engineer mocks this. In the event the entire town turns out to watch, shooed away to the safety of the clifftops, while Corelli’s bombardiers have rigged up a small explosive charge underneath the mine and wires leading to a detonator in his little trench.
When he detonates it, sure enough, it goes off with a much vaster explosion than anyone had expected, sending a vast amount of sand mixed with shards of red hot metal flying high into the sky and then raining down on the locals lying flat along the clifftop. This is actually really dangerous and the busy little engineer is decapitated by a red hot piece of shrapnel while other locals are more or less badly burned by the rain of hot metal stinging like hornets (p.260).
Concerned for Corelli, Pelagia leads the charge down to the beach but it’s Carlo who finds Corelli’s trench obliterated and takes a moment before he sees the captain, who was seized in the blast, thrown into the air, dumped back down and covered with sand. He’s mostly alright but is deaf for two days afterwards and suffers periodic tinnitus for the rest of his life. The doctor is infuriated when a small army of people covered in sand with black eyes and cuts all over, presents itself at his house.
Corelli is nearly put on a charge by the Italian Commanding Officer, General Gandin, of whom more below. But he is bedbound at Iannis’s for days and revels in the attention he gets from Pelagia, Carlo and even Lemoni. Even friend Weber brings his wind-up gramophone round and tries to teach him German popular songs.
But he’s even more infuriated to discover that his house is completely infested with snails, these being the hundreds of snails Corelli and Pelagia and Lemoni brought back from their snail hunt which have escaped from their buckets and had all day to ooze themselves into every nook of the house. Charming comedy.
44. Theft
Kokolios discovers two Italian soldiers trying to steal his chickens. This bear of a man grabs them, beats and kicks them and drags them along to Dr Iannis’s house where he wakes up the household and presents them to Captain Corelli for discipline. Corelli goes inside and returns with his pistol and for a horrible moment Pelagia thinks he is going to shoot Kokolios. Instead he points it at the soldiers and, to their amazement, tells them to get down on their hands and knees and lick Kokolios’s boots. Which they do, after he’s threatened and kicked and pistol-whipped them.
At which point Kokolios realises he is stark naked (apart from his boots), suddenly covers his privates, and goes running off. Comedy. Two days later Pelagia’s beloved goat, who she has been feeding and grooming, her consolation in many an emotional drama, has gone missing. She is furious with Corelli, blaming his soldiers and he can only hang his head.
45. A Time of Innocence
Corelli and Pelagia become lovers in the old-fashioned sense, they ‘walk out’ together, kiss and cuddle but have nothing like sex. There is no contraception and Pelagia has seen too many girls her age either shamed by single motherhood or dying after botched abortions.
Weber gifts the captain an old Wehrmacht motorcycle which had broken down, in exchange for Italian rations. Corelli turns up on it and amazes Pelagia. They proceed to have mad adventures biking all round the island, specially when he takes corners too fast and ends up wildly going down side tracks, or when she leans the wrong way on corners.
This allows them to motor to places where Pelagia won’t be seen or recognised (death in such a conservative culture) and then they find a disused shepherd’s hit which becomes a safe place for them to lie and canoodle for hours (p.269).
All their talk is fantasies about what wonderful lives they’ll lead ‘after the war’.
46. Bunnios
Up on Mount Aenos the isolated goatherd Alekos hears a plane booming overhead and then watches a white circle fall from the sky. In his simplicity he thinks it is an angel but it is, of course, a British officer being parachuted in. This officer whacks his head on a rock and required a) untangling from his parachute and then b) days of careful feeding and care.
This is one of the comedy posh Brits who crop up throughout the story. ‘What ho’ is his only remark before passing out. When, after a few days, he tries to talk to Alekos the latter doesn’t understand a word and we are only later told that this is because this typical product of a British public school is speaking ancient Greek (p.275). De Bernières very amusingly conveys the impression this has on his Greek listeners by translating it into Chaucerian English:
‘Sire, of your gentilesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certayn thyng.’ (p.2174)
The angel has a mechanical box which he turns on and emits squeaks and squawls though he hears words like ‘Roger’ and ‘Wilco’ and so on. It is a radio.
After some thought, Aleko decides to take the angel to see Dr Iannis. This takes four days of travelling down the mountain by night and hiding from patrols during the day. At Iannis’s the angel reveals his identity as Lieutenant Bunny Warren, seconded to the Special Operations Executive from the Kings Dragoon Guards (p.276).
After discussion, they get him a native outfit and he makes his way off into town where he ends up by sheer chutzpah staying in a local house which already has four Italian officers billeted on it. He confounds them by trying to communicate in Eton Latin. Bunny takes to trekking all over the island, regularly going to the isolated shack where he’s hidden his radio and reporting back to Cairo details of all enemy troop movements.
In his journeys he comes across Father Arsenios and takes to walking with him, passing as another religious lunatic. One more oddity in a book full of eccentrics.
47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter
We find the doctor once again writing a section of his history. He’s gone back to the ancient Romans’ occupation of Cephallonia. More importantly he can’t get his pipe to draw any more because of the vile apology for tobacco which is all you can get in wartime. He reflects that his history is more or a personal lament than an objective factual account. I’m sympathetic to the notion that History writing is actually impossible. We can never fully know the past for the blindingly obvious reason that none of us even understands the present. Like newspaper columnists all we can do is play with stereotypes and clichés, slightly more advanced stereotypes and clichés it’s true, but simplifications nonetheless. Because the true history of any event is beyond our abilities to fully understand. We always shape and interpret everything to suit our own purposes. History is no exception, the reverse: it’s distortion and simplification writ large.
Anyway, next time Pelagia comes in he asks her to sit down and have a heart to heart. He says he realises she and Corelli are in love. She blushes scarlet. He proceeds to calmly make the case against their love: 1) The captain is a foreigner and an enemy. If people discover she’s having an affair with the handsome enemy she will be universally decried as a traitor, spat at, stoned in the street. Her social life will end. 2) If she thinks of leaving for Italy she will leave behind forever everything which matters to her. 3) Infatuated love is transient, 6 months a year. After that it settles down to be hard work and you either discover you are two trees whose roots have entwined (like Dr Iannis and his wife did) or discover that you are separate beings. He is worried this is what Pelagia will discover when the dust settles. 4) She is still officially affianced to Mandras and nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. 5) Sex deferred becomes more and more obsessed over, but lust can only really function within marriage, otherwise the risks are enormous of pregnancy, complete social death, the man abandoning her, or dying from an abortion. 6) If she did have a child and become a single mum no man would marry her and she would end up like most in that situation, becoming a prostitute. 7) Sexually transmitted infections for which there were, in 1943, no cures.
48. La Scala
Weber brings evidence of crooked Italian scams to Corelli. Carlo is there and the doctor. It turns into a debate about morality and ‘science’, giving Weber the opportunity to expound at length the Nazi idea of the New Morality, Strength Through Joy, the fascist perversion of Darwinian evolution.
Although this then morphs into Weber bringing in his wind-up gramophone and playing Lili Marlene on it, which Corelli plays along to, the sound wafting out into the warm Greek night and enchanting listeners. (Compare with the descriptions of hearing Lili Marlene over the radio in Fitzroy Maclean’s war memoir Eastern Approaches.)
Pelagia expresses such joy at the machine that Weber promises he’ll leave it with her when he finally leaves and she calls him a sweet boy and kisses him on the cheek which makes him blush. She must be 19 or so by now and he, maybe 24. They’re all kids.
49. The Doctor Advises the Captain
Dr Iannis and Corelli are sitting quietly chatting while Corelli restrings his mandolin. Iannis gives Corelli the male equivalent of the talking to he gave to Pelagia a few days earlier. He is nettled when Corelli gives a blithe picture of their future together and says he loves Pelagia, as if that will solve all problems. Iannis tries to explain why he thinks Italians and Greeks are profoundly different, with a view to explaining why Pelagia can never leave the island and go with Corelli back to Italy. She would die of homesickness (p.291).
50. A Time of Hiatus
The Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. According to the very opinionated narrator this amounted to a betrayal of the Greeks, their most loyal allies and, fatefully, allowed the Greek communists a year to arm and prepare for their takeover i.e. the civil war, although in some places the people rebelled against the 25% tax they imposed everywhere.
The Italians on Cephallonia follow the progress of the Allies up Italy and talk aloud about armistice or surrender. The Germans in their small garrison fume at their perceived betrayal. Father Arsenios passes by with tattered dirty Bunny. Corelli tells Pelagia his boys think they should disarm the German garrison while it’s still small.
51. Paralysis
This chapter opens with another experiment in form for de Bernières has developments in Italy narrated as if in the style of Homer. De Bernières gives a day by day timeline of the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943 and the secret negotiations of his replacement, Marshal Badoglio, with the Allies. The La Scala choir doesn’t meet any more. Corelli doesn’t come to the house any more, too busy training with his unit. On 8 September comes the announcement over the radio that all aggressive actions by Italian forces against the Allies will cease at once. Church bells are rung all over the island and neighbouring islands.
The Italian officers are confused: should they surrender to the Germans? sign an armistice with them? attack them? Corelli is crystal clear that they must disarm the Germans or they’re ‘fucked’. Italian warships in the harbour slip anchor and head back to Brindisi thus preventing the evacuation of the 5,000 or so troops on the island. Hard to credit such cowardly betrayal.
Corelli asks the doctor how he can contact the resistance or andartes but the doctor doesn’t know and all Corelli’s efforts fail.
52. Developments
Consisting of 10 short sections giving the points of view of people caught up in the general confusion.
First person Carlo can’t believe their orders to surrender to the Germans.
Conversation between Italian CO General Gandin who tells his German counterpart, Barge, that the Italians are voluntarily giving up positions to show their good faith.
First person Corelli gives his mandolin to Pelagia for safekeeping, She reveals they’ve also taken Carlo’s manuscript and Corelli is surprised to learn the big man is a writer.
Leutnant Weber cleans his gun.
General Gandin uselessly confers with his chaplains and shows an irrational fear of attack by Stukas, unaware of the fact that’ from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised’ (p.304)
Someone comes to Corelli’s barracks to tell them Italian officers in another place have been shot by the Germans, prompting Corelli to demand a vote.
General Gandin wastes the next day in indecision.
Quote of the short order sent directly from Hitler ordering the complete liquidation of all Italian forces on Cephallonia. Since Italy hasn’t declared war on Germany, the Italians are to be treated as franc-tireurs rather than as prisoners of war.
General Gandin’s conference with senior officers, at which he highlights contradictory orders from Rome. Indecision.
The British decoded the German order to liquidate the Italians but did nothing because it would reveal the fact that they’d cracked their codes. De Bernières has quite a lot satirical disgust at the British attitude and abandonment of their allies.
53. First Blood
The fighting breaks out piecemeal as Italian officers, abandoned by their commanders and their allies, take courage. Planes fly overhead dropping bombs. Italians take on the Panzer tanks parked at strategic points in the towns. Instead of demanding a surrender, Gandin calls only for a truce, effectively handing the initiative to the Germans.
54. Carlo’s Farewell
Carlo writes a love letter to Corelli saying he has loved him as much as Corelli loves Pelagia.
55. Victory
How the Germans promised the Italians safe passage from Corfu them machine gunned them in the water i.e. German mass murder. Stukas dive bomb the Italian barracks. Gandin makes the mistake of calling all Italians from outposts into the town where they are easier targets. Whatever it was this is now a war novel. From his mountaintop Aleko sees the flashes and hears the bangs and knows the war has come to his island. Bunny Warren tries to get Cairo to send reinforcements for the Italians but de Bernières gives a characteristically scathing characterisation of top hole British perfidy:
‘Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can’t be done. Chin-chin.’ (p.316)
In their house Iannis consoles Pelagia who is terrified Corelli is dead. Stamatis and Kolokios come to ask the doctor’s absolution for they are taking their rifles and going off to kill Germans. Meanwhile, Corelli wanders through the rubble of Argostoli which has been seriously bombed. He comes across a little girl, dead, buried in the rubble of a house. Refugees are streaming in from villages razed by the Germans, clogging the streets and making it difficult to move artillery. Meanwhile two more battalions of Germans land. The Germans flatten villages all over the island in fierce fights with the Italians who run out of ammunition and blame the British for abandoning them.
After days of fighting an exhausted Corelli motorbikes to the Iannis house, kisses Pelagia, tells this is the last time she’ll see him alive. She begs him to stay and hide in the house but he explains he has to be with his boys and motors off.
56. The Good Nazi (2)
Cut to Weber arguing with his superior officer that he doesn’t want to carry out the direct order to murder the Italian prisoners. He and his CO argue about the legality of it, which all depends on the prisoners’ status as either POWs (with rights) or franc-tireurs, who it is legal to shoot.
In the lorry taking them to their deaths Corelli and his pals sing the humming chorus from Madam Butterfly. Weber is appalled that these men arrive singing and jump down from the trucks instead of being forced at bayonet point. Corelli recognises Weber and waves to him. Weber goes up to him, they share a cigarette, Weber hesitates and apologises, Corelli is gracious and shakes his hand but Carlo is rude and unforgiving, Weber walks away.
The order to fire is given but the Italians aren’t lined up against a wall but standing or sitting or lying around crying so the Germans have to shoot them where they are. De Bernières singles out for his loathing a sadistic Croatian sergeant who takes thuggish pleasure in emptying his machine gun into the Italians bodies.
And now occurs the most famous incident in the novel. For as the firing starts, huge strong gay giant Carlo Piero Guercio steps smartly in front of Corelli, seizing his wrists in his hands, and stands in front of him like a human shield, receiving bullet after bullet in his body, seeing if he can count to 30 and nearly getting there before a bullet smashes his jawbone and he falls backwards onto Corelli crushing him. Then Weber walks dazed through the abattoir of bodies delivering the coup de grace with his pistol, bends down and looks directly into Corelli’s face, their eyes meet as Weber’s pistol hesitates, then he pulls it back, stands up and walks away.
57. Fire
And now there is an almighty coincidence when Velisarios – remember him? the village strongman? – comes across the killing field and recognises the corpse of Carlo and lifts him up, with difficulty propping him against a wall, and recognised the bloodied body underneath him as the captain who’s been billeted with the doctor. He has multiple bullet wounds and is covered in blood, so much so that Velisarios wonders if it would be kinder to finish him off there, but Corelli whispers ‘Iatro, Pelagia’ so Velisarios picks him up and carries him to Dr Iannis’s.
Meanwhile up on Mount Aenos the goatherd Aleko who, as I said at the start watches all these vents from an Olympian height and with Olympian detachment, sees fires spring up all over the island. With their usual thoroughness the Germans are now burning the bodies, thousands and thousands of Italian men who they’ve murdered in cold blood.
Father Arsenios comes across then largest fire, it is now dark and the German soldiers are exhausting themselves bringing in truckload after load of corpses and throwing them into the flames, some not yet dead. It is a scene from hell and Arsenios shouts his Biblical anathema on all concerned, then starts beating the Germans with his walking staff until eventually a German officer draws a pistol and shoots him through the nape of his neck and they chuck his body onto the enormous pyre.
Eventually the Germans leave and the Greeks come to rescue the bodies they can, in order to give them a decent Orthodox burial. General Gandin is executed along with all his staff officers. It was a massacre of up to 8,000 Italians and a massive war crime.
58. Surgery and Obsequy
Velisario brings Corelli to Dr Iannis’s. Neither Pelagia nor the doctor recognise him but they set to work to treat him. The procedures are described in great detail. After cleaning the blood off they see six bullet wounds but when Iannis starts operating he discovers that they are shallow wounds i.e. haven’t gone clean through the body. Velisario explains how he found the captain, hidden under Carlo, and they are awed at Carlo’s self sacrifice. They ask Velisario to go and fetch Carlo’s body which he does, at some effort, and Iannis digs a grave in the back garden where they sew up his shattered jaw then give him a decent burial. Iannis reads an eloquent eulogy as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.
59. The Historical Cachette
The cachette is the hole under the floorboards which has been used to hide rebels and recusants for centuries. This is where they hide Corelli if the Germans are active locally. When he wakes he is in terrible pain. Iannis had to break some of his ribs in order to extract the bullets and wired them together with mandolin wire. This will have to be extracted in further operations. Iannis gives an unflinching prognosis of what Corelli can expect and when the latter jokingly asks him to lie to him, the doctor replies:
‘The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’ (p.341)
Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?
Corelli develops a fever, requires careful bathing, the fever breaks after four days and then he begins to eat. The doctor makes him stand up and walk on the spot. The pain is very bad but it looks like he’ll live.
60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows
Pelagia is now in very poor shape. Her skin is stretched tight and translucent. She is stick thin. She has grey hairs. Her gums bleed and she’s is worried teeth will start to fall out. She’s lost 50% of her body fat and her breasts have shrivelled. Now they start to starve and are reduced to hunting for lizards and snakes. She and her knackered lover, Corelli, lie on the bed together for hours and fantasise about the future. He hopes there’s a God because he wants to believe all his boys are in heaven. She says she hates all Germans but he makes the point that a lot of the German army isn’t German: they recruited from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, wherever there are thugs and sadists.
(p.345)
They realise that the longer he stays the more likely he’ll be discovered. So with reluctance they ask Stamatis or Kolokios to contact Bunny Warren who, a few days later, comes knocking at the window in the early hours. Provided with gold sovereigns by London, Bunny has for some time been paying local fisherman to smuggle allies out of Cephallonia. Now he arranges for Corelli to be taken by caique to Sicily the next evening.
61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death
Corelli and Pelagia’s last day together, full of soppy sentimental fantasies about the future, squabbles about whether Corelli should rejoin the army to carry on fighting Germans, what they will name their children. Almost casually, Dr Iannis tells them he has given Corelli permission to marry his daughter.
That night Bunny comes scratching at the window, gives detailed instructions for how to sneak past the German coast guards, the walk in silence down to the beach, lights flash, a rowing boat comes inshore, Corelli and Pelagia hug, hold and kiss for the last time, then he clambers into the boat and is rowed off into the darkness.
62. Of the German Occupation
After the light-hearted romantic Italians have all gone, shot down in cold blood and incinerated, the Germans prove to be brutal heartless machines, with only one ideology, naked power, and the conviction of their own ineffable superiority. They go into anyone’s house at any hour, beat the inhabitants and steal all their belongings. Both the doctor and Pelagia are beaten and lovely Psipsina is casually beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. Drousoula has cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts for scowling at a German. Four Germans systematically destroy all the medical equipment Dr Iannis has accumulated over four decades. When the Master Race are ordered to withdraw in November 1944, the destroy as many of the houses of Cephallonia as they can.
63. Liberation (the communists)
The Liberation is no liberation because the Nazis are replaced by the brutes of ELAS, the communists, who elect themselves to all positions of power, impose a tax of 25% on everything and start rounding up Fascists and counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois and everyone who poses any kind of threat and sending them to concentration camps. De Bernières really hates them and enumerates their crimes, including stealing food sent to Athens by the Allies for famine relief, destroyed factories, docks and railways the Germans had left intact, created 100,000 refugees, and mutilated anyone who crossed them, castrating and gouging out the eyes of the recalcitrant.
The doctor is dragged away in the middle of the night and sent to a labour camp for the crime of being bourgeois. They beat Pelagia unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios and Stamatis try to protect the doctor all three are arrested and sent to the docks to travel to a camp on the mainland. The communists invite Bunny Warren to a party and shoot him. Chin-chin.
After she’s beaten up Pelagia goes running to Mandras’s mother, Drousoula who takes her to her (shrivelled) bosom and cares for her like a mother. Within a few days she moves into the doctor’s house which becomes a matriarchy.
Return of Mandras
But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Mandras arrives at the doctor’s house and he is now a bloated monster, degraded after years of murdering and raping at will with the communist partisans, gross and disfigured, looking like a toad.
He has come back to claim her as his bride (although he is as disconcerted by the change in his appearance as she is by him). Conversation turns to abuse and he angrily gets out the bundle of letters she wrote him all those years ago and repeats the scene of insisting she read them out loud. This escalates into shouting then he’s accusing her of sleeping with an Italian Fascist, everyone’s told him about it, he starts calling her a whore and when she makes a move to leave, smacks her round the face and when she falls to the floor kicks her in the back, lifts her by the wrists onto the bed and starts to rip off her clothes, as he’s done to so many women over the past three years. (De Bernières gives a horribly convincing psychological insight into the raging joy of rape and then the bitter aftermath, p.366).
Mandras beats her again and again and again till her face is a bloody swollen pulp then hoiks up her skirts but this causes the little derringer pistol her father gave her all those years ago to fall out of the pocket and beside her head. She grabs it and fires, shattering Mandras’s collarbone. He staggers back and at just that moment Drosoula returns, entering the bedroom to encounter this scene.
She rushes over to Pelagia who manages to say through her bloody mouth that Mandras tried to rape her. Outraged, Drosoula produces her own pistol and points it at her son. She formally disowns him, calls him Fascist, Fascist rapist, curses him with traditional curses: may his heart burst in his chest, may he die alone, he is no longer her son, she has no son.
Stumbling outside, Mandras sees the old olive tree, the one he used to fool around in, the one he fell out of onto the pot, the focus of so much love and laughter. Now the whole scene is ashes and emptiness. It’s all been for nothing, all his fighting and suffering and mastering the discourse of revolution, all for nothing. He stumbles along tracks down to the seashore where once he frolicked like a young god, strips off and wades into the sea.
Some time later his body is washed ashore, being nudged and nuzzled by his three tame dolphins. This, the immeasurable degradation of Mandras, more than the killing of Carlo and maiming of Corelli, made me feel really sick and distraught. The charming youth with the arse of a god and a permanent smile had been reduced to a fat, exploiting, bully rapist, symbol of a world degraded to bestial levels.
64. Antonia (the baby)
Someone leaves a newborn baby in a bundle on the step of the house. Drosoula and Pelagia take it in and discover it is a baby girl, to join the matriarchy. Pelagia names it Antonia after Corelli’s name for his mandolin. After so much loss it becomes the focus of their hopes and efforts.
Iannis returns
One of de Bernières’ aims is to flay the communists in the fiercest way possible for their barbaric behaviour. He makes Iannis the vehicle for this, for he has Dr Iannis return, after three long years in communist camps on the mainland, a complete wreck, a broken man. He can’t speak, can barely shuffle, his hands shake, broken by the forced marches without food or water, watching villagers along the way who are slow to feed the people’s army having their eyes gouged out, being castrated or raped, the mouths slit wide. He is haunted by the memory of seeing his two oldest friends, Stamatis and Kolokios, incapable of staggering further, sitting by the road as the column staggered onwards, waiting to be shot as ‘stragglers’. In many ways de Bernières paints the communists as worse than the Nazis.
All the more impressive, then, that he moves back in with the matriarchal household and helps Pelagia who is now the main doctor, healing the sick of the village, despite the deep sense of futility burned into his core (p.371).
She tries to get him interested in his old project, the history of Cephallonia, but the gently whimsical approach to history has been burned out of him. I was recently thinking about Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ towards the end of which Marlowe discovers that the deranged envoy of ‘civilisation’, Mr Kurtz, has scrawled words of nihilistic despair across the bottom of a missionary pamphlet, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. In much the same spirit, Pelagia discovers that her father has scrawled across the bottom of the last page of his manuscript:
‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’ (p.372)
L’omosessuale
Pelagia finally reads the stash of writings by l’omosessuale, Carlo Piero Guercio, and marvels at the secret sensitivity behind the man’s giant strength, marvels at the depths of his love, for Francesco and Corelli. Thus the strength and virtue and endurance of gay love is one of the book’s central themes.
The house becomes a matriarchy, run by Pelagia and Drosoula, who raise little Antonia as a free spirit. The conservative neighbours call them witches, exacerbated by the obvious emasculation of the once-proud doctor, throw stones or hiss at them in the street, tell their children to avoid them. (This reminds me very much of the way the villagers treat the Englishwoman at the centre of John Buchan’s 1926 melodrama, The Dancing Floor.)
In 1950 they can’t scrape together enough to bribe an official who has discovered that neither Iannis nor Pelagia has a medical degree and so bans them from working. It looks as if they’re going to starve until Fate steps in in the shape of a Canadian poet, one of the millions of bourgeois intellectuals who, in the postwar boom, were seeking out the ‘authenticity’ of ‘primitive’ life among workers and sailors. To their astonishment he is prepared to pay an outrageous rent for the old house by the quay which Drosoula had abandoned to move in with Pelagia, and their finances bounce back to health.
In this figure de Bernières gently satirises the existentialist chic of the post-war years, humorously saying that the poet found himself living a happy and contented life and unable to write the angst-ridden and depressing verse which had made him famous and so he eventually packed up and went back to Montreal, via Paris:
where freedom was in the process of being recognised as a major source of Angst. (p.374)
I think he underestimates the extent to which existentialist thought, although well-established before the war, was a) coloured by the wartime years and b) was a kind of traumatic response to the war, and especially to the occupation. But it was also a fashionable fad, as well.
Almost inevitably the household acquires a cat. Women and cats. We learn for the first time that psipsina is, apparently, Greek for ‘puss’. They had started calling Antonia psipsina as a nickname and there is some of the old light-hearted whimsy in the comic confusion created by calling out psipsina and both the cat and the child misinterpreting it.
The revenant
In 1946 occurs the first of strange phenomena. One day, outside, nursing the baby, she looks up and sees a man dressed in black standing hesitating at exactly the spot where Velisarios hit Mandras with the canon. She is convinced it is her beloved Corelli, puts down the baby and runs down the street but when she turns the corner the figure has vanished, despite her anguished calls. Later a single red rose appears on Carlo’s grave. Is it Corelli’s ghost? Next year, at about the same time, she sees the figure again and another red rose appears. As the years of her spinsterhood progress, Pelagia is comforted by the love from beyond the grave.
65. 1953 (earthquake)
Pelagia stops thinking of herself as Greek. The barbarity of the civil war destroyed any belief that Greek culture was special or superior. Increasingly she thinks of herself as Italian and buys a radio cheap because its tuner is broken and it can only reach Italian radio stations. She sings Italian songs and raises Antonia to speak Italian.
Wars
Despite the tourist whimsy of many passages, this is fundamentally a book about war and wars. In one sentence de Bernières positions the events of this chapter after the Greek Civil War (March 1946 to August 1949), after the end of the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953) and just as the French were drawing near the disastrous climax of the First Indochina War (December 1946 to July 1954). The Second World War may have ended but it was still a world in flames.
Earthquake
This chapter is a fantastically vivid and almost magical realist depiction of the 1953 Ionian earthquake as experienced by our main characters i.e. weird electrical phenomena, followed by a series of shocks, then the Big One, as they desperately try to escape from the collapsing house.
The most destructive [of the shocks] was the August 12 earthquake. The event measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale, raised the whole island of Kefalonia by 60 cm (24 in), and caused widespread damage throughout the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos … Between 445 and 800 people were killed. (Wikipedia)
The practical upshot is 1) the doctor’s old house is reduced to ruins 2) the doctor is crushed to death, the peg for another of the book’s countless ironies:
[The ruined house] also contained the disillusioned soul and tired body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid. (p.383)
66. Rescue
De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:
In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. (p.383)
but remember this was published in 1994 and so written during the chaos at the end of the Thatcher regime, marked by the poll tax riots, and then the Conservative Party’s typically squalid and shambolic sacking of the greatest leader it’s ever had, in November 1990 and hurried replacement by the sad and ludicrous figure of John Major, who depressed all progressive-thinking people by winning the 1992 general election by a landslide. So, yes, from the perspective of 1994, Britain was indeed an unhappy, disgruntled, rather ludicrous country.
But there’s more, de Bernière expresses the standard liberal lament over Britain being America’s poodle:
[Britain] had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. (p.384)
You could argue that the crudeness of this is unworthy of the writer who’s delivered so many luminously subtle moments throughout this wonderful book. Then again, satire is, in general, crude. It prompts a second thought: that de Bernières and the world at large had seen nothing yet, and would be amazed ten years later at the behaviour of Tony Blair who rightly earned the nickname ‘Bush’s poodle’ and sent British forces into Afghanistan and Iraq…
Back to the text: it’s the British who send the most aid and stay the longest to help the inhabitants of the Ionian islands to recover but the chapter then goes onto become an overview of all the rescue attempts and aid sent by various countries, as well as the impacts on the locals, some of whom fell into despair, some intractable guilt at having survived, some set up businesses, unlikely leaders emerged such as Velisarios, the strong man, who took charge in Pelagia’s village. The narrative details his heroic acts (single-handedly cleaning out the village well so that nobody went thirsty) deeds which were remembered and venerated for decades afterwards.
In among the general confusion, an Italian fireman borrows an American jeep and drives out to Pelagia’s village, making his way to the ruins of the old house and identifying the ancient olive tree, split in two by the quake, and then sees the grave of the gentle giant Carlo, which has been opened up. He gets a spade from the jeep to recover the big man but as he does so the earth shakes again and the grave closes of its own volition.
Surely this is Corelli, but the text doesn’t say so.
67. Pelagia’s Lament
First-person lament by Pelagia for everything she’s lost, specifically her upbringing by her wonderful father, fount of fantastical stories, which leads up to her memory of Velisarios digging through the rubble to find her father, so small and limp and empty without his soul, and she realised how beaten and broken he had been but how he was the only man who loved her to the end. This lament made me cry.
68. The Resurrection of History
Pelagia sinks into profound guilt that she panicked and ran out of the house and left her father to die. Drosoula and Antonia sympathise to start with, but become more irritated as Pelagia becomes more morbidly obsessed. Eventually they make up the story that her father has appeared to them in dreams and told them to tell her to complete her father’s history of Cephallonia. After initial scepticism, Pelagi discovers that she can do it, enjoys doing it, starts flexing her intellectual muscles, expresses opinions she never knew she had, writes off to experts in Europe and America for more information and is amazed at the enthusiastic replies she receives. Several publishing houses turn it down but it doesn’t matter. Her father’s project has saved her.
It is 1961. Part of her intellectual exercise is enjoying teasing and contradicting the now teenage Antonia. But the girl dismays her and Drosoula by announcing that 1) she is a communist and 2) she is getting married, at the age of 17 (p.397).
69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills
Life continues. Pelagia starts to receive postcards from cities round the world with short cryptic messages in Greek. They can’t be from Corelli, he couldn’t speak Greek and what was he doing gallivanting round the world. She decides they’re from the ghost of her father continuing the peregrinations of his youth.
Antonia gets a job serving in a café in Argostoli and is chatted up by short, plump, 32-year-old radical lawyer Alexi (p.399). Despite all her mother’s opposition, Antonia gets married at a happy traditional ceremony.
Time passes. Drosoula sets up a ramshackle taverna in the space down by the quay where her house used to be and becomes a tourist attraction, famed for her slow service but eccentric company. Lemona, now the plump mother of three children, helps out as does Pelagia.
Antonia cries when King Paul dies, comes for comfort when Alexi is locked up by the colonels in 1967 and again in 1973, goes to the mainland to take part in feminist demonstrations. She tells her mother it’s all the fault of the older generation and it’s up to the young people to fix the world. As all young people do. But, as a feminist and a radical, she refuses to have a grandchild for Pelagia to the latter’s sorrow.
Drosoula dies quietly in her chair and is buried next to Dr Iannis and Pelagia suddenly realises she is alone. But in the event Antonia does get pregnant and have a little baby boy. Pelagia dandles it and calls it Iannis so often that that becomes its name. Alexi is a rich bourgeois now, builds an apartment block on the hillside where the old village used to be, rebuilds Drosoula’s taverna, hires a competent chef, takes 50% of the profit.
70. Excavation
Iannis grows to be a beautiful 6-year-old who helps out at the taverna and is cooed over by foreign matrons. Alexi becomes a property tycoon, building evermore apartment blocks with swimming pools and tennis courts. Antonia opens a tourist emporium full of tat in Argostali and then in half a dozen other towns. They become rich.
The boy Iannis engages in competitions to pee as high as possible against the wall at the back of the taverna and his dreams are full of plump tourist matrons pressing him their squishy bosoms.
When he’s ten, Pelagia hires Spiridon, a talented bouzouki player from Corfu, whose dexterity reminds her of the one true love of her life. iannis dreams of becoming a kamakia or ‘harpoon’, slang for the handsome young men who hang about the airport on mopeds and make a living having passionate week-long affairs with single women who’ve flown to Greece looking for ‘romance’ (p.407).
Anyway, Iannis conceives the ambition of playing the bouzouki not least because, by the end of every evening, Spiridon has his arms round the prettiest girls in the restaurant and is being showered with roses. Spiridon says his arms are too short to play it, he should start with a mandolin, so he begs his mum and dad for a mandolin but they keep forgetting to get one on their umpteen trips abroad, so instead he pesters granny Pelagia, who says there’s one buried in the ruins of her old house.
Which is why Iannis is dispatched with Spiridon to dig it up and hence the title of this chapter. In digging through the rubble they discover all kinds of relics which mean something to the reader – a wartime photo of Corelli and Weber, a family photo album starting with Dr Iannis’s wedding, a jar with a shrivelled pea in it (the pea which kick starts the whole narrative).
In the middle of this digging a huge old man appears in the ruined doorway. It is old Velisarios, come to see if they are looters. In his hand he holds a red rose and it’s only now that we learn that it is he who has left a rose on Carlo’s grave every year in October and, it is strongly implied, that he too was gay and recognised and respected a kindred spirit.
Anyway, it’s this huge strong Velisarios who opens up the trapdoor to the historic cachette under the old house where, of course, they find all its treasures perfectly preserved – the manuscripts of Carlo’s letters, Iannis’s history, Weber’s wind-up gramophone with records, the clasp knife she gave her father, the blanket she crocheted throughout Corelli’s stay, and, in side a box inside cloth covers, the most beautiful mandolin Spiridon has ever seen.
71. Antonia Sings Again
Reunited with all these evocative objects, Pelagia cries for weeks, and then shows the photo album in particular to Iannis, boring him with stories of all the old people in them.
And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.
72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)
Cut to 1993. Iannis is 15. He likes to go up to the old ruined house to practice the mandolin. One day an old grey-haired man approaches him. It is, of course, Antonio Corelli. He politely points out that the boy is fingering the mandolin in slightly the wrong way which is hampering his technique. When he takes the mandolin to show him how, he suddenly realises it is his old one. Everything comes flooding out and he tells the enthralled teenager how he is the man his mother was going to marry, how he was saved by the giant buried in the back garden and how the four strings missing from the mandolin when they first found it… are in his chest, holding his ribs together, he never had them removed.
73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)
This final chapter opens comically, with Pelagia, confronted by Corelli in the middle of her taverna, going mad with rage, overturning tables, throwing plates and pans at him, then prodding him with the broom handle as she furiously accuses him. All these years she thought he was dead and yet he was alive and living the life of Reilly.
So now we have the Big Reveal, the explanation of the last 50 years of their lives (1943 to 1993). It was Corelli who Pelagia saw at the end of the road in chapter 64, in 1946. He had come back to see her. But what he saw was her nursing a baby and put 2 and 2 together and made 53, wildly assuming that she was married with a child. In his confusion he ran and jumped over a wall so that when she ran after him she saw an empty street.
He came back every year around the same time but always saw her with the baby and made the same mistake. Pelagia asks the obvious question, why did he never meet her and ask her? Because he didn’t want to ruin what he thought was her new, happily married life by stirring up old ghosts. So like a gentleman he did the restrained thing and backed off. Although he did return every year, so her impression of seeing the mysterious dark man was real.
In the meantime he took her parting advice, left the army and became a fireman. Plenty of time to practice and compose and eventually he wrote classical pieces which became a success, three concertos, one of them with Pelagia’s March as its central theme.
He became a successful concert performer and was in demand around the world. Hence the postcards. They were from him. Why in Greek? Because when the full truth of the Fascist regime’s evils came out he was ashamed to be an Italian and emigrated to Greece. He’s been a Greek citizen for 25 years.
Much more chat and memories then he shyly gives her a Walkman and a tape of his 1954 concerto and leaves, to meet up later. She fumbles with the Walkman but once she works out how to work it, is amazed at how immediate and total the musical experience is, right in the centre of her head. And then she hears Pelagia’s March which he used to hum, subject to all kinds of developments, played by different instruments and then makes out the rat-a-tat-tat of machineguns, and the rumbling of drums which embodies the earthquake, my God, the whole narrative is captured in musical form.
That evening he brings her a goat. He went to the trouble of taking a taxi to the top of Mount Aenos where he was swindled by Alekos, and had to pay the taxi driver a double fare to bring it all the way down the mountain. It’s restitution for the one she loved which was stolen in chapter 44. She says she’ll name it Apodosis which is Greek for ‘restitution’. She amusingly humiliates Corelli when he tells her she should get good milk out of it, maybe sell yoghurt in the restaurant and she points between its back legs at the big pink scrotum!
That evening he returns with a modern motorbike and suggests they roar off up into the hills to see if they can find the old shed where they used to hide away and kiss and cuddle, which they called their Casa Nostra. Pelagia says it’s a preposterous idea and agrees. As they roar up into the hills Pelagia is pleased and terrified and holds on tight.
And in the final image of the novel, they are overtaken by a scooter carrying not one but three young woman, wearing skimpy dresses showing their shapely breasts, long hair flowing in the wind, one driving, one doing her eye make-up, one nonchalantly reading a paper. An image of carefree youth and optimism. Corelli thinks that when he comes to map out his next concerto all he will have to do is remember this moment to conjure up the spirit of Greece.
THE END.
The unsaid as a central theme
Writing out the sentence describing Dr Iannis’s death in the Ionian earthquake, and how he had for years prepared some noble and profound last words which, in the event, he had no chance to utter before being crushed to death, made me realise that this is a minor but significant thread in the book – the frustration of the unsaid.
On several occasions Corelli has big speeches ready to deliver to Pelagia, only for her temper or mood to sweep the conversation away.
Similarly, Dr Iannis likes to prepare grand speeches with which he will demolish the communist beliefs of Kokolios or the monarchism of Stamatis, and yet life (and Lemoni) keep interrupting him so that they are never delivered.
Mandras has so much to say to Pelagia on his two returns, from the Albanian front and then from life with the communist partisans, and yet both times his hopes of expressing what he feels are dashed and he ends up attacking her in a raging fury.
But the theme has its best embodiment in the entire life of Carlo Guercio, who overflows with love for Francesco and then for Corelli, which he can never ever, in real life, express.
Related, is the scene of Pelagia and Corelli’s last day together before he takes the illicit boat back to Italy, in which they have plenty of time and yet, somehow, mysteriously, don’t get to express a fraction of their feelings.
And maybe also related is Dr Iannis’s eternal frustration with his History of Cephallonia – no matter how much he writes he somehow never gets to express what he wants to say.
It’s as if it’s a buried moral of the story, that no matter how eloquent the writing and the words, the most important part, somehow, still, is left unexpressed. Something which is expressed nearly at the end of the text when Pelagia shows young Iannis all the photos from her life and he is suddenly struck by how little survives of our lives and loves, thinking:
How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on it? (p.416)
Hummel’s concerto for mandolin
Greek words
agapeton – sweetheart
iatre – ‘Doctor’
koritsimou – my girl
kyria – respectful title for a female, ‘kyria Pelagia’
mangas – men, chaps
papakis – diminutive form of address to a father
patir – form of address to a priest, same as ‘Father’
Credit
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières was published by Secker and Warburg in 1994. References are to the 1995 Minerva paperback edition.
Eric Newby (1919 to 2006) was a much-loved travel writer, author of such British travel classics as ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ (1958) and ‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ (1966). In 1971 he published this classic wartime memoir.
It describes how:
serving in the Special Boat Section, he was captured during an operation off the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was then held at prisoner of war camps, first in Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later at Fontanellato, near Parma
after the Italians made peace with the Allies in September 1943, he escaped from the camp by the simple expedient of walking through the now-unguarded gates
he was helped to hide for 6 months from the occupying Germans in the Apennine mountains, initially by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, her father the schoolteacher, a doctor, and then by a whole succession of colourful villagers and characters
Newby would later marry Wanda and she became the lifelong companion of his travels and adventures.
Newby’s core quality is a wonderful, self-mocking sense of humour; every turn of events is an opportunity for an amused, ironic remark or insight. Add to this his great way with natural descriptions of landscapes and weather, and then his acute descriptions of the many people he meets through the course of his adventure, and it makes for an extremely interesting, sometimes dramatic, but above all charming book.
The 298-page book is divided into 17 chapters.
1. Operation Whynot
Very detailed description of the secret small-scale operation during which Newby was captured on 12 August 1942, in the Bay of Catania off Sicily. He and five other members of M Detachment of the Special Boat Service had been taken into the bay by submarine (the Una commanded by Pat Norman, p.15), then manhandled inflatable canoes into the sea and rowed quietly to the beach. The plan was to attack a German airfield four miles south of Catania and take out as many of the 50 to 60 Junkers 88 bombers parked there as possible. The mission was lent urgency because a massive fleet of merchant ships had just entered the Mediterranean with the aim of sailing to British-held Malta to provide vital supplies to the besieged island (p.16).
They actually made it to the airfield when they encountered an Italian patrol, shots were fired, at which the airport alarm and all its floodlights went on. Now way they could cover the half mile to where loads of Ju 88s were lined up so they aborted, ran back to the beach, through the barbed wire, reclaimed their canoes and headed back out to sea.
But they completely missed the rendezvous point with the submarine (which, turned out, not only turned up and waited, but came back at the same time for several days in the hope of meeting them). Instead the seas got rough, the canoes swamped and sank and they were all pitched into the freezing water, clinging to various bits of wreckage.
Thus they were in very poor shape when they were discovered by a small Sicilian fishing fleet and dragged aboard the little fishing smacks about 8am. Newby’s attitude, tone of voice and wry humour are established on the opening page:
I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness that we did… (p.13)
The most Newby aspect of the entire account is that one of his party brought along their pet dog from Malta (in the submarine, not on the actual airfield mission), a dachshund named Socks who disappeared for long period, returning bloated with food and her long underbelly soaked in oil which she invariably rubbed all over Newby’s uniform when he jumped up to lick him.
The fishermen handed the captured Brits over to the Italian army, who put them in prison, interrogated them etc, till a German officer arrived and insisted they be properly fed and given dry clothes. Eventually they were shipped over to the mainland and taken under armed escort to a POW barracks in Rome.
Newby found Rome beautiful. He quite liked being alone in a cell. This was his first time in Europe. He was just twenty-two years old (p.34).
2. Grand Illusion
Cut to a year later (September 1943) and Newby is being held in what had been built as an orphanage or orfanotrofio attached to a convent, but was still not finished when war broke out. It was a three-storey building so unstable that if anyone jumped up and down the entire facade wobbled. It was in a village called Fontenallato.
The Italian guards are relaxed, the food is OK and supplemented by Red Cross parcels and stuff bought off the black market. There’s cheap if risky liquor available. Newby tells a typical story about the first lieutenant-colonel who became senior officer and hosted a big party on his first night, with lots of illegal booze. Finally he declared the party over, rose, and opened the door to a tall cupboard, striding inside as if into his bedroom. Because, when he pulled the door shut behind him, he wedged his thick coat in it, it took the others some time to free him, by which time he was fast asleep and sleeping.
The prisoners were forbidden to look out of any of the windows facing into the road into the village. If they did so the Italian guards fired at them, and the walls opposite the windows were studded with bullet holes.
For some reason local pretty young women made a point of promenading past the prison, to the great joy of the young men inside who risked death by bullet to get a sight. This leads to the subject of sex and Newby points out that most of the men were probably too undernourished to perform. In the absence of women there was always masturbation, which he describes as ‘pull our puddings’, something difficult to do in a dormitory of 26 men, packed close and illuminated by searchlights, although some of them revived the ancient skills of subterfuge perfected at boarding school.
To my surprise there’s an extended passage which expresses considerable dislike for the public school senior ranks who dominated life in the prison. Newby calls them ‘the OK people’, who’d all been to the same schools, were members of the same clubs in London, were officers in the best regiments, knew each other’s families and treated all outsiders like muck (pages 47 to 49). The passage includes bitter memories of privileged boys being pushed in prams in Hyde Park or hogging all the toys at Hamleys (‘Go away,’ he said, ‘It’s my rocking horse.’) The ‘OK people’ i.e. the nobs, rarely if ever read, or discuss anything except each other’s fabulous families, but they do gamble – on anything, for any stakes.
The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense…there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been. (p.55)
All the prisoners mock and joked about the ‘Itis’ (Newby’s spelling of what, according to the internet should be spelled ‘Eyeties’ i.e. slang abbreviation for Italians) but really it just channeled and controlled their frustration at being locked up.
In fact Newby philosophically comments that the prisoners were in fact more ‘free’ than they ever would be again, free from money, worries about careers, free from having to work, for responsibility for dependents and so on.
(The chapter is titled ‘Grand Illusion’ because a new commanding officer arrives who instils discipline and makes it resemble the prisoner of war camp in the 1937 French movie La Grande Illusion.)
3. Armistizio
On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was dismissed from power by King Victor Emmanuel. He was arrested, imprisoned and moved from place to place. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister. On 3 September 1943 Badoglio agreed to an Armistice between Italy and the Allies. The formal announcement was made on the radio five days later and plunged Italy into chaos. The complicated diplomatic and military manoeuvres are laid out on the Wikipedia Armistice of Cassibile article.
The only impact this made on the orfanotrofio was the guards stopped shooting through the windows and their daily escorted exercise marches came to an end. That evening the entire camp held a massive party with booze bought and smuggled in on the black market.
There was a couple of days of wild rumours that the Allies were landing in northern Italy leading to massive breakthroughs and that the war would be over in a week. In fact it was to last nearly two years more. What happened is the Germans turned on their former allies and seized positions all across Italy.
4. The Ninth of September
Their Italian captors let the entire camp population leave. They just walked out the door. All except Newby who hobbled. Just a few days earlier he’d managed to trip and fall down the grand staircase at the centre of the orfanotrofio and break his ankle. Now, as everyone walks out the building and through the previously guarded wire fences, Newby has to hobble, supported by two reluctant paratroopers. They’re only too happy to hand him over to a (small) horse secured for him by a British orderly and named Mora. Characteristically: a) Newby has never ridden a horse before (unlike the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ OK people inside the camp) b) he’s terrified of horse and c) the landscape is criss-crossed by irrigation ditches so terrible terrain for a horse to cross.
Pretty quickly the horse goes front legs into a ditch pitching Newby over its neck. I was surprised that his class consciousness surfaces even here.
‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have stuck a lit cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. (p.64)
He’s still in the general procession of escaping prisoners, looking like a troop of lunatics he once came across in Surrey. Later they discover that:
some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp, had fired a few rounds in the air, the Italian soldiers had capitulated immediately, the colonello had been arrested and the Germans had taken him away as a souvenir of their visit. (p.66)
The senior British officer in the column of escaping prisoners tells Newby that he can’t spare the men to help him hobble along and so he’s arranged for him to stay with a local farmer while the column heads off. So Newby is hidden in the hayloft of the first of a long line of Italian peasants. He hears the distant roar of traffic and wonders if it’s Germans on the Via Emilia (the modern A1 that runs between Piacenza in the north-west to Parma to the south-east). In the evening the farmer and his wife give him a hearty meal of home-made pasta and cheese and wine, the first of many flavours of the real, rustic Italy which Newby was to come to love.
An Italian translator from the orfanotrofio turns up and shares the latest news that the Germans are approaching in force from the north. Looks like the Great Liberation will be pushed back a bit.
5. Interlude in an Ospedale
Next day an Italian doctor comes and tells him he needs to go to hospital to have his ankle fixed. So Newby changes into Italian farmer clothes given him by his hosts and drives off in the doctor’s car. But not before one of the many land girls who had begun to arrive at the farm takes his notice, mainly because she’s blonde not dark-haired, and then comes over to the car to promise to visit him in hospital. It is Wanda, his future wife.
So he is driven back into Fontanellato and admitted to the Ospedale Perachi only a few hundred yards from the orfanotrofio. Wanda comes to visit, introduces herself and sets about giving him hilariously bad Italian lessons in her heavy Slovak accent. She pronounces his name ‘Hurrock’ (p.73).
She was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a blue cotton skirt. She was brown, she was slim, she had good legs, she had ash-blonde hair and blue eyes and she had a fine nose. When she smiled she looked saucy, when she didn’t she looked serious. (p.76)
Newby describes the staff at the hospital, strong nurses with no false modesty about stripping him and putting him into regulations pyjamas, a formidable matron, a silent consultant.
That evening German bombers drop leaflets telling the population the capitulation of their country is a disgrace and the Germans are coming to provide freedom and security. Wanda had told him he was right next door to the maternity wing of the hospital and the screams of a woman giving birth keep him up till late.
For some time life in the hospital is peaceful and quiet. Wanda comes every afternoon for more bad Italian lessons and gossip about how his former prisoners are doing. She thinks he should head north to Switzerland.
Wanda describes how Slovenia was annexed by Mussolini in the 1920s who forbade the use of the Slovenian language and deported all Slovenian teachers to Italy (p.80).
The radio gives the news: on 12 September Mussolini was rescued from prison by German paratroopers. 14 September news that the Germans had launched a fierce counter-offensive against the Allied landings at Salerno (as described by where . 16 September all Italian officers and men were ordered to present themselves in uniform at the nearest German headquarters.
The newspapers carry a threatening announcement from the head of the SS who has now taken control of Parma, just 20 km to the south.
6. Back to Nature
Newby realises he has to get away. But he’s left it late and now two carabinieri have been stationed outside his hospital room to guard him.
With one of his meals come detailed instructions on how to escape. he had been pretending to have diarrhoea and keep having to go to the toilet until his guards stopped paying attention. That evening he squeezes through the toilet window, shimmies down a drainpipe and goes stumbling and hopping across fields to the rendezvous point a kilometre away. Here he is collected by the doctor who has been treating him and another middle-aged man. It is Wanda’s father. They refer to each other as dottore and maestro, respectively.
We set off at a terrific rate on a road which had all the qualities necessary to produce a fatal accident. (p.90)
They drive for miles before giving him a full set of clothes, a knife and dumping him in a wood telling him he’ll be found by a middle-aged man named Giovanni. They tell him he’s near the river Po, then drive off, leaving him to stumble into the wood armed with a sleeping bag and a bottle of mosquito repellent.
7. Down by the Riverside
After a rough night in the woods, Newby blunders down to the river and has a revelatory view of the mighty River Po. Back in the woods he falls asleep and is roughly woken by Giovanni who takes him to a rock overlooking the river and treats him to home-made soup and pasta, slices of unsmoked ham and home-made wine. Giovanni explains the geography of the Po, its regular flooding, its shifting estuary.
Wanda arrives by bicycle and brings bad news. Field Marshall Kesselring has set up his base in the castle at Fontenallato. If he’d remained at the hospital he would have been sent to a POW camp in Germany. Worse, some British escapees were found and arrested at a farm and one of them had kept a diary including the names of everyone who had helped him. Idiot. Cretin.
Giovanni and Wanda’s father dig a kind of grave for Newby, line it, make him lie in it, then cover it with planks and soil, leaving a breathing hole, for him to hide in that night. Next morning he’s woken and dug out and still stiff from being cooped up Newby stumbles to the doctor’s car.
Newby discovers he’s not the only passenger as there’s an ancient man, bent over, dressed all in black, who appears to be deaf and spends a lot of the journey quietly chuckling to himself, ‘Heh, heh, heh’ (p.108).
The doctor drives them along a country road till it joins the Via Emilia only to discover a vast armoured column is driving along it. Trying to look Italian in his Italian clothes, Newby is bricking it as the doctor overtakes the column slowly and sensibly.
Eventually they outdistance the column, drive along open roads and arrive in the city of Parma where the Fiat promptly breaks down and the doctor spends some time under the bonnet fixing it. Despite some German traffic cops being about nobody interferes with them, the car is fixed, and they drive through Parma towards the mountains.
8. Haven in a Storm
The doctor drops Newby with the Baruffas, farmers in the foothills of the mountains, telling him he’ll be safe there. It’s all smiles and handshakes but the minute the doctor has driven off Senor Baruffa tells him he must leave. Now. Straightaway. They are terrified of reprisals. They tell him he must go to the farm of Zanoni, further up the valley beyond the mill. And with that, throw him out into the farm courtyard just as a ferocious rainstorm starts.
Newby trudges up along the cobbled track that leads beside the overflowing stream as the storm howls around him and brings him to the bubbling frothing watermill. From there a path leads further up the hill to a house which was more like a stone hut built against the mountainside. He knocks and enters a dark and smelly cowshed to find Signor Zanoni. This dirt-poor farmer takes him into the main ‘house’, more like a cavern, feeds him and lets him sleep in the only bed.
It’s the dark and stormy evening of 25 September 1943 and Newby spends the night in the most comfortable bed he’s ever slept in, before or since (p.118).
Next morning Zanoni informs him that the Germans have installed a new Fascist government in Italy and it is offering 1,800 lire for the capture of Allied prisoners. That’s about £25 at contemporary rates, a fortune for these peasants. Then again he explains the typical Italian attitude which is not to try too hard; most of the country’s officials know the Allies will eventually win the war at which point there’ll be a reckoning for anyone who gave away hiding soldiers.
The thin signora beings him coffee made from acorns and their own home-cured ham but he realises these people are very poor and making a real sacrifice. He has to leave soon. It’s a Sunday and all through the day neighbours drop in for a chat and socialise and he has to remain deathly silent upstairs.
9. Appointment at the Pian del Sotto
Next day he tells kindly Zanzoni that he really must leave, he wants to stay somewhere he can earn his keep through labour. After running through possible candidates Zanoni’s wife suggests old Luigi who lives up on the Pian del Sotto.
So Zanzoni takes him a long roundabout walk through old oak forest, cutting his way through the dense brambles, heading further up to the treeline and to a three-storey concrete house, the Pian del Sotto, owned by Luigi. He’s in the kitchen with his flat-chested wife Agata, Rita the skinny daughter, an Amazon woman helper Dolores, and a chunky young labourer Armando. Zazoni negotiates terms in heavy dialect. Eventually Luigi agrees to take him on as an unskilled labourer, given room and board.
Kindly old Zanzoni says he’ll tell Giovanni back in the plain that he’s OK and with that turns and leaves. Luigi immediately tells Newby to start clearing the fields he can see from the house of all their rocks and stones.
10. Life on the Pian del Sotto
A warm-hearted, humorous description of the very basic life with Luigi’s peasant family, up at 6 for coffee and dried bread before the back-breaking work of the day begins. The crushing boredom of spending all day excavating stones from fields, loading them into the cart, dragging the cart to a cliff and tipping then over the edge. At 10am the merenda when everyone has woken up and is lively. It is here that the women in the household discuss their dreams and interpret them with the use of a popular guide.
Dinner after which the conversation, strangely enough, turns to London, or what they call la citè d’la fumarassa, which they all know is packed with peasouper fogs, streets clogged with hansom cabs, and the gruesome murders of Jack the Ripper solved by Sherlock Holmes.
A feature of the house is the ferocious, angry demented hound, Nero, which barks like mad and makes a lunge for Newby every time he goes in or out of the house. He takes to throwing the contents of his chamber pot at it every morning.
11. Encounter with a Member of the Master Race
One of the girls brings a letter back from the village written by Wanda and addressed to ‘Enrica’ which tells him in code that her father and Giovanni have been arrested, and warning him not to go on any long journeys i.e. not to try and escape north to Switzerland.
Sunday comes and while the rest of the family head down the mountain to villages, Newby chooses to spend the day hiking higher up the mountain, discovering the circular areas of soil cleared by the seasonal charcoal burners. It’s a wonderful walk beautifully described up – especially a couple of pages itemising all the different types of funghi he sees about which he knows absolutely nothing – through the thinning tree cover and then out onto a steep downland of cropped grass and across to an immense cliff. The sun is out, it’s warm and mazy and he lies down and falls asleep in the meadow.
He’s awoken by a German soldier in uniform. After he gets over the shock he realises the German means him no harm. In fact he is an eccentric figure, a keen butterfly collector who has got a rare day off and come up to the meadows armed with a butterfly net. He speaks good English and quickly spots that Newby is English. He introduces himself as Oberleutnant Frick, Education officer. He offers Newby a cool quality bottle of beer from Munich and speaks quite candidly, saying it is horrible to be hated simply for being German. He advises Newby to spend the winter where he is rather than head south where the fighting is going to become very hard. When Newby asks him about the fighting in Italy Frick says they can hold the Allies till the spring, probably the summer, but it is not here the war will be won or lost, it is in Russia where German losses are catastrophic. Then he shakes hands, makes a formal goodbye and runs off to catch butterflies.
When Newby arrives back at the house he discovers the arrival of the Oberleutnant created a mass panic among the villages, many of which conceal not Allied POWs but deserters, who all promptly headed for the hills. Then Newby produces the backpack full of fungi which he had collected up the hill, leading the women to scream at him to take the poisonous ones off the table, and Luigi to tick him off for collecting fungi which, it turns out, belongs to an old farmer who’s paid the commune for the right to pick them from a certain part of the wood, which is therefore his fungaia. The women cook the edible ones and they all enjoy them for dinner.
Newby’s decided not to head south, after what the German told him. He asks when the snow comes and Luigi says the first snow comes in November but the Big Snow comes at the end of December and then people can only get about on skis. Also he says, as the others go quiet, that’s when, wherever he’s hiding, ‘they’ will come and arrest him.
12. The Great Paura
Paura means fear as in ‘Ho paura’ meaning I’m afraid.
After a week or so Newby finally completes the task of clearing the rocks from the fields. The last massive boulders are removed by building fires next to or on them, then pouring icy water over then so they crack and explore and the fragments can be cleared.
One day as he’s heading to the primitive outside toilet Nero finally breaks his chain and comes bounding after him. Newby flees for a barn with hay piled against it and is scrabbling to climb the bales when two huge hands appear and yank him by his overalls up into the hayloft. It is the Amazonian landgirl Dolores and she promptly tells him to kiss her. Then to touch her. She had been working in the hot loft and had taken her jumper off to reveal a light slip. The reader can imagine the rest. They would have proceeded to sex is Agata hadn’t delivered one of her deafening yells to the menfolk to come and sort Nero out, which curtailed that adventure.
But a couple of days later the girls doll themselves up for a ballo down in the village and insist that Newby have a wash, shave, put on clean clothes and accompany them, which he reluctantly does, descending the steep cobbled path to the village with Rita and Dolores on each arm.
The ballo is in the hot kitchen of a village farm, music provided by old men playing a violin and an accordion and a drunken Dolores is coming on very strong when there’s a cry of ‘Germans! Germans!’ and the place empties in seconds.
Newby makes his way sideways, across fields and up towards the house and sees the entire village and the main path alive with torches. He climbs the ‘cliff’ which is made of clay and has gotten soft in the evening’s rain, and sees torches at the Pian del Sotto and is terrified that Luigi and Agata have been arrested or shot. He had always hidden a backpack ready to be grabbed at any moment and now he digs it out and then squats under the trees in the rain.
Some time later Luigi appears. He explains that it was a really big raid, a ‘sweep’ of the hills and villages looking for deserters. They knew he was here, a spy had blabbed, but Luigi and Agata lied and the searchers believed them. Now Luigi tells him he must climb through the woods to the meadows where he fell asleep and Frick found him, and go even higher till he encounters the lonely shepherd known as Abram. He shakes his hand, thanks him for clearing the rocks, and walks away, leaving Newby alone in the night in the rain.
13. Interlude in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
So Newby climbs up through the woods, beyond the tree line and up the meadows, all the while feeling guilty that he ought to be heading south to try and hook up with ‘his people’ i.e. the Allied armies. Except he’s gotten used to living up here in the mountains which has taken the edge off his courage and motivation. It’s foggy. He hears the flock of sheep before he sees it and then looming out of the mist the big shepherd, Abramo, who ironically shows him his castello (a sheepfold made of stones linked by branches) and palazzo (a shepherd’s hut). Newby is actually in a bad way, soaked through and shivering, so Abramo dries him in front of the fire and gives him new clothes, plus generous helpings of home-made gin.
Newby is out of it for several days while the gentle giant cares for him. Once he’s on the mend, Abramo shares hare stew and home-made cheese. After a couple of days a small boy arrives with instructions to take him back down to the village which he does with an agility and speed Newby can’t keep up with.
He’s taken to a house he hasn’t seen before, a splendid medieval building, in which a committee of six men announce that, since their own sons are far away in prisons or fighting at the front or on the run, they will look after him as if he was their own son and look after him through the coming winter which otherwise he won’t survive. they are going to build him a secret dwelling.
14. A Cave of One’s Own
After a wonderful meal and then a heavy night drinking with the men, at 4am the next morning they head up into the hills accompanied by a mule carrying equipment and corrugated iron. They select one of many clefts in the cliff and then, with deep expertise, build a cabin, built back into the cliff overhand, with stone and wooden walls and a sloping ceiling so it’s invisible. The man who supervises the work is tall and handsome with a nose like an eagle’s beak, named Francesco (p.220). Then they go inside, make a fire, have a round of drinks, give him instructions about not going out during daylight, shake hands and leave. It is Wednesday 27 October 1943.
Newby calls it his cave. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe’s fort by way of the cabin in the snowy woods Johnny Frizel builds for Edward Leithen in John Buchan’s Sick Heart River.
Newby can stand upright nowhere except by the (remarkably efficient) fire. Every day a messenger from the village comes, using the agreed password Brindisi, sometimes children but often black-dressed old grandmothers who brought sausage or eggs or soup and milk and acorn coffee. Extraordinary kindness and generosity.
Then he gets a message to go, two nights hence, on 16 November, to go to a hut he knows, a long convoluted journey through the impenetrable forest in the pouring rain, and here he meets Signor Zanoni who has brought Wanda. Hugs, kisses and lots of news. The Italian campaign is going badly, the Allies are stuck below Rome. The Germans have tightened control over Italy. Food is tightly rationed, petrol is becoming rare, she uses a bicycle.
In an earlier message he had learned that the doctor and Wanda’s father, the two men who got him out of the hospital, had both been arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned. Now she tells him the doctor faked appendicitis and then absconded from the hospital he was sent to is somewhere in the mountains, while her father got a job as an interpreter, having fought for the Austrians in the Great War.
There’s rumours of submarines picking up scattered groups of POWs and soldiers on the run off the coast which she’ll try to confirm. Then it’s time to go, they have last kisses and then he’s on his own in a cold hut and he bursts into tears.
15. Journey to the End of the Known World
Before she left Wanda had suggested Newby hike up out of the cleft he’s in, along a ridge to the spine or crinale of the mighty Apennines with a view to familiarising himself with the route and looking down over the mountains to the plains and the sea where, maybe, a mythical submarine might one day pick him up. She leaves him a densely detailed and almost indecipherable map.
Luckily the next visitor from the village with provisions happens to be Francesco, extremely intelligent and very experienced, who first tries to dissuade him from making the journey, and then gives him a very detailed account of what so look for.
Next morning at 5am Newby sets out with a backpack for the epic journey. There’s lots and lots of circumstantial description of the landscape and the route which, I think, you have to be a particular kind of person to enjoy. Takes him 11 hours to trek from the cave to the spine of the mountains. The view north is spectacular, he can see the Alps ranging east towards the Dolomites. But closer to hand he can see paths leading up from the plain to a crossing over the mountain, paths which are jam-packed with peasants struggling uphill bent under huge loads, bringing goods to trade and barter, which really brings home the deleterious impact of total war on ordinary impoverished people.
By now it’s getting dark and he retraces his steps to spend the night in an empty shepherd’s hut, well built to withstand the fierce winds.
Next morning there’s a dense fog and he can barely see 20 yards. This is why he gets lost. From the central spine of the Apennines countless ridges run off in both directions. In the fog he takes the wrong ridge heading north (i.e. back towards his valley, the villages and the cave) and has gone some way before he realises it as this new ridge starts descending far earlier than it ought. He ought to have retraced his steps back up to the spine and taken the correct ridge but, being tired and making poor decisions, instead he decides to descend the side of the ridge, into the river valley, and go up the other side onto ‘his’ ridge. What he hadn’t bargained for is the monstrous jungle of brambles growing under the trees. Huge entangled jungles of brambles twenty feet long with no paths or trails. He tries to cut his way through but loses his knife, tries to use his rucksack as a shield but it gets torn, his clothes are torn to pieces he is covered with cuts and bleeding all over by the time he emerges at a cliff looking down into the little stream at the bottom of the valley. Further dangerous teetering along the cliff edge before it becomes low enough for him to manoeuvre via rotting trees down to the valley floor. He wades along the freezing stream until the path up the other side becomes clear and sets about staggering up the other side.
As it begins to get dark he spies a hut on the hillside and makes for it, completely oblivious of security. An old man comes out to greet him well before he gets there and to his amazement it is the same deaf old man who sat in the back of the dottore’s car on that car journey to Parma and up into the foothills. A coincidence of Buchanesque proportions which makes you stop and wonder whether it’s made up, at which point you start to wonder how much of the account has been, well, embroidered if not plain invented.
The bent old deaf man welcomes him into his strange house, an Aladdin’s cave full of weird and wonderful contraptions which the man has obviously made himself, all the time keeping up a running commentary, in Italian, to himself.
Once they’ve eaten home-made chestnut polenta and a bitter salad, the old man sets off telling long rambling folk stories heedless of whether Newby is listening or not. In fact he nods off during the second one.
Next morning the old man shows him his extraordinary forge in which every implement is home made. He then gives him lunch and, just as Newby is about to broach the subject of moving on, the man puts on his coat, whistles for his dog, and sets off up the side of the valley
Two hours later they reach the top of the ridge and Newby recognises where he is. He tries to thank the man, who can’t hear him, and is wondering whether to shake his hand, when he turns and leaves.
A few hours later Newby is descending through the labyrinth of forest when he senses something is wrong. As he approaches his cave he sees there is smoke rising from the chimney. He hides his rucksack and lifts the rough sacking which forms the door. To his surprise he hears a posh English voice and is astonished to discover it is James, one of his friends from back at the orfanotrofio.
16. Gathering Darkness
James is a god friend, tall, burly with a ruddy complexion and a Roman nose, great at games, honest and sound. As he tells the stories of his hiding out Newby is a bit downcast to realise that James’s story is very like his i.e. his has not been such a unique adventure after all.
Francesco comes calling, tells Newby off for trying to cut through the forest from the wrong ridge, then tells him a lot more about the mysterious old man of the mountain who’s named Aurelio and is a legendary craftsman and storyteller.
Newby was to spend many weeks of November and December in the cave with James. The leaves fall off the trees making the passage of people to and from the cave more conspicuous. Then the snow comes. They amuse themselves reading passages from Surtees and Gibbon but are forced to spend all day inside, choking from the smoke from the fire. James develops impetigo, Newby gets a bad cough.
Then they are visited by three earnest young men with rusty guns who tell them they are forming a bande of partisans. They have a crack-brained scheme to blow up a petrol dump three days march away on the Via Emilia. James and Newby give a detailed analysis of why this is a dreadful idea but feel duty bound to help. The local people have put themselves out so much to help them it feels shameful and churlish not to act when asked. Luckily the three young zealots fail to turn up at the rendezvous they fix for a few nights later and they never see them again.
Then, a few days after the really heavy snowfall has blanketed the forest, freezing the stream where they get their water, Francesco arrives with bad news. The milizia are coming to capture them at 8pm that evening. They must leave the cave right away.
17. Beginning of the End
So they pack a bag – Francesco has brought them a sack of rice and 20 loaves of bread – and tramp through the thick snow up out of the forest to the hut of the shepherd Abramo, who we met several chapters ago. Here they say goodbye to Francesco and are handed over to a young guide, Alfredo, who takes them down into the next valley, freezing cold wind, stopping for cigarettes and once a fire and a meal, before carrying on, fording a river, on the run, carrying heavy bags in freezing conditions.
They climb again until they come across a group of charcoal burners, existing in a primitive baracca, all quite black with the smoke of their work. Newby had never met people quite so degraded and immiserated.
Alfredo hands them over to one of the charcoal burners, turns and goes back the way he came. The burner takes them onto a hut where they were meant to rendezvous with a bande i.e. partisans, but it is empty and abandoned, so they press on, the charcoal burner leaving them.
Almost at the end of their tethers they come across a haystore built into a slope of the mountain, force open the door and pass out. Hours later they are woken by a little boy asking who they are, who returns in a bit with a middle-aged man who is almost blind. To their inexpressible gratitude he says he will look after and feed them.
And so this man, Amadeo, looks after them, getting the barn made habitable with beds and a fireplace, and sending his children with food every day. In return he regularly comes and sits with them and asks questions about the great world which Newby and James do their best to answer.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day James and Newby are invited down to the village to festivities at the houses of various villagers, stuffed full of local food and then given the best Christmas present ever, a hot bath in half a wine barrel. And then Newby receives an unexpected bonus, a slip of paper with the simple message, ‘Kisses, Wanda’.
About noon on 29 December they are captured. The barn is surrounded by evil-looking troops from the Fascist militia, they are marched down the hillside and loaded into a waiting lorry, and taken off to a second period of captivity.
Epilogue
Surprisingly, Newby doesn’t describe anything about his second incarceration or his second liberation, not a thing. Instead he jumps to 1956 when he and Wanda, now married with two children, return to the scenes of his escapades. In fact the pair had worked in 1946 for a charity which sought to reward families who had helped Allied soldiers on the run. But it’s the later 1956 trip which Newby makes into a big set-piece, with him and Wanda revisiting the houses of everyone who helped them, and shaking hands and having reunions. Some of the old houses have fallen down, the charcoal burners have gone, everyone uses methane gas now. Electricity lines drape the valleys, roads penetrate higher, the sound of petrol-driven tractors from the valley, no more driving cattle-led ploughs like Armando did.
Right at the very end, old Francesco who helped him survive in the cave, takes Newby to one side and says he knows the identities of the man who betrayed them in his village, and the woman who betrayed them in the haybarn village. He assures him that both did it to protect their villages and their people and turned down the cash rewards the milizia offered. Does he want to know who they were? And Newby’s last word is ‘No’. There have been enough recriminations and vendettas. It was a long time ago. Forgive and forget.
Thoughts
What an amazing book, what incredible experiences, and what a moving tribute to the kindness and generosity of human nature. It made me overflow with feelings of gratitude and respect. What a wonderfully life-affirming book.
Newby and God
In the final passages where James comes to stay in the cave, Newby describes his friend’s straightforward Christian faith and contrasts it with his own more heterodox views:
James used to read out bits of the Bible, usually some bloodthirsty piece of Old Testament military history which he thought appropriate and would amuse me. He was a conventional Christian. Just as he had before the war, he used to go to church every Sunday in the orfanotrofio, and it would never have occurred to him not to do so. It was not just lip service to the established religion. He believed in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. I believed in God, and had done ever since I had been a sailor in a sailing ship before the war; but the God I believed in was neither beneficent nor hostile. As he was everything how could he be? And if he was everything how could he be moved by prayer? If it was a question of life and death you died when the time came for you to do so, peacefully or horribly. My time had not yet come when the foot of an upper topsail had flicked me off the yard, a hundred and thirty feet above the Southern Ocean in 1939; or that night in the Bay of Catania, or the following one in the fortress where they told us that we were going to be shot; but it could be any time. It might be quite soon now.
At one time I prayed that a bomb would not fall on the people in England I loved; but it seemed almost impertinent; better, if anything, to pray that bombs would cease to fall on anyone. To me prayer had no efficacy as a preservative, at the most it was a profession of love, a remembrance, a reminder that there had been a past and might be a future, and perhaps this was its vale. At this time, whether I was right or wrong, I felt clearer in my mind about these things than I have ever done since. (pages 274 to 275)
This is very eloquent but it’s not Christianity, is it, surely it’s stoicism? Surely the belief that the universe is equivalent to a God who is everywhere, and that our destinies are foreordained, without any reference to the Trinity, Christ or the resurrection, is textbook stoicism? See:
Newby is a charming narrator, a lovely man with an endearingly self-deprecating sense of humour.
I had a fatal aptitude for being good at interviews, the results of which I invariably regretted subsequently, almost as much as the interviewers. (p.127)
After what seemed an eternity the conversation rumbled to a close, rather like a train of goods wagons coming to rest in a marshalling yard. (p.134)
Credit
Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby was published in 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.
‘I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust.’
(Buchan’s central message, delivered in this book by John Heritage, poet and soldier, page 116)
I’ve been reading old John Buchan novels I’ve picked up in second-hand shops as a break from the Africa project which overflowed with famine, civil wars, military coups, massacre, torture and child soldiers.
However, reading the series of five novels about Sir Edward Leithen has not turned out to be as easy and relaxing as I imagined. They all show the same weaknesses, which include the off-puttingly upper-class milieu, his terrible way with names but, above all, the weirdly contorted and contrived storylines.
Having finished the five Leithen books, as an experiment I tried one other novel (he wrote 30), this one the first of the series of three novels featuring on the face of it a very different protagonist, the retired Glasgow greengrocer and businessman, Dickson McCunn, ‘late of Mearns Street, Glasgow, wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and fifty-five years of age’ (p.55).
He makes an effort to show McCunn as coming from a different class than the hunting, shooting and fishing, Oxford and the bar Leithen, moving in his high society circles – instead McCunn is obviously intended to be a broadly comical figure and the story does, here and there, raise a wan smile, although ‘comic’ is not the term. It’s quite funny that Heritage mishears Dickson’s name and insists on referring to him throughout as ‘Dogson’.
Instead the plot is standard Buchan thriller i.e. a number of thriller tropes strung together on a wildly improbable and frequently incomprehensible plot.
The plot
So this Dickson McCunn is not just any old greengrocer, that would be a bit too déclassé – instead he has, until the novel opens, been the owner of the largest food and greengrocery supply business in all Glasgow
The big provision shop in Mearns Street—now the United Supply Stores, Limited
‘you’re a household name in these parts. I get all my supplies from you,’, says Lord
‘Comic’ touches are that he is a member of a literary society and likes to quote Tennyson and Browning i.e. is amusingly behind the times, and is inordinately proud of the safety razor he has just treated himself to. He has just the day before sold the grocery store he has built into the city’s premier emporium. Now, aged 55, he wants to have adventures. The broad comic joke of the entire novel is that he stumbles into an adventure and discovers that real-life adventures are not at all the entertaining romances he imagined.
What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. (p.53)
So McCunn packs his bags and heads off for a walking tour of the Carrick district of Galloway (p.25). Before he goes:
That morning he had received an epistle from a benevolent acquaintance, one Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who called themselves the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’. Behind the premises in Mearns Street lay a tract of slums, full of mischievous boys with whom his staff waged truceless war. But lately there had started among them a kind of unauthorised and unofficial Boy Scouts, who, without uniform or badge or any kind of paraphernalia, followed the banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and subjected themselves to a rude discipline. They were far too poor to join an orthodox troop, but they faithfully copied what they believed to be the practices of more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their pathetic parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader, a red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send them to camp in the country. Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not deny to others what he proposed for himself. His last act before leaving was to send Mackintosh ten pounds.
Tramping the roads turns out to be not quite as glamorous as the poets make it sound. On the first day he meets beggars and tramps who are not as picturesque as he hoped. The second day he is tired and the weather takes a turn for the worse.
At the Bull Inn at Kirkmichael McCunn meets John Heritage, a posh Englishman and would-be poet. They have an argument of sorts because Buchan makes Heritage the kind of superficial posing socialist that he despised. He makes Heritage a) sympathise with the Bolsheviks in Russia the novel was serialised in 1921 i.e. while the Russian civil war was still in full swing) and b) take a ludicrously dewy-eyed view of the working class. To which an irritated McCunn delivers an eloquent rebuke:
‘You ideelise the working-man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday…. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!’ (p.28)
McCunn then reads the slim volume of verse Heritage has published (titled Whorls), which is an opportunity for Buchan to ridicule modern poetry, thus showing what a philistine he was. NB Also at the inn is a stranger he chats to for a while, a handsome young man with an Australian accent. Anyway, after his argument with Heritage he goes back to Mrs Morran’s place and so to bed.
Next morning McCunn has breakfast early and sets off. He comes across a detour from the main road which apparently leads to a peninsula of land which leads from Kirkmichael down to the sea, with a sign reading ‘Dalquharter and Huntingtower. (The peninsula is known as the Cruives, an old name which is ‘something to do with fishing.’ Hence the name of the village pub, The Cruives Inn.)
McCunn tosses a coin to decide whether to walk on or take make a detour to see this Huntingtower place and it comes down tail, for the detour.
He is irritated, after walking a way, to see the poet’s figure approaching up a tributary road. They fall in together and walk onto a pretty village. The innkeeper here is surprisingly rude and says there’s no room, so they poke around and come across a private house which does rooms in the care of sweet little old lady Mrs (Phemie) Morran.
She makes them a fine tea and when McCunn asks about this Huntingtower delivers a handy history. It’s always belonged to the Kennedy family, until the most recent heir to the family, name, Quentin Kennedy, went off to the war and died of the influenza. Now the place is up for sale.
After lunch our boys set off to see the house but when they come to the lodge are met by a rude and officious gatekeeper who tells them no. This, of course, is a red rag to a bull, and Heritage and McCunn follow the wall round till it turns to hedge, slip through it and go to explore the house. En route they flop down in pretty fields with a view and talk about poetry and Heritage whistles an aria from a Russian opera then goes on to tell the story of how he was posted to Italy at the end of the war and from his rooms by the Spanish Steps heard a guest in the same hotel, a pretty Russian girl, sing this air.
Finally they arrive in sight of the house but are disappointed to see that instead of a weathered rocky old pile it is a newly built house but a pastiche of a Tudor mansion, completely inappropriate for this harsh northern clime.
Dickson had never before been affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted to get far away from it as fast as possible.
Buchan uses the same tactic in The Dancing Floor where he just asserts that the Greek village his heroes arrive at is eerie and spooky, without very much evidence, and then repeats the assertion in various ways until the reader is compelled to buy into it if you’re going to accept the story at all. He often does this. Asserts a factitious mood of foreboding with absolutely no justification, just because he needs to concoct an atmosphere of menace which then underpins the flaky plot.
Dickson’s mind was a chaos of feelings, all of them unpleasant. He had run up against something which he violently, blindly detested, and the trouble was that he could not tell why. It was all perfectly absurd, for why on earth should an ugly house, some overgrown trees and a couple of ill-favoured servants so malignly affect him? Yet this was the fact; he had strayed out of Arcady into a sphere that filled him with revolt and a nameless fear. Never in his experience had he felt like this, this foolish childish panic which took all the colour and zest out of life.
And:
‘I called this place Paradise four hours ago,’ Heritage said. ‘So it is, but I fancy it is next door to Hell. There is something devilish going on inside that park wall and I mean to get to the bottom of it.’
Forced. Contrived.
Then several things happen which justify the accusation of outrageous coincidences. They hear footsteps as another officious porter or lodgemaster arrives and so begin to head away, but Heritage suddenly falls to his knees. He’s heard singing coming from the open window of the house and it isthe voice of the beautiful Russian girl he met at the Spanish Steps!!!!! Of all the people in all the world, they just happen to bump into the very one Heritage was telling a story about 5 minutes earlier…
They hasten back to the nice cottage of Mrs Morran for tea where they spread out a map, with Heritage determined to go back, defy the gatekeepers and get into the house, when there’s a commotion as a dirty ragamuffin boy forces his way through to the parlour where he identifies himself to McCunn as…the very leader of the Gorbals wanna-be Boy Scouts who McCunn gave some money to as his last gesture before leaving the city. Quite a coincidence!
The Die-Hards are on some kind of outward bound, Boy Scout trip to the region, when they, also, had stumbled across the mysterious house and then been rebuffed by the rude gatekeepers, since when they’ve taken to staking out. So not only a coincidence that the boys McCunn gives charitable donations too just happen to have come to the exact same corner of Scotland as he has, but are staking out exactly the same house which he and Heritage have developed an interest in!
Apparently Buchan sub-titled the novel ‘A Glasgow fairy tale’ and he tells us straight out from the first that McCunn was looking for romance and adventure. The Russian princess is referred to three times as ‘a fairy tale princess’. And the characters themselves archly refer to being in an old fashioned romance:
‘You should be happy, Dogson,’ said the Poet. ‘Here we have all the materials for your blessed romance – old mansion, extinct family, village deserted of men and an innkeeper whom I suspect of being a villain.’
Long story short, these lads, known as the Gorbals Die-Hards and led by one Dougal Crombie, join forces with McCunn and Heritage. Through a series of convoluted complexities and a great deal of sneaking down the valley of the adjacent river, and crossing fords, and sneaking behind bushes and across lawns etc etc they eventually gain admittance to the house and discover it contains two Russian women, Saskia and her elderly cousin, Eugènie (first named on page 67). Saskia is, of course:
tall – that he could tell, tall and slim and very young. (p.63)
Dickson insisted on stripping off his trusty waterproof and forcing it on the Princess, on whose slim body it hung very loose and very short.
the slim girl, into whose face the weather had whipped a glow like blossom
And:
Dickson’s first impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. (p.65)
And:
Again Dickson was reminded of a child, for her arms hung limp by her side; and her slim figure in its odd clothes was curiously like that of a boy in a school blazer. (p.70)
Right at the end of the story:
She is no more the tragic muse of the past week, but a laughing child again, full of snatches of song, her eyes bright with expectation. (p.206)
Later:
He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy’s. (p.137)
All the classiest women are slim. The best kind of women have the quality of children. But the absolute bestest women are actually boys.
The younger prettier one, Saskia, explains. They once belonged to one of the grandest families in Russia. When the revolution struck they formed part of the general resistance of their class. As the tide turned against them they were tasked with saving jewels belonging to the Russian royal family. These they smuggled out as far as France.
But here some thriller voodoo intervenes because Saskia emphasises that the criminal Bolsheviks have agents everywhere on the lookout for them and the jewels. When these agents closed in on them in France they fled to Scotland. Saskia had met a noble Scot named Quentin Kennedy who told her he owned a fined house where she would be welcome to stay, and gave her a letter of introduction to his ‘factor’, Loudon (p.69). But when she arrived in Scotland and came to the house she found herself imprisoned and guarded by the three men who Heritage, McCunn and the Die-Hards have seen patrolling the grounds.
Illogically, although her coming was anticipated, none of these bad guys intercepted her before she actually got to Huntingtower nor, since she arrived, have they searched or interrogated her to find the whereabouts of the jewels. Well, they asked her where the jewels were and she refused to tell them and these international terrorists left it at that! This simply doesn’t make sense and is typical of the yawning plot holes or lack of logic which lace Buchan’s ‘shockers’.
Saskia says her gaolers are awaiting the arrival of another man, their master, the leader of the conspiracy, who McCunn and Heritage nickname The Unknown.
Chapter 6
Well, they decide McCunn should take the jewels to his bank in Glasgow. This he does, although the episode is milked of as much paranoid thriller voodoo as possible, with a messenger from the besieged house racing after the horse and cart McCunn goes to the railway station in, the creepy inn-keeper Dobson who is clearly in on the conspiracy leaping onto the train and keeping tabs on him, and then the package which McCunn accidentally on purpose leaves exposed in a cab he’s hired, sure enough being stolen. As in The Power-House, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan is at pains to convey the sense of a vast invisible conspiracy with its tentacles in every city.
Anyway, the box the baddie steals from the cab was a decoy and McCunn gaily walks into the biggest bank in Glasgow to reveal that he has the princess’s precious jewels sown into his shirt and waistcoat, he cuts them free and puts them in a safety deposit box.
So, on the face of it, grocer supremo Dickson McCunn has done more than his fair share of helping a damsel in distress and ensuring that her treasure is safe. However, this is a thriller and we all want to know what happens back at Huntingtower and how the siege will play out, right?
And so Buchan gives his middle-aged grocer a crisis of conscience, making him pause as he catches a tram back to his town house and ask himself whether he isn’t running away precisely when his friends need him most etc (p.85). Maybe this is a plausible piece of plotting but it feels a lot like Buchan bending his character in order to reinvolve him with the entire convoluted plot to the end.
By the time he’s gotten off the tram he has come to the decision to go back into the valley of doom and help Heritage and the beautiful princess. However, being a practical businessman he takes practical steps. First of all he orders a huge hamper of luxury provisions which he will take with him to feed the allies (Heritage, the ladies, the Die-Hards).
Then he goes to see his Glasgow lawyer (Mr Caw of Paton and Linklater) to ask him to contact the firm in Edinburgh responsible for renting out Huntingtower. He makes as if he, the wealthy Glasgow businessman, wants to buy it and to warn the factor, Loudon, that he is on his way, today or tomorrow.
Then he goes to see Mr McNair a gunsmith who is a fellow elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. Unfortunately, the careful Scot says he can’t sell him a gun – but he can lend him a service pistol and 50 cartridges (p.88). Thus armed, McCunn hastens to catch the 7.33 from Glasgow to Kirkmichael.
Chapter 7
McCunn checks into the Salutation Hotel at Auchenlochan and sets off to visit the lawyer Loudon. Loudon gives him a thorough, intelligent summary of the state of Huntingtower and is readily willing that McCunn see it and buy it; he just reasonably insists that he needs to inform the owners, who live abroad, how about visiting sometime next week? He insists that nobody is allowed inside the building so is fazed when McCunn insists he saw some women in it. He then changes his story to tell some cock-and-bull yarn about a mad old relative of the family that’s being kept there – it’s she who will take a week or so to get out of the way before McCunn can visit. At this point McCunn realises Loudon is lying and is in on the conspiracy.
He doesn’t let on and instead says he’ll be returning to Glasgow by the late train, shakes hands and leaves. His suspicions are confirmed when he hangs around in the shadow on the other side of the street and see Dobson, the dodgy inn-keeper, slouch up and go round the side of Loudon’s house. They’re in on it together.
McCunn walks along the main road to Dalquharter and is accosted by one of the Die-Hards who takes him to their camp in the woods, very neatly done with a fire burning. Dougal tells him they’ve smuggled Heritage into the house again. McCunn tells Dougal to send some of the boys to the station to fetch the big hamper of food which has been delivered to the station. Dougal then introduces him to the rest of the ‘men’, being:
Thomas Yownie, the chief of staff
Peer Pairson
Napoleon
Wee Jaikie
Auld Bull
Chapter 8
After this sojourn with the Die-Hards McCunn goes straight to Mrs Morran’s, checks in and falls fast asleep. At 1o the next morning Dobson pays a visit and is rudely officious, warning McCunn that he is not allowed to go near the house nor to walk along the coast. it degenerates into a shouting match with McCunn saying Dobson is obviously hiding something he doesn’t want other people to see and Dobson losing his temper, shouting abuse, banging his head on the lintel and falling down the stairs on his way out (p.107).
To be one the safe side, to forestall attack, McCunn persuades little Mrs Morran to accompany him along the main road to the bridge across the river where she turns to go home while he cuts down a track beside the river running to the sea. Maybe this is intended to be spooky, maybe it’s intended to be comic, but it comes over as bizarre.
After a great deal of unnecessary fuss and complication, McCunn crosses the river where it hits the beach under the guidance of Auld Bill and arrives at cliff tops beneath the house and has to be helped up them etc etc. All instead of just walking up to the house and pulling out the gun if any of the three guards try to stop him. There’s always a huge amount of sneaking over heather, and fording rivers, and clambering up cliffs in Buchan stories, rather than just knocking on the front door.
Chapter 9
Incomprehensibly, rather than just take the princess far far away, for example to Glasgow, the allies have decided to spirit her out of the main house and down to the old ruined watch tower in the grounds (!?). Having dumped equipment here, they all then sneak up to the house, across the verandah (pretty easily avoiding the supposed guards) and into the garden room.
Here he meets Heritage who tells him the latest news. Saskia has given more details about Mr Unknown, about the Mastermind behind her (not very effective) kidnap. He comes from a rich family but when the revolution broke out, threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He is a kind of evil genius, ‘none of your callow revolutionaries’.
A digression on antisemitism
Buchan, or his character, betrays the typical bourgeois or aristocratic belief that mere working class people couldn’t have overthrown an entire social order, couldn’t possibly win a war against armies led by aristocrats and bolstered by British and allied forces. Ghastly oiks couldn’t possibly do all that by themselves. This is one source of the popular stereotype that there must be mysterious powers behind the revolution, either renegade aristocrats (as here) or, much more perniciously, the Jews. According to the notes to this book there was an academic spat about whether Buchan was antisemitic or not, a long time ago, in the 1970s. Buchan may or may not have been but some of his characters certainly are. Here’s the view of the ‘fairy tale princess’ Saskia:
‘Our enemies were very clever, and soon the hunt was cried against me. They tried to rob me of [the jewels], but they failed, for I too had become clever. Then they asked the help of the law – first in Italy and then in France. Oh, it was subtly done. Respectable bourgeois, who hated the Bolsheviki but had bought long ago the bonds of my country, desired to be repaid their debts out of the property of the Russian Crown which might be found in the West. But behind them were the Jews, and behind the Jews our unsleeping enemies.’ (p.68)
And here’s Heritage, supposedly one of the good guys:
‘The place for you,’ said Dickson dryly, ‘is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.’
Mr. Heritage approved. ‘They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods – they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them – but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.’
Mind you, Heritage’s antisemitism lies alongside his ignorant support of the Bolsheviks, of which he is later completely cured. So possibly antisemitism is expressed by characters who are intended to be callow, naive and ignorant, and who eventually learn better. Maybe.
Anyway, the allies all conclude that the Big Bad Man is coming that very night. They continue into the house and deliver McCunn’s magnificent hamper of luxuries to the Russian ladies. Saskia is overwhelmed and gives McCunn a kiss. This transports him to seventh heaven, a moment familiar from a million movies where the glamorous young heroine gives the middle-aged old hero’s assistant a kiss and transports him back to his youth!
Heritage has a plan. They’re inside the house now. Rather than go outside to engage in battle he plans to lure the three guards inside and lock them up. And using the Die-Hards, this is exactly what they do, wait for the guards to enter, then turn the lights off and lure them via noises or mutterings or distant lamps into three separate cellars or rooms where they can be locked tight. But not before one of them, the one called Léon, bumps into McCunn and, mistaking him for Dobson, shares the news that the Unknown is arriving at dawn aboard a Danish brig. When the bad guy realises it’s not Dobson he’s talking to there’s a mad scuffle in which Heritage gets knocked to the stone floor and knocked unconscious. At which point half a dozen Die-Hards jump on him, disarm him and bundle him into a cupboard which they lock.
All the good guys emerge onto the verandah, along with provisions, waterproofs and whatnot. There’s a banging of pots at the other end and McCunn sees a figure against a glass door. In that moment McCunnis convinced that this must be the Fourth Man they are all waiting for and pulls out the loaded pistol he was lent by Mr McNair and fires. He wings the figure who spins and disappears into the house. but something about the way he moved makes McCunn realise it is Loudon the factor (p.125).
Now, I was genuinely shocked by this. McCunn, up until now a figure of fun, is ready to shoot dead someone whose identity he can’t even make out in the dark. He’s as bad as the Bolsheviks.
Chapter 10
Inexplicably, rather than heading inland and getting as far away from the coast where the boat full of baddies is about to arrive, heading, for example, to the bloody train station, catching a train to Glasgow, reporting everything to the police and putting Saskia under diplomatic protection, the Allies decide instead to hole up in the ruined tower stop the cliffs. Here they Heritage comes round from his concussion, and they have another long debate about their plight.
Here something emerges into the full light which I hadn’t noticed previously which is somewhere along the line, Saskia had told them that she had been told to wait at Huntingtower for ‘her friend’. McCunn makes the super-sensible point that they should get to safety then send this ‘friend’ a message. Saskia obstinately refuses to leave (p.130). This is just stupid and feels like a contrivance to drag out the already thin and creaking plot.
Now McCunn comes up with a hare-brained scheme. Coming into the village several times he’s noticed a big white house (i.e. country house) on a hill. Why doesn’t he go there and try to recruit the laird and his people? He’ll need some evidence or they’ll think him mad, so he says he’ll take Saskia and, improbably, she agrees to go. Meanwhile, they’ll take Eugenie to Mrs Morran’s where she can be put to bed in a nice warm bed. (Good grief, do they think a gang of international terrorists aren’t capable of storming a little old lady’s b&b?)
So first McCunn accompanies both women through gathering rain and wet grass and grounds and along the empty road to Mrs Morran’s cottage. Here the old lady, with the instinctive reverence for aristocracy which conservatives like Buchan like to believe hide in the hearts of every peasant, curtseys to the princess. Then she tells McCunn to go stay in the attic room while the strips, dries and dresses both ladies in good solid highland clothes. McCunn is astonished in the change in Saskia’s appearance once she is wearing:
a heavy tweed skirt cut very short, and thick homespun stockings, which had been made for someone with larger feet than hers. A pair of the coarse low-heeled shoes, which country folk wear in the farmyard, stood warming by the hearth. She still had her russet jumper, but round her neck hung a grey wool scarf, of the kind known as a ‘comforter’. (p.135)
Mrs Morran then makes them a fine breakfast with hot tea as if they had all the time in the world. Eugènie is put to bed and McCunn and Saskia, covered in waterproofs, set off into the rain again, and there is a typically tortuous description of the elaborate route via roads, tracks, heather, moorland and whatnot till they get to the front door of the big house on the hill overlooking the railway station. (Get on a train at the railway station and hie to Glasgow, maybe then to London and complete safety? No.)
Mrs Morran had told McCunn over breakfast that this house belonged to the dashing hero Sir Archibald Roylance, one of Buchan’s recurring characters. The one-armed butler shows them into Roylance who is lounging in a chair bored, reading a book. As McCunn tells him the story, he leaps out of the chair exclaiming, in an impeccably posh dropped h, that ‘It’s more absurd than this shocker I’ve been readin’.’
Chapter 11
Astonished at the turn of events, Roylance bows to the princess and then they converse. He confirms that he was one of Quentin Kennedy’s best friends, they went to the same school together etc. Saskia tells him her story but Buchan says explicitly that she gives more detail now that she is talking to someone of her own class. In particular, she identifies the Great Unknown as a Russian man named Paul Abreskov.
Once he’s heard the full story, Roylance declares he’ll take Saskia to the local head of police and then bring her back here where he can defend her. But Saskia obstinately insists that she return to the hunting tower, to meet with her friend and to support Heritage and the Die-Hards who are fighting on her behalf.
When McCunn expresses his wish to get back in the fight, too, Roylance is inspired to join them. Unfortunately every single member of his staff, including himself, was wounded or crippled in the war. So McCunn tells Roylance to take Saskia to see the cops while he borrows his bicycle to get back to the house. But on the way his bike has a stick through the spokes which sends him flying and knocked unconscious, by two mercenaries paid by Dobson to get him.
Out for a walk, Mrs Morran comes across McMunn’s hat, sees a scuffle took place in the roadside mud, finds the bicycle hidden in bushes and concludes that McMunn has been captured. On the road back she comes across Wee Jaikie and tells him to sound the alarm (p.149).
Chapter 12
When McCunn comes round he’s tied to a tree. He has a couple of pages of regretting ever getting caught up in ‘romance’ and adventures (‘He did not want to die’ etc) before Wee Jaikie appears and cuts most of his bonds but is interrupted by the return of his capturers. These loiter just long enough to taunt him for being captured and sharing with the reader the vital information that the Danish brig has arrived and anchored and the baddies will be landing in half an hour. Then they move off, allowing Wee Jaikie to return and finish cutting McCunn free.
McCunn staggers back up to the public highway and encounters a man squatting down and repairing his motorcycle. He is a handsome young man who McCunn recognises as the man with the Australian accent he met at the Black Bull inn way back at the start of the story. Now the thing is that, during one of the many conversations between McCunn and Heritage about the mysterious Unknown Man who Saskia has told them she’s terribly afraid of, the mastermind of the kidnappers etc, our guys had decided it must be this Australian fellow. So the chap has barely looked up from his tinkering with his bike before McCunn grabs a spanner and takes a wild swing at him. Luckily the man ducks and then stands and punches McCunn, knocking the older man flat.
After some moments of understandable confusion, the man reveals that, far from being the Enemy, he is in fact The Friend who Saskia keeps going on about, the one she promised she’d meet here, the meeting which is her excuse for not doing the sensible thing and catching a train to Glasgow.
He introduces himself as going by the name of Alexander Nicholson but his real name is, of course, Russian, being Alexis Nicolaevitch. He quickly gives his backstory i.e. he left Russia before the war and emigrated to Australia, went back when war broke out, and when Russia signed its ceasefire made his way to join Australians fighting on the western front, and so found himself in Paris after the war.
And, of course, he is not just a ‘friend’ but the fiancé of the beautiful princess (‘She is my kinswoman. She is also my affianced wife’ p.159). He is, in fact, the fairy prince. And of course, desperately interested when McCunn reveals that he, McCunn, knows where the princess is and has been helping her.
So he helps McCunn onto the back of the bike and they set off towards the village but are almost immediately intercepted by Dougal, head of the Die-Hards. He tells the two men that the enemy ships have arrived, three boatloads of 23 or 24 men.
As usual with Buchan the situation feels needlessly complicated. Dougal tells them the enemy are on their way to besiege the tower. Heritage and some of the boys are inside and will put up a stiff fight. But when Lord Roylance returned with Saskia, Dougal insisted on putting them up in the house, allowing the enemy to think they’re in the tower, while they remain safe and at large (why oh why don’t they head away from the blasted enemy?).
Apparently, Roylance and Saskia got to meet the chief constable who believed their story but said it would take a while to rouse his men (really?) so there’ll be no help from that quarter for a while (really? when the country is being invaded by foreign nationals?)
Chapter 13
Cut to John Heritage holed up in the old tower and barely believing that an enlightened modern man could be caught up in an adventure out of romance. He’s alone in the tower but a) notifies the guards (who have managed to get out of their locked rooms in the main house) by shouting at them from the windows, b) and convinces them the princess is with them by waving skirts around and mimicking conversations in French for the guards’ benefit.
Dawn comes up and the morning passes and then the afternoon with nothing much happening except Heritage becoming more and more anxious. He fondly imagines the police, tipped off by Roylance, will arrive any moment and capture the whole pack of enemies. It gets chilly and in a typically waspish incident, Buchan has the one-time poet tear up his own slim volume of verse in order to feed the fire in the tower. You see, once a young man has tasted ‘action’ all his poetic vapourings, as well as his foolish left-wing tendencies, will evaporate.
Finally something happens which is a whole crowd of wet-looking rough sailors arrive and form a siege party. A posh man yells up at him to let them in, but Heritage stoutly refuses. He has been charged with defending the tower and he will stay to the end. When several try the door he shoots. Then they get a battering ram and pound the door again, and he shoots through a crack in the masonry and hits someone. Finally he sees something lob a bomb at the door which explodes in a great crash of timber and he hears the mob pouring into the ground floor of the tower. So Heritage retreats up the stairs to the topmost parapet and prepares to sell his life dear.
But at that moment he sees a white figure come running from the house and with horror realises it is the princess who he thought was miles away. She’s obviously seen the mob besiege and then storm the tower where a brave man is prepared to give his life for her. And so she runs down to within earshot of the mob and harangues them in Russian, then turns and runs off. The enemy forget all about Heritage, pour back out of the tower and set off in pursuit of the girl.
So really, Heritage’s occupation of the tower for most of the day had absolutely no practical value because it didn’t allow the princess to go anywhere, in fact the opposite, as soon as it began to fall she rushed within sight of her enemies. Like so much in Buchan it’s quite exciting and action-packed so long as you don’t actually think about its plausibility.
Chapter 14
Back to Dougal when Sir Archie arrives along with Sime the butler, Carfrae the chauffeur, and McGuffog the gamekeeper, and an armful of guns and two big cartridge-magazines. There is a typically long-winded debate about what to do: Roylance is for going to join Heritage in the tower, but Dougal objects that they would then be presenting themselves as sitting ducks. Dougal; counter-suggests that the ten or so of them go down to the beach heavily armed and fire on the sailors when they try to land, killing many of them. Roylance says that is illegal in a law-abiding country, and so they find themselves pushed back into the strategy of reoccupying the house and withstanding a siege. Innumerable details of how they barricade every door and window, Roylance all the time worried in case the whole thing is a mistake and they get in bad trouble with the law.
Eventually they see the figures coming from the seaward end of the house’s lawns and making for the tower. Panic stations. They hear the shots Heritage fired and then the explosion of the bomb. Saskia is wound up into a fever of concern and suddenly tells Roylance she’s going to save Heritage, wriggles through one of the blocked doors and is gone.
As we saw through Heritage’s eyes, she breasts a ridge and shouts at the attackers who promptly leave the tower to chase her. We see the breathless pursuit through Roylance’s eyes, who shoots the lead enemy who is getting within yards of the tiring girl in the leg. She reaches the ladder up the steep wall to the veranda as the leaders of mob close in but then suddenly a tall man emerges from nowhere, picks her up and forces her up the ladder our boys had leaned against the wall and turns to face the mob, addressing them in Russian. It is, of course, Alexis the fairy prince.
He harangues the mob then turns, races up the ladder, drawing it up after him, and through a part-open door into the house which is quickly barricaded. Saskia recognises her Alesha and runs into his arms. Our chaps hurriedly deploy their forces and then the whole thing turns into the defence of the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift, as the enemy try to break through various doors or windows only to meet fierce resistance.
Despite valiant fighting our team are forced to make an orderly retreat to the first floor landing. Suddenly out of the mob of sailors steps the elegant figure of Paul Abreskov, former lover of Saskia and now Bolshevik leader. In impeccable English he politely says the fight is now over and asks Saskia to come with him.
Obviously Saskia defies him, backed up by Roylance. Suddenly the mood in the mob at the bottom of the stairs changes. Messengers come from outside and they start to waver. Paul makes another plea as Dobson re-enters and tells him they must go now, the police have arrived, they’ll all be arrested. Then an evil look comes into Paul’s eye and he says if he can’t have Saskia, no-one can have her, and he reaches into his pocket, they hear a click and his hand comes out ready to throw.
At that second a figure comes out of nowhere, grabs Paul’s hand and makes a throw into the corner. The bomb Paul meant to throw at our team goes off with a terrific bang, blowing a hole through the fireplace into the next room. When the smoke clears their saviour is revealed to be Heritage, come from the tower, and Paul, like all the attackers, has gone.
Heritage announces that the police have just this moment arrived. Then who the devil was worrying the mob so for the previous ten minutes? At which one of the Die-Hards enters the room, wet and torn and scratched and bleeding, to be greeted by his chief, Dougal. Yes it was the Gorbals Die-Hards who saved the day!
Chapter 15
Goes back in time a few hours to tell things from McCunn’s point of view. Having escaped from being tied up, and mistakenly hitting out at Alexis, he had let the fairy prince and the Die-Hard zoom off on their motorbike and walked to Mrs Morran’s. Here he discovered was the command post of Thomas Yownie. He, the other Die-Hards and especially Mrs Morran are very concerned for nice Mr Heritage. First they hear the bomb go off which blows in the tower door, then Napoleon bursts in to report that he’s seen at least 27 baddies swarming up from the beach. At which point Yownie has a brainwave. Dobson is a lead figure in the opposition and he has a mortal fear of the police. Now night has fallen it is very dark so…why don’t the Die-Hards pretend to be the police?
And that’s what they do in a great comic set-piece which Buchan emphasises by adopting the tones of a military historian or, even better, a bard singing of the deeds of heroes. So he describes how the five or so boys dispose themselves around the building, blowing their police whistles from near and far, engaging in threatening conversations about how many of the mob had been captured, a constable informing his superior that the boats have been seized, Loudon is taken and so on, sowing doubt and fear into their listeners, especially Dobson who keeps rushing into the house to tell the irritated Paul that their cause is lost and they must flee.
There’s then a tense description of how Heritage escaped from the burning tower which was more fraught and dangerous than you’d think since he tried climbing down the outside only to find a great hole blocked his way and had to climb back up to the attic room and fight his way down the red hot stairs where he picked up burns and set his clothes alight before finally making it out into the cool wet heather.
Meanwhile McCunn and Mrs Morran listened to the effective cries of the Die-Hards and then witnessed the arrival of the actual police, some mounted on horses, who gave chase to the fleeing baddies. In the bay two boats are riding and pitching in heavy seas but the third is still ashore waiting for someone. McCunn and Napoleon realise it must be the enemy mastermind and then he’s upon them, rushing through the dark across the grass. Both McCunn and Napoleon try to tackle him, the boy being thrown off and McCunn being shot at at close range, but both fail to stop him and the agile young Russian leaps into the third boat, which quickly casts off.
But the storm is blowing up and the Atlantic breakers growing with each passing minute. From his vantage point ashore McCunn watches the three ships, one by one, founder and sink. Next day the dead bodies are washed ashore.
Chapter 16
Which ties up the loose ends. It’s only a week since McCunn set off on his merry ramble through the countryside but what a week! Now the storm has blown itself out and spring has arrived and the house, which seemed so threatening under lowering skies, now seems handsome set amid beautiful gardens.
1. The affair is hushed up. The police are leaned on by a superior not to make a report. The coroner gives death by drowning of unknown sailors to the baddies. Loudon is found dead at the foot of the cliff and the papers give him a glowing obituary as a sound member of the community (cf the glowing obituary given to Andrew Lumley who everyone thinks is a leading light of the community and only a handful know is the leader of a wicked international conspiracy in The Power-House).
Anyway, this is a fairy tale so all the goodies live happily ever after. 2. Some of the Russkies survive the storm and Alexis, in fine aristocratic style, forgives them and pays their passages to British Dominions where they can start new lives.
3. Saskia and Alexis walk hand and hand on the sunny greensward with their lives ahead of them.
4. Dickson and Heritage can see the lovers from where they’re sitting. Dickson is worried that Heritage will be devastated that Saskia, who he was in love with, is affianced to another man. But on the contrary, Heritage has the true gallant knight’s happiness that he served a beautiful princess. And he goes on to deliver an Author’s Message:
‘The trouble about you, Dogson,’ says Heritage, ‘is that you’re a bit of an anarchist. All you false romantics are. You don’t see the extraordinary beauty of the conventions which time has consecrated. You always want novelty, you know, and the novel is usually the ugly and rarely the true. I am for romance, but upon the old, noble classic lines.’ (p.207)
Which reminds me of the huge biography of Lord Salisbury I read a year ago, a lifelong arch-conservative whose philosophy was summed up in a pithy quote:
Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.
If you are convinced that change, any change, is for the worst, then of course you will try your damnedest to prevent any change and conserve things just the way they are. And that is the conservative mindset.
5. Dickson wanders on and looks down on the camp of the Die-Hards who are camping in the house’s empty grounds. He reflects on how few chances they’ve had in life and decides he will adopt them as his wards, house and clothe and feed them and pay for their educations.
6. Throughout the tumultuous week McCunn’s wife, referred to only as ‘Mamma’, has been away at a spa. Now she returns home to find her husband looking tanned and with a few cuts and bruises. He seats her by the fire and treats her to some of their maid’s scones. Then McCunn ends the novel by taking out and giving to her a beautiful necklet of emeralds. It is, of course, a gift from the grateful Saskia and Mamma is delighted.
Thoughts
I watch too many movies for my own good. The thing about American films is how smoothly (by and large) they are plotted and how swift the action is. By complete contrast, Buchan’s shockers come from another era, when readers (apparently) enjoyed rickety plots and an extreme amount of circumstantial detail.
The descriptions of McCunn or Heritage or one or other of the Die-Hards creeping through heather, hiding in bushes, fording the river, sneaking across the lawn, doubling back on this road, that track, this path, that bit of beach or wood or orchard or whatnot, initially add atmosphere but eventually become very wearing.
Arguably, these long, long descriptions of the scenery the various protagonists traipse or creep or hurry through is a central characteristic of Buchan’s novels. All the kind of thing which would be immediately dropped if American scriptwriters got their hand on the plot, stripped out the persiflage and made it simpler and more coherent.
The comic climax, with the Die-Hards running round pretending to be the police, entirely makes sense, in its own terms, as a comic scene in a comic novel. But plenty of the other scenes – for example the immense fuss surrounding McCunn’s train trip to Glasgow with the princess’s jewels – feel clunky and over-detailed.
The basic premise, of a Russian princess bearing priceless jewels hiding in a remote Scottish house make reasonable sense and you can imagine it being the workable premise of a movie or TV series – but almost everything else about the story (starting with how she is imprisoned but her captives make barely any efforts to ask where she’s hidden them) would have to be radically rethought to achieve something like grown-up plausibility.
The rejuvenating effect of adventure stories
It’s a recurring theme in the six Buchan novels I’ve just read, that adventures make you young again.
But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. ‘I haven’t been doing badly for an old man,’ he reflected with glee. What, oh, what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a Bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor’s and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairy-tale Princess. I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many more in the same line. ‘Gosh, but I’m seeing life,’ was his unregenerate conclusion. (p.133)
But not just McCunn:
Sir Archie was never very clear afterwards about the events of the next hour. The Princess was in the maddest spirits, as if the burden of three years had slipped from her and she was back in her first girlhood. (p.183)
When I mentioned this to a friend she pointed out that it’s not just the character who is rejuvenated by these boyish adventures, it is the reader, too, who feels young again. The rejuvenation of the character in the text mimics or echoes the juvenilisation of anybody who reads what is, in effect, an adventure story for children.
And this is because, in this type of adventure yarn, we the readers know beyond any doubt that the good guys will win – and, indeed, that there are clearly identified good guys and bad guys. (Almost as simple-minded as US foreign policy.) There is a reassuring, comforting predictability about these ‘shockers’ so that immersing yourself means that all the complexities of adult life not only fall away from the characters, but from the reader as well.
After that Dickson leaves him [Heritage] and wanders among the thickets on the edge of the Huntingtower policies above the Laver glen. He feels childishly happy, wonderfully young, and at the same time supernaturally wise. (p.208)
And, of course, the stars of the story are a group of slum children, ranging from teenage years to toddlers. It is a child’s adventure story which features a gang of spunky kids, themselves readily envisionable as cartoon characters.
The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, currently on display at Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace at the Photographers’ Gallery until 2 June 2024
The character of Russia
‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘I cannot make any one understand – except a Russian. My country has been broken to pieces, and there is no law in it; therefore it is a nursery of crime … My people are not wickeder than others, but for the moment they are sick and have no strength … Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilising everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. Today that is true about criminals… It is not Bolshevism, the theory, you need fear, for that is a weak and dying thing. It is crime, which to-day finds its seat in my country…’ (p.142)
Exactly a hundred years later I’m listening to current affairs programmes which countenance the idea that Russia might trigger a third world war, while Putin’s security state works day and night to undermine the economies, infrastructure and culture of the West. So plus ça change…
In praise of the middle classes
In contrast with a Russia that has been run by proletarians, commissars, a communist tyranny, and now oligarchs and yet another dictator, Buchan has his character Alesha, the exiled Russian aristocrat, deliver a paean to the value of the British middle classes, which is also a tribute to the unflappable nature of the book’s hero, Dickson McCunn:
‘You will not find him in Russia. He is what we call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.’ (p.206)
1977 BBC Scotland dramatisation
Credit
Huntingtower by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1922. References are to the 2008 World Classics paperback edition.
‘I need a rest. I’ve been pretty busy all my days and I’m tired.’
(Sir Edward Leithen setting the tone of Sick Heart River, page 2)
‘Every man’s got to skin his own skunk.’
(Wise words from Indian guide Johnny Frizel, p.90)
This is the final one in the series of five novels Buchan wrote featuring the fictional barrister and Tory MP, Sir Edward Leithen. It was also Buchan’s last book, completed only a few days before he died on 11 February 1940 and published posthumously.
Leithen is dying
It opens with a sequence that immediately feels better than anything in the previous four books, with an extended passage showing a tired and ill Leithen winding down his work at his barristers’ chambers and as an MP at the House of Commons. He says goodbye to his faithful clerk of 30 years in the chambers and to the Tory whip in the Commons. Why? He has for some years felt increasingly exhausted, with symptoms like night sweats, waking as tired as he went to bed, and so on. Finally he goes to see the eminent doctor, Acton Croke (Buchan is really bad at making up names, in my opinion – they’re neither plausibly realistic, nor comically exaggerated. They just feel bad.)
Anyway, this Acton Croke tells him he has tuberculosis, probably a long-term consequence of the gassing he experienced in the First World War, and that he has only a year to live, give or take. The passage where he walks back to his old rooms in Down Street W1, letting memories flood back into his consciousness – the winter funeral of Queen Victoria, the hot hectic days of August 1914, his love of the different smells of the different London seasons – all this is worth reading by itself. I thought for a moment that Buchan was going to let his guard down and really let us into a character’s soul, really break through to engage the reader, with real depth and emotion. These ten or fifteen pages suggest what a considerably more powerful writer Buchan might have been if he’d really let down his guard, and shared, instead of being so punctilious and tightly wrapped in all his fiction.
Leithen and ‘society’
Alas, he is not that type of man or writer. Other people intrude into Leithen’s musings and, with their advent the character, and the narrator, close up, button up, seize up, return to being the tightly-wrapped, stiff-upper-lip, impeccably well-mannered Calvinist Scotsman of all the other novels.
Maybe my problem with reading the Leithen novels has been not so much that he’s a snob (though he is) so much as that his consciousness remains so highly socialised, so polite and well mannered, stuck on the level of the high-toned society he moves in. What I’m trying to express is that his characters not only mix in the highest circles but almost entirely function at a highly socialised level: they think about everything in terms of country house parties, hunting, shooting and fishing parties, dinner parties and luncheons, and the matrix of society figures they all meet there. Their conversation is all about each other. None of them has anything to say about ideas, or art or theatre or music. They like the same things their Victorian parents liked, and hate the new Jazz Age of the 1920s with its barbaric music, its over-made up women, and the ridiculous younger generation with its upstart ideas.
Blenkiron’s commission
Anyway, the very affecting first 10 or 15 pages of wistful reminiscence are quickly crushed when Leithen is paid a visit by a wealthy American from his social set, one John S. Blenkiron (a figure who appears in several Buchan novels). He’s heard about Blenkiron chap from two of his best friends, Sandy Arbuthnot and Richard Hannay. (It came as a shock to me to learn that Leithen knows Hannay and Arbuthnot, the two lead characters in his other great series of novels focusing on Hannay. I’m sure this is the first time in the Leithen series that either name has been mentioned.)
This meeting straightaway plunges us back into the world of extended posh families, contacts and connections. Blenkiron thinks Leithen knows his niece, Barbara (he does). Well, he’s come about her younger sister, Felicity.
‘Babs has a sister, Felicity – I guess you don’t know her, but she’s something of a person on our side of the water. Two years younger than Babs, and married to a man you’ve maybe heard of, Francis Galliard, one of old Simon Ravelston’s partners. Young Galliard’s gotten a great name in the city of New York, and Felicity and he looked like being a happy pair.’ (p.14)
In a nutshell, this promising young chap, Francis Galliard, has done a bunk. Left a note for his wife saying he felt unwell, and disappeared without a trace. Been weeks now. Poor Francis is worried sick. Well, Sir Edward, Dick and Sandy sort of suggested that you might be the fellow who can track young Francis down. Willing to give it a shot?
Finding Francis
Leithen says yes. And that’s what the rest of the novel will be about, Sir Edward Leithen on the trail of the mysteriously vanished young man.
Why? Because Leithen had spent some soulful days wondering what a man should do with his last year of life. Travel the world? Go to India, Africa? He thinks about the ill-fated Greek island he visited (an adventure recounted in The Dancing Floor) no, not there. Then into his mind drifts a memory of the time he was trekking in Canada and came across a highland meadow with a stream running through it. It struck him as paradise. And so the key fact about young Francis Galliard, as explained by Blenkiron, is that, although he has become a naturalised American and was living in New York with his wife, he is of Canadian origin, and has almost certainly done a bunk back to his native land.
So the Quest for Francis Galliard immediately solves Leithen’s dilemma: here is somewhere to go for a reason; instead of just mooning around and feeling sorry for himself, he will have a job and not just for money – he doesn’t need money any more – but to help people, to serve, to live a socially useful honourable life right up to the end. As he later explains to Johnny the guide:
‘Is Galliard your best pal?’ ‘I scarcely know him. But I have taken on the job to please a friend, and I must make a success of it. I want to die on my feet, if you see what I mean.’ (p.61)
New York
And that’s what the remaining 170 pages of the novel describe. Leithen flies to New York. He, inevitably, attends a dinner party at which everyone is amazingly eminent and successful (top bankers, world’s leading classical scholar etc etc), hosted by Simon and Mrs Ravelston, formerly US ambassador to Great Britain. He begins to learn about Galliard which, as so often in the Leithen novels, is little about him as a personality, as such, and everything to do with his relationships with others, his place in society: ‘I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota with George Lethaby, and he’s a trustee of Walter Derwent’s Polar Institute’
In a private members club overlooking the East River, he meets with the eminent financier Bronson Jane (see what I mean about terrible names?) who gives him a detailed profile of Galliard and ‘his people’. These turn out to be French Canadian from Quebec, originally spelling their name Gaillard. We learn that Galliard came from a farming background but had a gift for finance, was partner in a bank at 35 and now, aged 43, is one of the top five financiers in America.
At the same club Leithen is introduced to Clifford Savory (‘There were few men alive who were his equals in classical scholarship’) who adds his ha’pennyworth about Galliard and the culture of the French Canadians.
Then he meets the abandoned wife, Felicity Galliard, slim (like all the eligible or admirable women in Buchan), wealthy, urbane, worried sick. She shows him Galliard’s goodbye note:
‘Dearest, I am sick – very sick in mind. I am going away. When I am cured I will come back to you. All my love.’ (p.29)
Leithen begins to have the sense that Galliard felt cabined and confined, that he needed to escape all this perfection and high expectation.Then he is introduced to Walter Derwent, a scientist who runs a Polar Institute. Galliard was his treasurer. (As this series of interviews progressed, it began to feel a bit like a detective novel, with Leithen gently quizzing a whole series of suspects.) Derwent tells him that Francis contacted him a few months back asking if he could recommend a guide to the Canadian wilderness, and Derwent did: a ‘half-breed’ (are we allowed to say that any more? is the correct term ‘mixed race?’) named Lew Frizel (‘His mother was a Cree Indian and his father one of the old-time Hudson’s Bay factors’). The implication is that Francis hired Lew as a guide to the bush, the outback, the wild North of Canada and they’ve headed off somewhere.
Handily, this guide has a brother, Johnny Frizel, and Derwent has already reached out to him to see if he can come back east to help Leithen track down Francis (p.34).
Leithen then goes to the offices of Ravelston’s, the bank where Francis had risen to executive level. Here he interviews Francis’s assistant who tells him the missing man had called for papers about the Glaubstein pulp mill which had recently been built at a place called Chateau-Gaillard which, as the name suggests, is deep in the ancestral land which has belonged to various members of the Gaillard family for centuries. Aha. That’s the place to start, then.
Canada
So it is that Leithen takes a steamer up the East Coast, beyond the American border, along the St Lawrence Waterway and disembarks at the pulp paper town of Chateau-Gaillard, a scrappy, ugly, industrial place. He has hired the guide, Johnny Frizel, brother of Lew (physical description [short] p.42).
They drive out of town, up into the hills to a valley, which a local tells them is called Clairefontaine. Suddenly they come across the very spot, the very same beauty spot whose memory had floated into Leithen’s mind back in London in those early pages of reminiscence. Now, he is horrified to discover that it’s been ruined.
The valley above the township was an ugly sight. The hillsides had been lumbered out and only scrub was left, and the shutes where the logs had been brought down were already tawny with young brushwood. In the bottom was a dam, which had stretched well up the slopes, for the lower scrub was bleached and muddied with water. But the sluices had been opened and the dam had shrunk to a few hundred yards in width, leaving the near hillsides a hideous waste of slime, the colour of a slag-heap. The place was like the environs of a town in the English Black Country. (p.38)
They continue their journey higher into the hills, to the village of Clairefontaine where they are shown hospitality by the kindly Catholic priest. The Gaillard land has been inherited by an uncle of Francis’s who turns out to be a 60-year-old drunk (p.44). Frizel gets put up with the drunk while Leithen stays with hospitable Father Paradis (p.43).
The priest gives him an extended briefing on the ancient Gaillard family which owned all the land hereabouts, the vagaries of various fathers, uncles, errant sons and so on. Buchan’s stories are always very, very heavily conceived around families. They are like his units of meaning, the concepts of ‘families’ and ‘races’ underpin Buchanworld.
Next morning Johnny tells Leithen that the drunk uncle Gaillard told him that (Johnny’s) brother, Lew, had been there recently. Between them they speculate that Francis came here, to the ancestral land, was disappointed by what he found, and for unknown reasons decided to head further north, towards Ghost River.
The chains of race and tradition are ill to undo, and Galliard, in his brilliant advance to success, had loosened, not broken them. Something had happened to tighten them again. The pull of an older world had jerked him out of his niche. But how? And whither? (p.38)
Leithen goes back to Montreal and hires a plane and a pilot, Job Teviot (p.49). They fly over awesome Canadian scenery which is lyrically described, across the Great Slave Lake and ‘the Barrens, then land at Dog-Rib river to spend the night in a tent. Up and flying further north next day, landing at a place called Little Fish, where Johnny finds a white man with two Indians camped a bit further up the river. Leithen goes for a chat.
The white man is a New Yorker, Taverner, who has, of course, visited England, London, sat in the House of Commons visitors gallery and watched Leithen make a speech! It’s a small world, Buchan’s world. Moreover, this chap happens to be a cousin of the financier Bronson Jane and so, when Leithen mentions Francis Galliard, yes, he’s heard of him! Smaller than small world. Microscopic world. His main role in the book is to deliver a long speech criticising his own country, presumably venting some of Buchan’s (negative) opinions:
‘I’m saying nothing against my country. I know it’s the greatest on earth. But my God! I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me there isn’t one section of society that hasn’t got some kind of jitters—big business, little business, politicians, the newspaper men, even the college professors. We can’t talk except too loud. We’re bitten by the exhibitionist bug. We’re all boosters and high-powered salesmen and propagandists, and yet we don’t know what we want to propagand, for we haven’t got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really the movies. We’re one big movie show. And just as in the movies we worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny. Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.’ (p.53)
The Quest
Slowly the narrative changes from just looking for some guy into something more driven, into a quest, into a manhunt.
Leithen and Johnny fly down to the Ghost River Delta and camp on the shore. Leithen is appalled by what a vast bleak emptiness it is. He thought the Arctic would be cold and bracing but pure and clean and healing, whereas this is a desolate landscape of mud and gravel, abandoned by the Demiurge who made the world, who gave up and walked away (p.55).
To their surprise there’s a schooner anchored on the muddy shore, with a Danish captain, for conversation and some supplies. They find an Eskimo cemetery and here Johnny recognises the mark of his brother, Lew. Lew had very recently carved his own distinctive version of the Saint Andrew cross onto two crosses made of driftwood which appear to commemorate members of the Gaillard family (p.57). Father Paradis had mentioned that one of Francis’s uncles, named Aristide, had left the meadows behind to go exploring North. Looks like this is where he ended up dying. Still, extraordinary coincidence that in all this vast waste, Leithen and Johnny happen across the tiny cemetery where Aristide happens to be buried AND that Lew has been helpful enough to do a bit of whittling on the grave markers.
So many of Buchan’s plots are like this – they make a sort of sense as you read them through but, if you stop to think for even a moment, they don’t quite hang together, are inexplicable. ‘Contrived’ doesn’t adequately convey their factitiousness (meaning: ‘1. formed by or adapted to an artificial or conventional standard 2. produced by special effort 3. sham.’)
Johnny slowly reveals that his brother Lew is sort of mad, a creature of mad enthusiasms. He asks if Leithen has ever heard of Sick Heart River? It’s a kind of Eldorado or Shangri-la, a fabled territory deep in the mountains which nobody quite knows how to access. Lew saw it once, on some hunting trip ten years ago, and was mesmerised by it and its inaccessibility.
‘Which watershed is it on?’ Leithen asked.
‘That’s what no man knows. Not on the South Nahanni’s. And you can’t get into it from the Yukon side, by the Pelly or the Peel or the Ross or Macmillan – Lew tried ’em all.’ (p.60)
That, with not much evidence, is where Johnny tells Leithen he thinks his brother is heading. Here’s his precise reasoning:
‘I don’t think, but I suspicion. See here, mister. Lew’s a strong character and mighty set on what he wants. He’s also a bit mad, and mad folks have persuasive ways with them. He finds this Galliard man keen to get into the wilds, and the natural thing is that he persuades him to go to his particular wilds, which he hasn’t had out of his mind for ten years.’ (p.60)
So the story started off being about Leithen looking for Galliard but it slowly morphs into being more about mad Lew Frizer, the obsessive backwoods guide.
Fort Bannerman
Weather conditions are getting bad, with fogs and rain. It is several days before they make it to the jumping off point for Sick Heart River, Fort Bannerman on the Mackenzie River (p.62). The inhabitants of this wretched spot are the Hudson’s Bay postmaster, two Oblate Brothers, a fur trader, a trapper in for supplies, and several Indians. It stinks of rotting food.
Johnny sets about buying up the equipment needed for a major expedition, being a thirty-foot boat with an outboard motor and a couple of canoes; clothes consisting of parkas and fur-lined jerkins, leather breeches and lined boots; gloves and flapped caps, blankets and duffel bags; dog packs to carry everything in and a light tent; a couple of shotguns and a couple of rifles and ammunition. Food, consisting of bacon and beans and flour, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, and a fancy assortment of tinned stuffs, plus a folding tin stove to cook it on. And they hire two of the local Hare Indians as porters and guides (p.64).
The plan is to head up the river against the current to find this Sick Heart River area, on the assumption that this is where mad Lew the guide is leading Francis Galliard.
During their stay at the Fort, as is his wont, Leithen discovers links between the people he’s meeting and his network of people and values. Turns out that one of the Oblate Brothers had served in a French battalion which had been on the right of Leithen’s regiment, the Guards, at the Battle of Loos, so they spend time together talking about the Great War. Meanwhile, Father Duplessis was from Picardy and Leithen had once been billeted in the shabby flat-chested chateau near Montreuil where his family had dwelt since the days of Henri Quatre.
In other words, Leithen has this gift for finding something in common with more or less everyone he meets. Or, to put it another way, Buchan can only conceive of his hero being able to really communicate with people who plug into his set of values.
This is vividly demonstrated when Johnny gets chatting about his family and brother, once they’ve embarked on the boat up the river. Turns out that his surname, Frizel, is a corruption of Fraser, and so that his guide has Scottish ancestors. At one point Johnny shows him his ring.
Leithen examined it. The stone bore the three cinquefoils of Fraser. Then he remembered that Frizel had been the name for Fraser in the Border parish where he had spent his youth. He remembered Adam Fraser, the blacksmith, the clang of his smithy on summer mornings, the smell of sizzling hooves and hot iron on summer afternoons. The recollection gave Johnny a new meaning for him; he was no longer a shadowy figure in this fantastic world of weakness; he was linked to the vanished world of real things, and thereby acquired a personality.
People only acquire full personhood for Leithen/Buchan if they can be plugged either 1) into his matrix of social connections i.e. all the bankers and lawyers and whatnot who all went to public school and are all related to each other or 2) into his sense of peoples or ‘races’, which each come complete with ancestries and stereotypes. It’s bigger and deeper than snobbery; it’s an entire existential worldview, a system of values to make sense of the world, and anybody who doesn’t fit into these categories (i.e. most of the population of Britain and the world) don’t really exist, not fully, not with a full personality.
Hares Indians
Anyway they chug up the river, camping on the bank at night, for several days, till they reach the camp of the Hares Indians. This is a squalid dump, stinking of rotten food and poverty, not at all what Leithen wanted from the wilderness.
Leithen sat in the presbytery in a black depression. The smells of the encampment – unclean human flesh, half-dressed skins of animals, gobbets of putrefying food – were bad enough in that mild autumn noon. The stuffy little presbytery was not much better. But the real trouble was that suddenly everything seemed to have become little and common. The mountains were shapeless, mere unfinished bits of earth; the forest of pine and spruce had neither form nor colour; the river, choked with logs and jetsam, had none of the beauty of running water. In coming into the wilderness he had found not the majesty of Nature, but the trivial, the infinitely small – an illiterate half-breed, a rabble of degenerate Indians, a priest with the mind of a child. The pettiness culminated in the chapel, which was as garish as a Noah’s Ark from a cheap toyshop… He felt sick in mind and very sick in body. (p.71)
The Catholic priest of this wretched hole is Father Wentzel and he has news of Lew and Francis, who passed through less than a week previously, so our guys are definitely on the right track. But he also indicates that Lew and Francis are not getting on. Lew was:
‘In a furious haste, as if vengeance followed him, and he did not sleep much. When I rose before dawn he was lying with staring eyes. For his companion, the gentleman, he seemed to have no care – he was pursuing his own private errand. A strong man, but a difficult. When they left me I did not feel happy about the two messieurs.’ (p.72).
Well, this isn’t good news. So Leithen, Johnny and the two Hares Indians leave the squalid camp and push on up the river, the scenery changing to become scenic and beautiful, with varieties of colourful trees, many birds and even bears. Leithen’s spirits lift.
Three long portages took them out of the Big Hare valley to Lone Tree Lake, which, in shape like a scimitar, lay tucked in a mat of forest under the wall of what seemed to be a divide. (p.73)
Picking up the trail
They camp near some woods and Johnny finds tangible evidence of the pair ahead of them: Lew and Francis have cached supplies and their canoe here but Johnny can tell from their tracks that there was a gap of 50 yards between them and the second man was limping. Looks like they’ve quarrelled. Looks like Francis is injured. Worse and worse (p.75).
The trail heads away from the lake and up beside a tributary stream. The other three carry all the supplies but Leithen is feeling increasingly weak and ill and has to stop to rest every hour. Days go by and Johnny gets chatty, praising the high woods and the adventures he’s had there. But he worries more and more about his brother, pointing out that the other man (Francis) is lagging hours behind him and arriving at the bivouacs late, probably not getting enough sleep. Why isn’t Lew waiting for him?
Leithen slips into a daze, one day leaching into another. Johnny has to mash up his bacon and beans till it’s nearly soup before Leithen can eat it. There’s more game, they see ptarmigan and willow grouse, and then moose, huge on the hillsides. At nights they hear the wolves nosing around the woods nearby. Leithen admires the Aurora Borealis flickering like a curtain of delicate lace (p.80).
Buchan and Canada
In 1935 Buchan had been appointed by King George V to become Governor General of Canada, a post he held till his death in 1940. His tenure was distinguished by intensive travel the length and breadth of the country. According to the introduction to this Authorised Edition of the novel, written by his grandson James Buchan, in 1937 Buchan undertook his most extensive tour, of the far North of the country. He and his party travelled by steamer down the Athabasca river, then the Slave River, carrying their gear past rapids and transferring to another steamer for a 1,000 mile journey into the Arctic Circle. At the Great Slave Lake they joined the Mackenzie River, stopping at forts and trading posts along the way where they met Catholic priests and nuns, traders, trappers and Hudson Bay officers, seeing on their left the vast Mackenzie range of mountains before coming out at the vast and barren delta described in the book. At Aklavik they switched to plane and flew over the Great Bear Lake to Coronation Gulf, before flying back by way of Alberta and British Columbia. It was an epic journey and many aspects of it are transferred wholesale into this novel, which contains page after page describing the breath-taking scenery.
Landscape description
Here’s an extended quotation a) to demonstrate what the book feels like to read b) to demonstrate Buchan’s way with description of scenery and c) to demonstrate his handling of the way this huge description gracefully circles back round to the plot (the quest for Galliard) and Leithen’s own plight.
Mountains prematurely snow-covered had been visible from the Hares’ settlement, and Leithen at Lone Tree Camp had seen one sharp white peak in a gap very far off. Ever since then they had been moving among wooded ridges at the most two thousand feet high. But now they suddenly came out on a stony plateau, the trees fell away, and they looked on a new world.
The sedimentary rocks had given place to some kind of igneous formation. In front were cliffs and towers as fantastic as the Dolomites, black and sinister against a background of great snowfields, sweeping upward to ice arêtes and couloirs which reminded Leithen of Dauphiné. In the foreground the land dropped steeply into gorges which seemed to converge in a deep central trough, but they were very unlike the mild glens through which they had been ascending. These were rifts in the black rock, their edges feathered with dwarf pines, and from their inky darkness in the sunlight they must be deep. The rock towers were not white and shining like the gracious pinnacles above Cortina, but as black as if they had been hewn out of coal by a savage Creator.
But it was not the foreground that held the eye, but the immense airy sweep of the snow-fields and ice pinnacles up to a central point, where a tall peak soared into the blue. Leithen had seen many snow mountains in his time, but this was something new to him – new to the world. The icefield was gigantic, the descending glaciers were on the grand scale, the central mountain must compete with the chief summits of the southern Rockies. But unlike the Rockies the scene was composed as if by a great artist – nothing untidy and shapeless, but everything harmonised into an exquisite unity of line and colour.
His eyes dropped from the skyline to the foreground and the middle distance. He shivered. Somewhere down in that labyrinth was Galliard. Somewhere down there he would leave his own bones. (p.81)
This novel is arguably Buchan’s best because he takes us far away from the tiresome world of posh society and pukka families and City bankers and fox hunting, he goes beneath the surface social veneer which dominates the other books. The descriptions of the Canadian wilds are awesome, but what really impresses is the extended descriptions of a dying man confronting his mortality. Every page contains Leithen’s feelings or thoughts as he collapses at the end of another gruelling trek.
Leithen reaches exhaustion
At their next stop Johnny confirms what he’d already suspected, that Lew is pressing on regardless and that his companion, Francis, has fallen behind and then lost the track altogether. Francis is now lost in the wilderness, limping, probably not carrying much. Chances are he’s lying in one of the great wild woods, freezing and starving to death.
The thing is, Leithen is so ill and has been so worn down by the physical challenges of the trek that he doesn’t care any more. Nobody can say he didn’t move heaven and earth to track down this Francis guy, did more than anybody could decently have expected of him. And anyway, before he even left Britain he knew the entire quest was really a way of distracting himself from his coming death.
Oddly enough, Johnny’s news had not made him restless, though it threatened disaster to his journey. He had wanted that journey to succeed, but the mere finding of Galliard would not spell success, or the loss of him failure. Success lay in his own spirit. (p.84)
They find Galliard
Next day Johnny and the Hares go early to scour the surrounding woods to see if they can find Galliard. When the sun comes out Leithen goes for a small walk up into the woods. As he comes back to their little encampment he sees a bear snuffling into his tent. At least he thinks it’s a bear. When he gets closer he realises it’s a man, wearing rags, covered in mud, so exhausted he can’t speak – it is Galliard! (p.86)
Leithen lays him down, washes his face, discovers he has a deep wound in his leg which he tries to clean. A few hours later Johnny returns and, with much more advanced fieldcraft, cleans and dresses the leg wound, cleans Galliard more and makes broth to spoonfeed him with. Galliard can barely speak, mumbling broken phrases about a sacred river, obviously a degraded articulation of his and Lew’s obsession with finding the fabled Sick Heart River. He has undergone what so many characters do in Buchan (cf Vernon Milburn in The Dancing Floor) and regressed back from the state of high civilisation which he enjoyed in New York, back to life in the wilds, and then on backwards into the barely human.
The partner of Ravelstons had suffered a strange transformation. Leithen realised that it would be idle to try to link this man’s memory with his New York life. He had gone back into a very old world, the world of his childhood and his ancestors, and though it might terrify him, it was for the moment his only world. (p.93)
This is a hobby horse of Buchan’s so he repeats it in different words:
Galliard had lost all touch with his recent life. He had reverted to the traditions of his family, and now worshipped at ancestral shrines, and he had been mortally scared by the sight of the goddess. (p.94)
A lot later Leithen joins a hunt for caribou, and:
He was primitive man again who had killed his dinner. (p.176)
Johnny declares that it will take weeks for Galliard to heal in body and who knows how long to heal in him in mind. They can’t risk moving him and winter is coming. So Johnny and the Hares are going to build a cabin against the coming winter.
Leithen feels guilty that he has now concluded his quest and Johnny is being a faithful employee and going to build a log cabin to protect them all and yet is very anxious about the physical and especially mental wellbeing of his brother Lew. So after some thought Liethen announces that he will press on to find Lew himself. Johnny explodes with laughter, given that Leithen is at death’s door. But he insists that, with the help of the bigger and stronger of the two Hares, he can do it.
It is another of those wild improbabilities and yet it is necessary for the Quest-like, fable-like structure of the book, that it is Leithen and not Johnny who finally makes it to the fabled valley.
Sick Heart River
And that is indeed what happens. After three days trekking (p.102), during which the Hare time and time again has to wait for Leithen to catch him up, or to support him, the pair come to an extraordinary chasm, deep, a mile across, with sheer sides, down into a meadow landscape across which flows a wide river – the famous Sick Heart River of the title.
After trekking along the edge of the precipice down into the valley, Leithen persuades a very reluctant Hare to descend a steep shute or landslide, now conveniently covered in snow. All goes well until the last thirty yards or so when the Hare slips on the ice, falls dragging Leithen with him, and they both roll and slide the last distance to the valley floor, Leithen banging his head and passing out (p.108).
When he groggily regains consciousness, the pair make a small camp near the the river and get a full sense of the strange and quiet, unnaturally warm landscape. Slowly they realise there isn’t a living thing in the place. Far from being Shangri-la, the place feels spooky and eerie.
The Hare spots smoke from a camp the other side of the river, presumably Lew! Leithen tells him to hang back while he, Leithen, goes ahead. So Leithen walks toward the camp and is aware of a shot being fired to the left, then one to the right of him – warning shots – but before anything worse can happen he simply he passes out from exhaustion (p.114).
Lew Frizel
Leithen awakes in a cave by a roaring fire with Lew marching up and down. Lew tends to him, introduces himself, the Hare makes his approach – soon all three are settled.
Long story short, Lew came from Presbyterian stock and had for long harboured an image he picked up from the Pilgrims Progress of passing beyond the Holy River, had become obsessed with travelling north to find Sick Heart River (p.120). But he’s been here a few days now and has become terrified, stricken with fear.
‘You’re over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you’re at the end of your road… I had a notion it was the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation.’
The man’s eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of melancholy.
‘Well, it ain’t. It’s the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know that and they only come here to die.’ (p.116)
Instead he calls it ‘a by-road to Hell!’ He gives more detail about how he and Galliard fell in together, both egging on each other’s obsession, how he eventually became so heedless he left Galliard behind in his mad obsession. But just a few days in the valley of death have totally cured him.
‘One thing I know – this is the River of the Water of Death. You can’t live in this valley. There’s no life here. Not a bird or beast, not a squirrel in the woods, not a rabbit in the grass, let alone bear or deer.’
‘There are warm springs,’ Leithen said. ‘There must be duck there.’
‘Devil a duck! I looked to find the sedges full of them, geese and ducks that the Eskimos and Indians had hurt and that couldn’t move south. Devil a feather! And devil a fish in the river! When God made this place He wasn’t figuring on humans taking up lots in it.’ (p.118)
And:
‘I was mad! It was the temptation of the Devil and not a promise of God. The Sick Heart is not the Land-of-Beulah but the Byroad-to-Hell, same as in Bunyan. It don’t rise like a proper river out of little springs – it comes full-born out of the rock and slinks back into it like a ghost. I tell you the place is no’ canny. You’d say it had the best grazing in all America, and yet there’s nothing can live here. There’s a curse on this valley when I thought there was a blessing. So there’s just the one thing to do if we’re to save our souls, and that’s to get out of it though we break our necks in the job.’ (p.121)
So that’s what they do. The Hare and Lew are keeping the fire going and cooking meals while they prepare their gear and pack. Then the next morning they trek for three hours back to the cliff face, to the shute the Hare and Leithen slid down. Now he supervises the reverse process, with him climbing slowly up and cutting footholds into the hard ice with an axe. He climbs with a rope tied round his middle so that when he eventually reaches the lip of the shute and climbs over the edge into snowy flat, he manages to tie the rope around a tree and tug it three times before collapsing (p.125).
Leithen regains consciousness (which is how so many of these chapters start) to find himself in a bowl scooped out of the snow with a fire at the bottom. The other two climbed up, made a camp, lit a fire. Now they have to trek back to the cabin Johnny and the other Hare was building. Leithen tries walking but passes out again and the others rig up a sled to haul him in.
Three days and nights of hard travelling, and holing up in the tent before a big fire every night. Clean air and huge skies. Leithen alternates between physical collapse and moments of religious exhilaration.
He had welcomed the North because it matched his dull stoicism. Here in this iron and icy world man was a pigmy and God was all in all. Like Job, he was abashed by the divine majesty and could put his face in the dust. It was the temper in which he wished to pass out of life. He asked for nothing – “nut in the husk, nor dawn in the dusk, nor life beyond death.” He had already much more than his deserts! and what Omnipotence proposed to do with him was the business of Omnipotence; he was too sick and weary to dream or hope. He lay passive in all-potent hands. (p.132)
All reunited at the cabin
Leithen regains consciousness in the cabin. Everyone is reunited. Here are sick old Leithen, Galliard, the reunited Frizel brothers Lew and Johnny, and the two Hares. There is enough to collect firewood and keep the fires burning, and go hunting and keep food supplied, for a few weeks anyway.
Lew has lost the mad craziness which drove him north and is now totally sane, but he has transferred his obsessive tendencies to making Leithen well again. When Leithen tells him that he, Leithen, is destined to die and asks Lew to make sure the message gets to New York that Galliard is still alive, Lew gets fierce.
‘Well, I’m going out, and it’s for you to finish the job. You must get him down country and back to his friends. I’ve written out the details and left them with Johnny. You must promise, so that I can die with an easy mind.’
For a little Lew did not speak.
‘You’re not going to die,’ he said fiercely.
‘The best authorities in the world have told me that I haven’t the ghost of a chance.’
‘They’re wrong, and by God we’ll prove them wrong!’ (p.134)
Part three
Part one covered the setup, the plane to New York, and Leithen’s interviews with Galliard’s friends and family. Part two covered the trek into Canada up to and including Lew in the fabled Sick Heart River. Part three is the final part and covers their return.
They are all stuck in the cabin through December, January and February. As Leithen comes out of his death-bed weakness and gains strength he realises that Galliard is no longer the shambling wreck he first met, but has fully healed and become a tall, strong lumberjack. Leithen remains very sick. The others take it in turns to fetch firewood or hunt game.
Galliard’s version
Over the course of several interviews Leithen gets the story of Galliard’s life which led him to chuck it all: he was born into an ancient French-Canadian family, fallen on hard times i.e. become hardscrabble farmers. He saw the life his father and brother were living and rebelled against it. He did well at school, went to college, decided to drop the law and study business. Had a big argument with his family who disapproved, then headed off to America, knowing his career would be limited as a Frenchman in Anglophone Canada. He had hard times in New York till he emerged as a successful businessman, got taken on at Ravelston’s bank, rose to become an important financier. Socially, he met Francis and his eyes were opened to society dinner parties, art galleries and so on. And yet deep down – as Buchan would put it, due to ties of ancestry and race – he felt guilty, felt like he had betrayed his father and his family.
‘I came to realise that I had forgotten God,’ he said simply… ‘What I had to recover was the proper touch with the world which I had grown out of and could no more reject than my own skin. Also I had to make restitution. I had betrayed something ancient and noble, and had to do penance for my sins.’ (p.153)
And this guilt ate away at him till one day he snapped, left the note for wife Francis and headed out for the North. Then follows confirmation of what Leithen had guessed about him heading to the ancestral lands, being bitterly disillusioned so heading North looking for some kind of redemption, coming under the influence of Lew’s quest for redemption, and eventually being left to die by the wayside (pages 148 to 153).
He is still not mentally recovered, he is still dazed, he still feels the weight of guilt and the need to atone:
‘I had been faithless to a trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find Him… We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.’ (p.147)
Religious convictions
In the snow bowl after they got out of the valley, Leithen has a religious epiphany of sorts:
At night in the pit in the snow with Lew and the Hare he had become suddenly conscious of the mercifulness of things. There was a purpose of pity and tenderness in the iron compulsion of fate. Now this thought was always with him – the mercy as well as the omnipotence of God. (p.139)
This theme of the deep mercy is to be repeated with greater and greater regularity and emphasis in the last 50 pages of the book.
Now there suddenly broke in on him like a sunrise a sense of God’s mercy – deeper than the fore-ordination of things, like a great mercifulness… Out of the cruel North most of the birds had flown south from ancient instinct, and would return to keep the wheel of life moving. Merciful! But some remained, snatching safety by cunning ways from the winter of death. Merciful! Under the fetters of ice and snow there were little animals lying snug in holes, and fish under the frozen streams, and bears asleep in their lie-ups, and moose stamping out their yards, and caribou rooting for their grey moss. Merciful! And human beings, men, women, and children, fending off winter and sustaining life by an instinct old as that of the migrating birds. Lew nursing like a child one whom he had known less than a week – the Hares stolidly doing their jobs, as well fitted as Lew for this harsh world – Johnny tormented by anxiety for his brother, but uncomplainingly sticking to the main road of his duty… Surely, surely, behind the reign of law and the coercion of power there was a deep purpose of mercy. (p.132)
I know what he means. There is something about just being alive which indicates a grand gesture against death. Why is there life anywhere in a universe of death? Someone, somewhere, has made and supports it. All you have to do is sit on a bench out in the spring sunshine and feel the sun warming through your body to feel the real, primal, basic wonderfulness of being alive, and this is a feeling conveyed again and again, as Leithen’s physical wellbeing dips and fails, and then revives in the sun.
Back to the Hares’ camp
Food was running short so Johnny undertakes a trek on snow shoes back to the Hares’ camp and returns a week later. He reports that the Hares have sunk into apathy and despair. Their necromancy tells them they will die out this winter and they’re acting accordingly. After a great deal of discussion over several days, the six men in the cabin decide to return to the Hares camp. During these debates Leithen begins to feel it more and more incumbent on him to do something for the dying Indians. Though physically recovered, Galliard is still mentally weak and is clinging to Leithen hoping for a cure. And Father Duplessis had mentioned him (Leithen).
So they strike camp (leaving provisions and firewood for anyone else who ever comes across the cabin) and set out on the trek back to the Hares’ camp (p.167). After a week they arrive at the Hares’ camp to discover two things. 1) The Hares are sunk deep in suicidal apathy, sitting in their snow-filled huts dying of starvation and despair. 2) Father Duplessis, the Catholic chaplain sent to minister to them, tells our guys that war has broken out in Europe. Its Germany and her allies against Britain and France, again.
On the Hare front, Duplessis tells them he’s done everything he can, services, Masses, but it doesn’t work, something more is needed, someone needs to take command – looking meaningfully at Leithen.
Leithen takes command
Leithen has the latest in his series of religious/spiritual/moral revelations. It’s tied up with the news about a war. He served in the First World War and saw the appalling waste, futility and death. Now he sees it kicking off all over again. He revolts against the dominion of Death and decides he is going to preserve Life, he is going to commit to life, he is going to save the Hares. This is the spirit in which he hears Father Duplessis ringing the bell in the snowbound chapel:
That tinny bell had an explosive effect on Leithen’s mind. This was a place of death, the whole world was full of death—and yet here was one man who stood stubbornly for life. He rang the bell which should have started his flock on their day’s work. Sunk in weakness and despair they would remain torpid, but he had sounded the challenge. Here was one man at any rate who was the champion of life against death. (p.180)
And so he throws himself into plans to revive the dying community. He charges Lew and the Hares with fetching firewood and hunting meat. He orders a big fire to be built in the centre of the camp and be kept roaring as a sign of Life and Spring and Hope. He calls the ancient old leader of the tribe (Zacharias) for an interview and consults how best to revive his people. He sets about visiting every hut and getting to know every Indian and motivating them to stand up against Death.
The bell still tinkled in his ears. The world was at war again. It might be the twilight of the gods, the end of all things. The globe might swim in blood. Death might resume his ancient reign. But, by Heaven, he would strike his blow for life, even a pitiful flicker of it. (p.181)
Lew warns him that he has only just recovered his strength. If he shepherds it he will live a while, maybe years, living carefully and frugally. But Leithen has determined to go out standing up, doing his duty, in one last flare of activity.
There was a plain task before him, to fight with Death. God for His own purpose had unloosed it in the world, ravening over places which had once been rich in innocent life. Here in the North life had always been on sufferance, its pale slender shoots fighting a hard battle against the Elder Ice. But it had maintained its brave defiance. And now one such pathetic slip was on the verge of extinction. This handful of Hares had for generations been a little enclave of life besieged by mortality. Now it was perishing, hurrying to share in the dissolution which was overtaking the world. By God’s help that should not happen – the God who was the God of the living. Through strange circuits he had come to that simple forthright duty for which he had always longed. In that duty he must make his soul. (p.185)
And Leithen inspires Galliard, tells Galliard that this is his Sick Heart River, this is his duty and his calling, and so begins the process of psychological healing which Galliard needs:
‘This is a war and I obey orders. I’ve got my orders. In a world where Death is king we’re going to defy him and save life. The North has closed down on us and we’re going to beat the North. That is to your address, Galliard.’
Galliard was staring at him with bright comprehending eyes.
‘In this fight we have each got his special job. I’m in command, and I hand them out. I’ve taken the one for myself that I believe I can do best. We’re going to win, remember. What does my death matter if we defeat Death?’
Lew sat down again with his head in his hands. He raised it like a frightened animal at Leithen’s next words.
‘This is my Sick Heart River. Galliard’s too, I think. Maybe yours, Lew. Each of us has got to find his river for himself, and it may flow where he least expects it.’ (p.187)
I found all this very moving. The nobility of it transcends all its weakness as literature. Suddenly, in time of war, saving only a few people from a universe of Death, becomes an inspirational moral duty.
He was facing the challenge of Death. Elsewhere in the world the ancient enemy was victorious. If here, against all odds, he could save the tiny germ of life from its maw he would have met that challenge, and done God’s work. (p.190)
This reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Unconditional Surrender whose protagonist, Guy Crouchback, tries to restore meaning and honour to his little part of the world at the end of the Second World War by saving against the odds a community of Jews threatened by antisemitic Partisans in Yugoslavia. At some point his hero quotes the ancient Talmudic saying: ‘Whoever saves one life saves the world entire’… and, the wise man might have added, saves himself, as Leithen saves not only the Hares, but also restores Galliard’s sense of purpose and will to live, and, finally, saves himself.
As Father Duplessis puts it, in his last weeks, Leithen comes to love the Hares, not as a faceless mass, as a project, as an abstract duty, but for who they are. He becomes, at last, fully humanised.
He had come to love those poor childish folk. Hitherto a lonely man, he had found a clan and a family. (p.203)
And we have seen how family is the most basic unit of meaning in Buchan’s worldview.
The Mounty’s report
The text abruptly cuts away from being by the third-person narrator to give an excerpt from a report by a Mounty i.e. a trooper in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
From a report by Corporal S——, R.C.M.P., Fort Bannerman, to Inspector N——, R.C.M.P., Fort Macleod.
In objective, official terms the corporal describes how Leithen established a hold over the entire tribe and nursed it back to health, so that the entire community was ready to live again as spring arrived, detailing specific such as encouraging them to fish through holes in the ice on the lakes again, to catch fish to feed up their starving dogs who, once restored to health, could pull the sledges required to bring in large amounts of firewood, and so on. But how in organising this and many other activities, Leithen exhausted what little strength he had, passed into a coma and died
Father Duplessis’s diary
A religious take on Leithen’s devotion to duty. How Leithen started out considering the Hares as a faceless mass, as simply a project to be addressed. But how he slowly mastered the details of their culture and beliefs and slowly began to humanise them, in the process I noted above whereby strangers slowly entered Leithen’s set of values to become full human. It meshes perfectly with the increasing number of religious reflections in the final part of the text about the humanising of Leithen’s soul.
He had been abject but without true humility. When had the change begun? At Sick Heart River, when he had a vision of the beauty which might be concealed in the desert? Then, that evening in the snow-pit had come the realisation of the tenderness behind the iron front of Nature, and after that had come thankfulness for plain human affection. The North had not frozen him, but had melted the ice in his heart. God was not only all-mighty but all-loving.
Duplessis devotes several pages to describing how Leithen’s example inspired Galliard to overcome his fear of the North, to face it and master it, to redeem himself in service to the poor Hares.
In L.’s grim fortitude Galliard found something that steadied his nerves. More, he learned from L. the only remedy for his malaise. He must fight the North and not submit to it; once fought and beaten, he could win from it not a curse but a blessing. Therefore he eagerly accepted the task of grappling with the Hares’ problem. Here was a test case. They were defying the North; they were resisting a madness akin to his own. If they won, the North had no more terrors for him – or life either. He would have conquered his ancestral fear. (p.201)
Then Duplessis briefly describes how Leithen attended High Mass at Easter then went steadily downhill until he died in his sleep. But by then his work was done, the Hares restored to life as spring began to warm the earth, and Galliard returned to his former balance and sanity.
Galliard and Francis reunited
The final scene reverts to the third-person narrator to describe Galliard, now utterly restored to health who had returned to New York, been reunited with his wife and colleagues, completely rehabilitated but has now flown back to the idyllic meadow which Leithen remembered right back at the start of the novel, for a three page envoi. He briefly summarise the fight-the-north theme:
‘You see, I have made my peace with the North, faced up to it, defied it, and so won its blessing.’
On a practical front a world war is raging and he knows he is to leave soon to join the army and who knows what his fate will be. Then this sometimes rackety novel ends on some of the most moving words I’ve ever read. We have, in effect, accompanied Leithen on his long journey to religious enlightenment and Galliard caps it beautifully.
The two by a common impulse turned their eyes to the wooden cross on the lawn of turf. Galliard rose.
‘We must hurry, my dear. The road back is none too good.’
She seemed unwilling to go.
‘I feel rather sad, don’t you? You’re leaving your captain behind.’
Galliard turned to his wife, and she saw that in his eyes which made her smile.
‘I can’t feel sad,’ he said. ‘When I think of Leithen I feel triumphant. He fought a good fight, but he hasn’t finished his course. I remember what Father Duplessis said – he knew that he would die; but he knew also that he would live.’ (p.208)
In its simplicity but its profound conviction I think that’s one of the most moving statements of faith I have ever read. It is a really beautiful ending to a book which way before the end had transcended Buchan’s limitations as a writer of popular shockers to morph into something much more deep and profound. It feels, by the end, like a really great book.
The concept of race in the fiction of John Buchan
It’s a central concept. People he meets are defined by family i.e. their place in the matrix of the British upper classes, or by ‘race’.
It doesn’t mean what it does today. Today ‘race’ is a negative word associated with racism. Just the word carries connotations of the colonial era when ‘lesser’ races deserved to be ruled by the white races etc.
It’s interesting to see how, for Buchan, the word is not particularly negative, and is also flexible. Sometimes it refers to the entire French people or Irish people etc, who are thought of as having definable characteristics. Other times it much more specifically refers to a family.
Here’s examples of it describing an entire people:
‘Well, they [the French Canadians] are a remarkable race there. They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have. Here’s a fine European stock planted out in a new country and toughened by two centuries of hardship and war. They keep their close family life and their religion intact and don’t give a cent for what we call progress. Yet all the time they have a pretty serious fight with nature, so there is nothing soft in them. You would say that boys would come out of those farms of theirs with a real kick in them, for they have always been a race of pioneers.’ (Bronson Jane)
‘I expect he has family in his blood like all his race.’ [of French Canadians]
But Augustin had the fine manners of his race. [French Canadians]
Then you have generalisations about the cross-breeding of these ‘races’:
‘That’s probably due to his race,’ said Leithen. ‘Whenever you get a borderland where Latin and Northman meet, you get this uncanny sensitiveness.’
And then you have something which is closer to ‘family’, such as when Leithen arrives at Galliard’s ancestral homeland:
Only now, when he was entering the cradle of Galliard’s race, did he realise how intricate was the task to which he had set himself.
‘You must know, monsieur, that once the Gaillards were a stirring race. They fought with Frontenac against the Iroquois, and very fiercely against the English. Then, when peace came, they exercised their hardihood in distant ventures.’
As you can see, none of these usages have any reference to the modern concern with ethnicity which has resulted from a mixture of very contemporary obsessions, with mass immigration to formerly white European countries, with the racism that so many of these immigrants face, and with evergrowing embarrassment about the behaviour of the European colonial powers and the rewriting of history to give black and other ethnic groups their rightful history and position.
Buchan was writing before all that was dreamed of and meant something very different, something more teasing and interesting.
Interesting words
callant – a young lad, a stripling, a boy
couloir – a seam, scar, or fissure, or vertical crevasse in an otherwise solid mountain mass
dunnage – the durable padding material used to protect goods during shipping
muskeg – a swamp or bog in northern North America
selvedge – a zone of altered rock, especially volcanic glass, at the edge of a rock mass
Credit
Sick Heart River by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1941. References are to the 2018 Polygon Authorised John Buchan edition.
‘Half the fun of an adventure is to be able to gossip about it.’
(The financier, Tavanger, in The Gap in the Curtain, page 76)
This is the fourth of Buchan’s five novels featuring Scottish barrister and Conservative MP living in London (apparently, ‘the most beautiful city on earth’, p.143), Sir Edward Leithen. Unlike the first and third novels, there’s no frame story, it’s just a straightforward narrative told directly, in the first person, by Leithen himself.
It’s a weird story and Buchan emerges from it as a strange and uneven writer. His protagonists present themselves as bluff, no-nonsense, unimaginative men of the world – and yet the stories themselves overflow with eerie visions, strange presentiments, hallucinations, nightmares, moments of vertiginous disorientation and so on.
The previous novel in the sequence, 1926’s The Dancing Floor, sets out (once the characters have arrived at a remote Greek island) to develop a brooding sense of threat and menace, which eventually rises to a mad visionary intensity, the appearance of the old pagan gods which triggers mass panic in a hysterical crowd. This, the next in the sequence, one doesn’t feature the same kind of mass hysteria, is far more domestic in scope, but is, at least to being with, just as weird and strange.
Chapter 1. Whitsuntide at Flambard (50 pages)
In a nutshell, Leithen, the wise, dry old bachelor barrister, goes to stay with some old friends, Lord and Lady Flambard, at their country house in the Cotswolds, over the Whitsuntide holiday. (Whitsuntide: ‘the name used in Britain and other countries among Anglicans and Methodists for the Christian holy day of Pentecost. It falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciple.’ In 2024 it falls on 19 May. In the year when the novel is set, it seems to occur in early June.)
There are eight or nine guests at Lady Flambard’s and the first 10 or 15 pages spend some time introducing them to us and giving us Leithen’s opinion of them, maybe in the manner of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. But the plot they’re involved in is much weirder than that. For the key guest at the house is an eminent scientist, Professor Moe, physically large, but frail and ailing, a maths and physics genius on a par with Einstein.
What slowly emerges is that this professor has highly advanced theories about the nature of Time. Buchan has the professor take Leithen for a stroll through the country house’s lovely gardens and slowly unfold to him his theories. Leithen being a non-scientist means Buchan doesn’t have to present a coherent theory, because his bluff narrator can endearingly say that he didn’t follow this or that aspect of the theory.
But the upshot is very practical. Moe thinks that time isn’t linear, that all moments of time are permanently present, it is just the evolution of the human body and mind which limits our perceptions to a straight, railway-like line from past to future. The professor has come to the conclusion that some humans, with the right biological and mental predisposition and the right training, be taught to see into the future – more precisely, to see the future which runs alongside us all the time, which is around us everywhere.
Therefore, and wildly improbably, the professor has decided to carry out his experiment using guests at an upper class English country house weekend (of all the people in all the universities or scientific institutes of all the world!) Thus the prof weeds out the strong and shouty guests, focusing in on seven of the guests who seem frailer than the rest, in both body and spirit. This includes Leithen who (as in every one of these Leithen tales) is tired and jaded from overwork.
These seven agree, with various stages of reluctance or scepticism, to sign up for the experiment, and the professor puts them on a special diet, forbids them physical exercise, and administers amounts of a secret potion. The result, over the course of three or four days, is that the volunteers come to feel increasingly weak in body and spirit. That is exactly the purpose – to weaken their physical and mental attachment to the present in order to open a gap in the curtain which normally confines us to the present moment, and allow us to see into the future.
So it’s sort of a science fiction story but lacking any real science, certainly any gadgets or gizmos. In its focus on physical austerity it reminds me of the fashion for Eastern mysticism which swept the West between the wars. But it’s probably more like a hangover from the golden age of seances and spiritualism, which had begun in the late-Victorian period and underwent a great efflorescence after the First World War, as so many widows and orphans wanted more than anything to contact their dead husbands and fathers.
All this introductory matter builds up to the novel’s One Big Event. This is when the professor decides his guinea pigs are ready for the Big Experiment. I haven’t mentioned yet that the professor discusses with Leithen (and presumably some of the others) what kind of thing they should focus on seeing in the future. Not an organic object like a tree, which changes too slowly. Not a static artifact like a house, which might simply not be there. Instead they settle (again, rather improbably) on a newspaper, specifically the posh chap’s newspaper of record, The Times.
So the professor has their bemused hostess, Lady Flambard (who’s fully up for the experiment, even if she doesn’t really understand it) provide them with seven broadsheet-sized blank pieces of white paper, for the seven experimentees to focus on each day. The aim is to project their minds forward one calendar year and read what is in next year’s edition of the paper.
So at the climactic Grand Event, they all sit in chairs in a circle, each holding a copy of that morning’s Times, for 10 June, in their hands and the professor gives his instructions:
‘For three minutes you will turn your eyes inward – into the darkness of the mind which I have taught you to make. Then – I will give the sign – you will look at the paper. There you will see words written, but only for one second. Bend all your powers to remember them.’
At the last minute the spell doesn’t quite work for Leithen, and the only woman in the group, Sally, faints away from the strain. That leaves five men who, each for a brief moment, under the influence of their strange training and the intense presence of the spectral Professor Moe, each have a few seconds vision of the contents of the Times newspaper for one year hence. As they do so, only Leithen, failing to properly enter the trance state, realises that in some mystic way, Moe gives the last of his psychic energy to the group mind and actually dies during this intense moment. Thus chapter 1 ends on a cliffhanger:
In that fateful moment, while the soul of a genius was quitting the body, five men, staring at what had become the simulacrum of a Times not to be printed for twelve months, read certain things. Mayot had a vision of the leader page, and read two sentences of comment on a speech by the Prime Minister. In one sentence the Prime Minister was named, and the name was not that of him who then held the office. Tavanger, on the first City page, had a glimpse of a note on the formation of a great combine, by the Anatilla Corporation, of the michelite-producing interests of the world. Reggie Daker, on the Court page, saw an account of the departure of an archaeological expedition to Yucatan, and his name appeared as one of the members. Goodeve and Charles Ottery – the one on the page opposite the leaders and the other on the first page of the paper – read the announcement of their own deaths.
I suppose the professor dying 1) adds intensity and seriousness to the moment and 2) ensures that the experiment can never be repeated.
But it’s only at this moment, at the end of chapter 1, and checking the names of the remaining five chapters in the book, that you realise that each of them will be devoted to describing how their brief insight into one year into the future, effects the five men who saw it.
Thus the book is by way of being an anthology or omnibus, a package or portmanteau novel, in the sense that this long first chapter has set the scene and explained the premise, and then each of the five subsequent chapters addresses the question, What if a man was given a sneak preview of the world one year into the future?
Chapter 2. Mr Arnold Tavanger (34 pages)
Chapter 2 kicks off with no backward linking to the experiment at Lady Flambard’s. Instead it jumps straight into a detailed account of what this fellow Tavanger (to rhyme with scavenger) did with his brief sight into the future.
Arnold Tavanger is something in the City, a businessman or speculator or stockbroker. He buys and sells shares and companies. His glimpse into the future showed him that there would be a worldwide consolidation of companies mining and purifying a (fictional) substance called ‘michelite’. It’s a rare metal which improves the industrial process of making steel.
Right, so the entire chapter gives us Leithen’s account of this Tavanger scheming to buy up all companies presently mining michelite. There are two big established companies in the field, being the Anatilla Corporation and the Rosas-Sprenger. The one other company in the market is the Rhodesian company, the Daphne Concessions and Tavanger discovers that shares in this are held by five individuals.
The chapter consists of an improbably detailed account of Tavanger’s treks as he travels to Egypt, then on into South Africa and Rhodesia, to track down the very varied individuals (one just a simple backwood fruit farmer), how he gets introduced to them and plays them in order to buy their shares off them.
On one (rather dry, Financial Times) level, it is sort of interesting to read about a) the travel and b) the negotiations and c) the business strategy employed by Tavanger. But ultimately, as the plot of a novel, or story from a compendium of stories, it’s pretty dull. It feels like a long 34 pages, and also quite easy to put down, pick up, and completely forget where you were in the story because there is no story.
The whole dull narrative builds up to a punch line which I suppose is intended to be humorous which is that Tavanger finally acquires all the shares available for the one rival to the two big michelite-mining corporations, Anatilla Corporation and the Rosas-Sprenger, and they make him a very handsome offer but he is determined to hold out for more (he bought most of them for about 18 shillings (90p in today’s money) but is holding out to sell them at £5). When the bottom falls out of the market because a scientist attached to one of the other companies perfects and patents a technique which will make their michelite many, many times more useful and Tavanger’s michelite almost impossible to sell.
So the price of all those shares which he travelled so fat and wide to collect collapses and he is forced to sell the Anastilla Corporation his entire holding ‘at par’ i.e. what he bought them for. Buchan then points a trite suburban moral of the story, having Tavanger wisely but sadly tell Leithen that:
‘Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing.’ (p.87)
Chapter 3. The Rt. Hon. David Mayot (25 pages)
If Tavanger stands for the world of business, The Right Honourable David Mayot stands for politics. When the story starts he’s a Labour politician, although Buchan gives him a very detailed biography, explaining that he started off as a Tory, then sat as an independent, then cross the House in time to become a Minister in the 1929 government. He is a bachelor with an independent fortune, not that bright but consumed by ambition. This is all sort of interesting as a sort of fictional profile of a certain kind of politician from the era, maybe.
Anyway, when this Mayot took part in The Experiment, he saw in next year’s Times a few lines in a leader indicating that the Prime Minister at the time of the main narrative was going to be replaced, surprisingly, by the leader of the small Liberal Party.
So Leithen’s account describes how this rich bachelor and scheming politician set out to take advantage of this knowledge. To do so he gives pen portraits of the party leaders of the time, the League of Nations-supporting old school, Free Trade Liberal leader Waldemar; the principled conciliatory Labour leader Sir Derrick Trant, and the leader of a Conservative Party which was moving towards protectionism, Geraldine.
Leithen gives what is presumably a realistic account of the characters and political manoeuvrings of the political leaders, their biases and backgrounds and beliefs – but he also goes into mind-numbing detail about the numerous factions within the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties, and the ever-changing meetings and discussions and alliances, the endless negotiations and backroom deals and calculations which make up the actual business of politics.
It has some merit for capturing the spirit of the times just as the Great Depression really kicked in, so in 1930.
But with February came one of the unlooked-for upheavals of opinion which make politics such a colossal gamble. The country suddenly awoke to the meaning of the unemployment figures. These were appalling, and, owing to the general dislocation of world credit and especially to the American situation, held no immediate hope of improvement. The inevitable followed. Hitherto sedate newspapers began to shout, and the habitual shouters began to scream. Hunger-marchers thronged the highways to London; there were mass-meetings in every town in the North; the Archbishops appointed a day for public prayer; and what with deputations, appeals, and nagging questions in the House… (p.105)
And then a summary of the different policies which emerged, along a spectrum from massive government intervention at one end, to laissez-fair free marketism at the other. But it’s the nitty gritty of personalities, which the narrative is about, and the guiding thread is Leithen’s educated guess at what he thinks Mayot was up to.
The Labour leader resigns, a general election is called in May. It’s interesting to realise that a central issue in a 1930s UK election was the role of the British Empire, specifically whether it should, as imperialists had been proposing for decades, become a unified economic bloc with tariffs to keep out products from outside and protect industry, agriculture etc across the quarter of the world included in it. Or, whether this would lead to economic inefficiency, stagnation and, what did for Joseph Chamberlain’s protectionist vision in the 1900s, more expensive food.
Interestingly, there’s talk of a pact between Liberal and Labour not to stand against each other in seats where either is likely to win against the Tories – exactly the kind of thing you read about today, in 2024, in the progressive press (Guardian, New Statesman et al).
To his surprise, Mayot who had spent a year scheming with the foreknowledge that the Liberal leader would be the next Prime Minister, is left out in the cold as new stars arise in the Labour Party, impressing with their firebrand oratory or their ability to do backroom deals. After all his clever scheming Mayot loses his own seat.
So it’s another ‘life’s little ironies’-type conclusion, summarised by the now-retired Labour leader, Trant, chatting with Leithen once the new government is formed:
‘Poor old Mayot,’ he went on, his pleasant face puckered into a grin. ‘Politics are a brutal game, you know. Here is an able fellow who makes one mistake and finds himself on the scrap-heap. If he hadn’t been so clever he would be at No. 10 today…’ (p.115)
Maybe all this is entertaining to a certain kind of mind. Very dry. Not very interesting (unless all the characters are thinly-veiled real people). And impossible to care tuppence about the downfall of this fictional Mayot.
Chapter 4. Mr Reginald Daker (34 pages)
So the next one to have had a glimpse of the future and come a cropper because of it, is Mr Reginald Daker. Daker was one of the most susceptible of Moe’s disciples and genuinely believes what he foresees in the Times of a year hence, that the Times will write that he will be a member of an expedition to Yucatan – but he doesn’t actually believe he’ll go. ‘Got no idea where Yucatan is, old boy! Not my sort of thing at all.’
Daker is what the posh boys at my university called ‘a thick’. He inherited money from the sale of family land which put him through Eton and Oxford, where he was dim but immensely sociable, building up a large connection of friends. He’s tried numerous jobs since leaving uni but never last more than a week or two at any of them. At the time of the fateful weekend at Flambard, he was trying out being a dealer in antique books.
Digression
All the characters in these Leithan novels live such breath-takingly carefree, privileged lives. For example, this dim rich parasite, Daker, takes a couple of months holiday in the Highlands and:
liked a civilised country house where the comforts of life were not forgotten. He was a neat shot at driven grouse, and loved a day on a mild moor where you motored to the first butts and had easy walks to the others. He liked good tennis and golf to be available on by-days, and he liked a large house-party with agreeable women…
And he:
had a very pleasant two months in comfortable dwellings, varied with a week in a yacht among the Western Isles. It was a fine autumn in the north, and Reggie returned with a full sketch-book – he dabbled in water-colours – and a stock of new enthusiasms. He had picked up a lot of folklore in the Hebrides, had written a good deal of indifferent verse…, had conceived a scheme for the making of rugs with Celtic designs coloured by the native Highland dyes, and had learned something about early Scottish books – David Lyndesay and the like – on which he hoped to specialise for the American market.
Everybody in these books is an expert in something or other, eminent this, famous that. When Daker goes to stay with the Earl of Lamancha (at his country estate of Leriot) he finds it difficult to keep up with all the other guests who have had such wizard adventures overseas:
There was Maffit who had solved the riddle of the Bramaputra gorges, and Beavan who had been the first to penetrate the interior of New Guinea and climb Carstensz, and Wilmer who had been with the second Everest expedition, and Hurrell who had pursued his hobby of birds to the frozen tundras of the Yenesei. (p.124)
Back in London, Daker’s day consists of going for an early canter in the Park, followed by a leisurely breakfast, the newspaper with the first pipe, write a few letters, then stroll east through the city to one of his clubs for luncheon, in the afternoon visits to museums or galleries, researches in bookshops, then home for tea, and reading for a few hours before it’s time to dress for dinner out, at a club or restaurant with friends. For exercise he plays polo at the Roehampton, a lot of tennis, spends the weekends on a Berkshire trout stream (p.144).
Buchan and his characters float in this sea of privilege, enjoying unbelievably blessed and comfortable lives, enjoying all the classic outdoor activities of a gentleman, when they’re not off exploring remote bits of the Empire.
Buchan’s novels are not set among ordinary mortals, but among a privileged class as remote from my experience as the Greek gods. It is this which, I think, makes so many of his stories feel cold, aloof – so detached from most people’s ordinary lives as to be actively offputting, actively deterring sympathy or identification with his characters – unless you live such a charmed life yourself, or fantasise about leading one.
Back to Dakar
Anyway, back to Daker. He is really put off by these hearty explorers and white man’s burden types, so flees from Lamancha’s place back to Town (Town with a capital letter like this always refers to ‘London’).
The heart of the chapter is that Daker falls in love with a dashing gel called Verona Cortal (Buchan is consistently bad with names – they all sound arch and contrived; fancy calling the leader of the Conservative Party Geraldine!?).
Verona is, of course, a great rider to hounds and has a visionary feel for the Englishness of Old England. They meet at country house weekends and become inseparable. She it is who focuses Daker’s diffuse energies onto this business of antique bookselling, and the chapter contains a lot of what feels like raw research about antique book dealing repeated in a lightly fictionalised form.
Anyway, the point is that this Verona turns out to be a termagent (‘an overbearing woman’) who takes command of Daker’s book business, writes a hard-headed prospectus, maps out Daker’s schedule for him with a relentless series of meetings and when he’s not meeting clients and customers, he is having lunch or dinner with Verona’s ferociously successful banker brothers or fiercely ambitious mother.
The last few times he bumps into him, Leithen finds Daker hag-ridden, pale and anxious. All his joy and whimsy have been burned off by the unrelenting business mind of his supposed lady love. Finally Daker snaps. Leithen hears of his final lunch with Tallis, the Welsh book collector at whose house Daker first met Verona. Suddenly he breaks and starts ranting about her being a juggernaut of a woman riding roughshod over everything he holds rare and precious and how he is being stifled by her ruthlessly ambitious family. And the very next evening he’s been invited to one of their ghastly family evenings where he knows everyone is expecting him to propose to the beastly woman.
As it happens Tallis had a similar experience 25 years previously. He did a runner, hopping it as far away as he could, in his case to Tibet! Suddenly Daker sees a way out of his predicament and then Tallis announces that he is leaving that very evening on a year-long mission to follow up his fascination with Central American art, he is setting off for Yucatan. Will Daker hurriedly pack his stuff and come with him? And Daker leaps at the chance.
And so the prophecy or future vision vouchsafed to Daker exactly 12 months earlier, comes true. This is the most attractive of the three stories so far, because the figure of the bossy woman domineering the faint-hearted aesthete is funny (or at least used to be) in a way that the complex financial deals or knotty political manoeuvring of the first two stories very much aren’t.
Chapter 5. Sir Robert Goodeve, Baronet (33 pages)
OK so who is this guy and what happens to him over the fateful 12 months? Well, this is another political chapter. It kicks off with Goodeve standing in a by-election in Dorset for, of course, the Conservative Party. Some of the themes and policies mentioned in the Mayot chapter are repeated, because they cover the same 12 months in the same field.
Leithen goes down to help him with election speeches then, once the campaign is over, drives him home to his country house (of course) which boasts ‘the loveliest hall in England’ (of course). After dinner they sit by the grand old fire, smoking pipes and the mood completely changes from politics to ghost story. The tone is identical to when Leithen listened to young Vernon Milburne tell his dark secret (recurring nightmares) in the hall of his ancestral home, in The Dancing Floor.
Goodeve is tense and nervous. They discuss Moe and that long weekend at Lady Flambard’s and what it all meant. Leithen can tell that Goodeve saw something which spooked him and eventually gets confirmation that Goodeve read his own obituary in the Times of a year hence. They had walked through a corridor lined with portraits of his ancestors many of whom died young. Now, with a haggard face, he tells Leithen he fears the same will happen to him. Leithen tries several ways to distract him, cheer him up, reject the Moe experiment as poppycock. None work.
Cut to Goodeve a few weeks later making a stunning maiden speech as an MP in House of Commons (a maiden speech is the first speech a newly elected MP gives). However, it’s all downhill from there. Leithen personally is in the House on numerous occasions to watch Goodeve’s speeches lack punch or interest and fizzle out. Only he, Leithen, knows it is because Goodeve is increasingly haunted by foreknowledge of his own death. After a particularly humiliating failure Goodeve stalks out of the House never to return.
Next thing Leithen bumps into Goodeve in Glasgow. He had told him that when he glimpsed a few pages of his obituary it had mentioned a chap named Colonel Dugald Chatto. He has travelled up to Scotland where he secured an introduction to this fellow at, inevitably, his gold club. In fact they’ve subsequently played many games, arguing about politics, and become friends. Little does the stocky, vulgar, argumentative Chatto realise it is because their destinies were bound together according to Goodeve’s brief glimpse of the future.
The month of May is taken up with the general election whose origin and course were described in chapter 3. Leithen bumps into Chatto down south, who describes the pair’s fishing expeditions. When Leithen finally bumps into Goodeve he is appalled at how thin and gaunt the latter looks, a shadow of his former buoyant self. But Goodeve tells him he has a plan. He’s getting away from England on a Scandinavian cruise. Nothing can happen there.
But things hasten to their predestined end. Chatto goes fishing in miserable weather, gets soaked to the skin, develops a chill which worsens into pleurisy and is admitted to hospital. Meanwhile, Goodeve cancelled his ticket for the cruise and returned to his ancestral home. Here he ate little and wasted away to the worry of his staff. When he got a telegram saying Chatto was at death’s door, he gave up, had the fires lit in the long gallery full of portraits of his doomed ancestors, and slept in an old armchair. That’s where they found him dead on 10 June. The coroner’s report attributed death to heart failure. Only Leithen knew it was due to accumulated anxiety which had turned into downright fear and corroded the man from within.
Chapter 6. Captain Charles Ottery (27 pages)
Another instance of someone who, during the Moe experiment, sees their obituary in The Times. In that ‘small world’ way of the upper classes, Leithen has known Ottery since he was a boy because he’s a friend of his nephew, Charles. He was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers when the war broke out and had a good war. He inherited a large estate and after the war got a job as a merchant banker. He rose to become a director of the Bank of England, sat on various government commissions. (It’s as if Buchan is trying to write in upper class clichés.)
Then into his life came Pamela Brune, lovely lithe young woman. She is, of course, Leithen’s god-daughter. He falls heavily in love with her, but he’s a heavy 35 year old and she’s a flighty 19, so they argue and he had just been more or less rejected when they both were invited to the house party at Flambard and he took part in the Moe experiment.
Prediction of his death a year hence throws him into depression from which he rouses himself by throwing himself into frenetic activity, first sports in England (tennis, golf, sailing) but then he organises a trip into the back of beyond, hunting caribou in the wild interior of Canada. He keeps a diary which, for some reason, came into Leithen’s hands and which he summarises. After much agonising and speculation about God and heaven, Ottery comes to the conclusion that he must live the remainder of his days with pluck and fortitude, like a good public school boy (p.197).
Back in England he throws himself into distraction, taking to gambling for high stakes at his club, frequently getting drunk and then throwing himself into hunting (the Birkham hunt) with obsessive determination. But nothing can blot out the knowledge of his coming death. He gains an unsavoury reputation for dissoluteness.
Meanwhile, his one-time love Pamela is going off the rails. Instead of going on holiday to Scotland she goes off with some family to the Riviera where she’s snapped by Society photographers (all of which Leithen appears to disapprove of) then goes off as guest of another family on a cruise of the Red Sea. You can see why the Jarrow Marchers attacked the Ritz, can’t you?
Leithen sees her at a ball in December and dislikes the way she has caked herself in make-up in the modern fashion and affects a raffish bravado. Being blessed with insight, Leithen realises that she’s hiding a secret sorrow, the brave girl!
Next thing is Leithen is at a house party before Christmas given by the Earl of Lamancha at his place in Devonshire, pheasant shooting during the day and cards in the evening. Charles is there and then Pamela shows up. He gets drunk and she is unpleasant.
He gets up early next morning and goes for a mighty walk across the moors, blind to their beauty, sunk in despair. As chance has it, he bumps into her in the home woods on his way back. They politely greet each other, then she sympathises with his wretched appearance, then he tells her that he loves her but it can never work because he is doomed to die and takes her hands but she says this is all nonsense and runs off.
Back in London, she turns up unannounced at his rooms in Mount Street. She makes him repeat the whole story about Moe and seeing the future and then boldly announces that it is balderdash and she is going to help him escape his fate. This is arguably the best of the five stories, and arguably the best scene, because she not only tells Charles he is going to defy his fate because it’s all stuff and nonsense, but also because on 10 June she will be starting her honeymoon. With him.
That fetched him out of his chair. He gazed blindly at her as she stood with her cheeks flushed and her eyes a little dim. For a full minute he strove for words and none came.
‘Have you nothing to say?’ she whispered. ‘Do you realise, sir, that I am asking you to marry me?’ (p.209)
Pamela (his god-daughter) comes to see him (Leithen) and confides everything, how she is helping Charles through his depression, how she is spending all her time bolstering his nerve, and Leithen can see how it’s exhausting her and how jolly brave she is!
I do not think that I have ever in my life so deeply admired a fellow-mortal. Pamela was the very genius of fortitude, courage winged and inspired and divinely lit… I told myself that such a spirit could not fail if there was a God in Heaven. (p.211)
January and February pass. In March she offers to marry him there and then but he doesn’t want to make her a widow, insists they must wait till 10 June has been and gone. Then startling news. Pamela has caught a cold and it develops into pneumonia.
Weeks of mental anguish as Pamela declines and Charles throws himself into his work or spends the nights walking round Mayfair in agonies. He forgets about his own impending doom and is only concerned for his love. Then Leithen, following his diary, realises that Charles breaks through his anguish into an unexpected serenity. Faith. He becomes convinced that so deep is their love it will transcend death, it will continue after death, and somehow he isn’t worried any more.
On the last page Leithen describes attending their wedding, which is an idyllic affair at Wirlesdon. Pamela shows him the copy of The Times with his obituary in it, that much came true. Later, in the autumn, Charles jokes of it to Leithen. It was a case of mistaken identity. Seems Charles had third cousin of his great-grandfather, who had also served in a Scots regiment, who lived in some villa in Cheltenham which he’d named after the family home, and this old boy died on 9 June and his servant informed the Times. Hence the obituary on 10 June. Case of mistaken identity, old boy. Rum do, eh?
This is the best of the stories and has vivid descriptions of love and despair (maybe I liked it because it fits archetypes of what a love story should be). But the payoff felt a bit, well, cheap.
The theme of boyishness and rejuvenation
It’s a truism that ripping yarns are designed to appeal to ‘boys of all ages’, as Haggard out it in a preface, that the adventures either happen to boys or bring out the boyish side of grown men.
But there’s something more in Buchan stories. Adventures restore men’s youth, adventures make stolid middle-aged men young again. This was true of Leithen in the previous novel in the series, The Dancing Floor, who, when he got swept up in the fervid course of events, felt the years fall away. And it’s true of Tavanger the financier during his complex business negotiations.
We parted at Hyde Park Corner, and I watched him set off westward with his shoulders squared and his step as light as a boy’s. This Daphne adventure was assuredly renewing Tavanger’s youth.
His adventures seemed to have renewed his youth, for he looked actually boyish, and I understood that half the power of the man – and indeed of anyone who succeeds in his line – lay just in a boyish readiness to fling his cap on the right occasion over the moon
and:
He laughed – not ironically, or ruefully, but with robust enjoyment. Tavanger had certainly acquired a pleasant boyishness from this enterprise.
In this book grown men behave with puckish boyishness. In the politics chapter the Prime Minister, Trant, retires in the spirit of a naughty schoolboy:
I walked down to the House that afternoon with one assured conviction. Trant was about to retire. His air had been that of a schoolboy who meant to defy authority and hang the consequences. He had the manner of one who knew he was going to behave unconscientiously and dared anybody to prevent him.
While the protagonist of chapter 3:
I have come down to breakfast before a day’s partridge shooting, apathetic about the prospect, and have been compelled by Reggie to look forward to it with the ardour of a boy. Small wonder he was popular; many people remain young, but few can communicate youthfulness. (p.121)
And not just the men are juvenilised. After a rough day’s riding Daker’s love interest is shaken and red-faced, her clothes and adult self-possession shaken.
As they jogged home Reggie wondered that he had not thought her pretty before; the polished young lady had gone, and in its place was something very girlish and young, something more primitive and more feminine.
The regression from self-possessed lady to ‘girl’, parallels the move backwards from ‘civilisation’ to ‘primitive’, and both involve a move to the ‘more feminine’ (p.131). Part of the juvenile mindset which British public school education seemed to inculcate, then as now.
Thoughts
I grew up on the stories of H.G. Wells, writer of wild science fiction stories placed in cosy suburban settings (Martians travel millions of miles through space and land in Woking; the key witness to the terrifying war which destroys the world is Bert Smallways, keeper of a failed second-hand bicycle shop in suburban Kent, etc).
Wells is a brilliantly vivid and, at the same time, often very funny writer. Buchan is neither. As I’ve read his books I’ve tried to nail down what it is that keeps Buchan’s books so second-rate, why hardly any of the 30 or so novels he wrote are read (or worth reading) these days.
Rackety plots
A major part of the problem is that Buchan’s plots really don’t hang together very well. We still read Conan Doyle’s stories (both the Holmes ones but also the Professor Challengers ones which I loved as a boy) because they make sense. Doyle went to great pains (and found it exhausting) to nail down every link in the convoluted plots which he had Holmes and Watson unravel.
In his science fiction works the premises are sometimes fantastic but are kept simple and therefore somehow believable (like a remote plateau in South America where dinosaurs never died out, in The Lost World). Same is true of Wells. His story ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’ struck me, as a boy, as very much what would happen to an ordinary man if he was suddenly given the ability to work miracles.
Buchan has neither of these gifts. His plots are rackety, bent and contrived – we never find out what international conspiracy is at work in The Power-House, while The Dancing Floor relies on not just one but a whole series of silly and contrived coincidences. And many aspects of the individual sub-plots or incidental incidents, are themselves riddled with holes, full of ridiculous implausibilities on virtually every page.
So his stories 1) lack the grand simplicity of Wells’ or Doyle’s one-concept fantasies, but at the same time 2) their complicated plots lack the elegant complexity of the Holmes stories, instead relying on so many contrived implausibilities as to fail to win us over.
Charmless snobbery
But there’s a third element brooding over these two structural ones, which really keeps Buchan locked in the third division, which is his lack of charm. Both Conan Doyle and Wells are often funny, charming, invite the reader to join in a sense of humour which (remarkably) still works a hundred year later. The interplay between Holmes, Watson and their housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, has charmed and delighted readers round the world for over a century. Buchan has moments of drollness, and all of John MacNab is one big joke, but he is rarely charming. He is never loveable.
No, the vibe that comes from Buchan is cold, aloof and standoffish. And this is connected with his snobbery. Before we get to any of his creaking, Heath Robinson plots, we are bombarded with reminders that the central protagonist, Sir Edward Leithen, is a leading member of the pukka British upper classes. There’s reams of stuff about dinner parties, and country house weekends, and hunting, shooting and fishing, tediously persistent reminders of how he rides with famous fox hunting packs in the Home Counties (the Wyvern, the Bicester), records of dinner and chat at his pukka London club, or casually dropping into the House of Commons to represent the Conservative landed interest, listen to this or that speech, hobnob with the great party leaders.
Instead of charming his readers, Buchan, certainly in the Leithen novels, goes out of his way to flaunt his class privilege, his social rank, his gilded lifestyle, and his immaculate social connections at every opportunity. The lasting impression of all his stories isn’t so much the creaky and contrived plots but his persistent need to remind us at every turn of his social superiority.
Evelyn Waugh was on the face of it every bit as snobbish but in Waugh it doesn’t matter because he is so very, very funny, so inventive and unexpected, and such a supreme prose stylist. Buchan is none of these things.
So I’d itemise Buchan’s shortcomings as:
over-complicated plots with too many moving parts
parts which rely on too many improbable coincidences
but which still don’t really justify the sense of hysteria he wants to generate (in both The Power-House and The Dancing Floor)
accompanied by an almost complete lack of warmth, humour or charm
but instead, an officious insistence on his impeccable social superiority i.e. snobbery
Interesting words
incunabula, plural of incunabulum – an early printed book, especially one printed before 1500
to ingeminate – repeat or reiterate (a word or statement), typically for emphasis
pachydermatous – thick-skinned; insensitive to criticism, insult etc
a pourparler – a discussion preliminary to negotiations
a prepossession – a preconceived opinion, a prejudice
stand-patter – term used in America in the early 20th century describing stubbornly conservative members of the members of the Republican Party
vouchsafement – the granting of a favour
Credit
The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1932. References are to the 1992 B&W paperback edition, which is littered with typos.
She had spoken of a ‘sacrifice.’ That was the naked truth of it; any moment tragedy might be done, some hideous rite consummated, and youth and gallantry laid on a dark altar.
(The central threat in The Dancing Floor, page 150)
There was business afoot, it appeared, ugly business.
(Reaction of plucky young Vernon Milburne when he hears of a damsel in distress, page 198)
Frame story
As with The Power-House and John McNab, this is another frame story, although the frame is brief and cursory, less than half a page. It says that the unnamed narrator heard this tale from Leithen himself, ‘as we were returning rather late in the season from a shooting holiday in North Ontario’.
I think this single paragraph does at least four things. First and foremost it announces that we are going to hear a long yarn, of a certain comfortable, clubbable, fireside type. Two, it establishes that we are, as usual with Leithen, moving in posh English circles, among hunting, shooting and fishing types. And three, the unexpected setting, North Ontario, announces that we are among the British ruling class which is used to taking the world as its oyster, which thinks nothing of travelling to Canada, Australia, India or South Africa, for recreation and amusement. In this respect it 4) prepares us for the way this spooky horror story is going to be set in Greece, in that era still a faraway destination, full of uncanny pagan beliefs, as the story will amply demonstrate.
A Leithen story
The first-person narrator claims to have been told this story told by the Buchan character, Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Leithen, barrister and Conservative MP, making this the third of the five Leithen novels.
Part One
Chapter 1
So the story gets going in January 1913, with Leithen describing meeting a friend of his nephew, Charles, at a posh ball. The friend is a tall, slender, aloof young man named Vernon Milburne. Brief party conversation.
Three months later, at Easter, Leithen takes a break from his busy work schedule for a brief walking holiday in the Westmoreland hills, what we call the Lake District. On the last day he twists his ankle, the weather turns bad, he gets lost and is lucky to end up walking up the drive and knocking on the front door of a big old mansion belonging to…guess who! The very same Vernon Milburne, living all alone in the Gothic monstrosity built by his grandfather, attended on by an ancient butler.
This so-far pretty prosaic account takes a turn for the supernatural. For after they’ve taken his boots off and treated his ankle and given Leithen a nice hot bath and clean clothes, after the staff have served up a lovely hot dinner, then young Vernon hesitantly tells Leithen that he has been haunted by dreams since boyhood. To be precise, every spring he is revisited by the same dream in which he is in a strange house with the terrible knowledge that something momentous is moving through the rooms towards him. With each spring that passes, the dream recurs and The Thing is one room closer.
Chapter 2
Over the next few years Leithen stays in touch with young Vernon and they regularly meet up for lunch or dinner. He tries to help the boy by doing in-depth research into his family tree in the vague hope of discovering either a strain of psychic weirdness or maybe some traumatic event which Vernon is channeling.
In spring 1914 Leithen is invited by a friend (the Earl of Lamancha who is one of the three protagonists of the previous book in the series, John McNab) to join him on his yacht for a cruise around the Greek islands, and he invites Vernon along. He discovers Vernon has a very strong feel for the primal Mother Goddess who he considers the centre of Greek religion and forerunner of the Virgin Mary. On a walk round a remote island they’ve anchored at, they come across a large mansion and are startled when local fishermen give cries of terror and cross themselves on seeing Vernon. Why?
On the cruise he has the same dream again. By his reckoning there are six more rooms for The Thing he so strongly feels looming in his dream to traverse – six more years before the secret of his dreams is revealed.
Unfortunately, the First World War intervenes. From various sources Leithen (who volunteers and fights for the duration) discovers that Vernon is a very dutiful and logical soldier but lacks the real urge to hatred and violence. He is strangely detached from the whole thing.
Towards the end of the war, Leithen is gassed and spends weeks in a hospital bed recovering. In the way of outrageous coincidences which characterise popular yarns, Vernon happens to be in the bed next to him. He has had a good war and risen to the rank of colonel (p.205).
Chapter 3
The lad recovers and goes off but Leithen’s health is permanently undermined. He does lots of things to try and recapture the good health of his youth, looking out his old university books, even moving into the rooms he and friends shared at Oxford.
He gets a letter that Vernon has been sailing in the south of France and that reminds him of the eerie morning on the Greek island before the war. Leithen happens to have an old relic of the 1890s staying with him, old Folliot, a memoirist who’d made a career writing about 50 years of dining at other men’s tables. When Leithen asks him about the Greek island he and Vernon spent that weird morning on, Plakos, it triggers a long stream of information from Folliot.
Turns out the island was bought by a renegade Englishman named Tom Arabin, a wastrel and bounder from way back, ‘a shabby old bandit,’ who built himself a mansion on the house and had all sorts of rascal friends to stay. He had actually known Byron and Shelley. So much so that he named the son he had and raised on the island Shelley, Shelley Arabin. Good-looking young chap, expert writer, took the decadent style of Baudelaire and Swinburne a step further.
Good-looking but cold and cruel, and rumours spread about his wicked behaviour as he turned the mansion into a refuge for:
soldiers of fortune, and bad poets, and the gentry who have made their native countries too hot for them. Plakos was the refuge of every brand of outlaw, social and political.’
Folliot heard gossip about scandalous behaviour from our man in Athens, a certain Fanshawe, who marvelled that the islanders didn’t burn down the den of iniquity the villa had become.
Well, this explains to Leithen the very powerful vibe of evil and discomfort he’d felt when he and Vernon stumbled over the place on their innocent stroll. To the reader the way the Greek fishermen they happened across leapt aside and made the sign of protection against the evil eye…well, that immediately made me think that young Vernon is, in the way familiar from a thousand horror stories, a reincarnation of wicked Shelley Arabin!
Chapter 4
The plot thickens then thickens some more. Leithen is at a country house party, at a place called Wirlesdon whose owners, Tom and Molly, are old friends, for the shooting (the book contains numerous references to not only shooting game but fox hunting, with knowing references to various well-known ‘hunts’ across England). Here he sees a young woman behaving with astonishing rudeness, domineering and masterful, who demands a cigarette, a light and then conversation with young Vernon who is, understandably, put off by her rudeness. Leithen learns she is named Corrie and assumes she is some jumped-up chorus girl.
The hostess, Mollie Nantley, then informs him that this woman is none other than the daughter of Shelley Arabin, brought up in a house of sin and decadence.
Chapter 5
Then, as so often with the Leithen stories (The Power-House depends on it) he finds out more via his work as a barrister, this being a way of shoehorning outrageous coincidences into the plot. A brief comes his way which he is surprised to see concerns the island of Plakos and the former owner Shelley Arabin.
From this Leithen learns that Corrie’s real name is Koré, the classical Greek term for young woman. And it takes a while to disentangle the fact that the case has been cooked up by the old solicitor for the family, a Mr Derwent, in a bid to rescue Koré. The idea is that the Arabin family were already very unpopular but that the privations of the war, coming close at times to starvation, have inflamed the sense of grievance among the ‘primitive’ islanders. There have been threats against her and Derwent is worried for her safety. And so he was involved in the law case Leithen has come across, in which an anonymous buyer was proposed to buy the mansion and all the property off Koré and so free her from threat.
Derwent is discreet about who this mysterious benefactor is but Leithen takes a guess that it is the wealthy Jewish banker Theodore Ertzberger, who Koré stayed with as a girl during her education in England. So he goes to visit Mr Ertzberger, who confirms the story and adds a lot more detail about the danger Miss Arabin is in back on Plakos. He also adds depth to the black character of Shelley Arabin.
‘The man was rotten to the very core. His father – I remember him too – was unscrupulous and violent, but he had a heart. And he had a kind of burning courage. Shelley was as hard and cold as a stone, and he was also a coward. But he had genius – a genius for wickedness. He was beyond all comparison the worst man I have ever known.’
And the danger Koré is in among islanders who some of whom consider her a witch. So Ertzberger begs Leithen to take her case and help her.
Chapter 6
Over the next couple of weeks Leithen has random sightings of Koré, in a train carriage then, again, on a train platform with a group of other young people waiting for a train. These sightings are designed to build up the sense of Koré as aloof and distant and lonely and separated from her peers by a terrible upbringing and present danger. It is around Christmas time.
One night he returns from work at his chambers in the Temple (the Temple is a set of buildings in east central London entirely devoted to the chambers of barristers and lawyers) to discover a great pile of family records and documents has been delivered to his house, a ramshackle assortment of all sorts of documents including diaries and letters of wicked old Shelley. In among them was an old envelope containing what looks like a very old manuscript written in Greek. He sends this onto a fellow lawyer who as a hobby is interested in the Classics. He transcribes it a pronounces it fascinating but can’t actually translate it. So Leithen sends it on to Vernon who, conveniently enough, studied Classics at Oxford.
(Worth pointing out that Leithen has been saddened at their recent meetings to realise that Vernon is drifting away from him; they no longer share the friendship and regular meetings they had before the war.)
The manuscript turns out to describe the Spring festival of welcoming the Queen or ‘Fairborn’ at a place named Kynaetho. It quotes old paeans, Greek poetry and rituals, to describe the Koré or the Maiden. But it goes on to mention that in times of great distress a different ceremony is held, and the document seems to describe is the human sacrifice of a young man and woman in order to bring Spring and fertility to the land.
A few days later Koré phones him, asks if he has read the papers, then domineeringly invites him for luncheon. Here Leithen summarises the situation:
‘Your family was unpopular – I understand, justly unpopular. All sorts of wild beliefs grew up about them among the peasants, and they have been transferred to you. The people are half savages, and half starved, and their mood is dangerous. They are coming to see in you the cause of their misfortunes. You go there alone and unprotected, and you have no friends in the island. The danger is that, after a winter of brooding, they may try in some horrible way to wreak their vengeance on you.’
Koré accepts all this but obstinately refuses to do the sensible thing, namely sell up and move back to England. She goes on to deepen the sense of voodoo threat, explaining that some of the islanders accuse her of being a diabolissa (a she-devil), a trigla (a harpy) or vrykolakas (a vampire), they wear blue beads round their necks and always have garlic on them to protect themselves and their children from her, whisk children out of the street when she passes, and so on. Ertzberger, in their earlier interview, had given one reason for her obstinate insistence on staying.
‘I think she feels that she has a duty—that she cannot run away from the consequences of her father’s devilry. Her presence there at the mercy of the people is a kind of atonement.’
We are on page 100 of this 250-page book and it is plain that we have been very slowly, very painstakingly sucked into the intense, Hammer Horror plight of this young lady. And Leithen is hooked:
The fact was that I was acquiring an obsession of my own – a tragic defiant girl moving between mirthless gaiety and menaced solitude. She might be innocent of the witchcraft in which Plakos believed, but she had cast some outlandish spell over me.
As they talk, Leithen suddenly has what you might call the Quintessential Buchan Epiphany, which is the sudden sense of the thin line separating barbarism and civilisation; more precisely that you can be in busy old London, in a London street or a London flat and everything looks and feels normal but somehow, some secret knowledge, knowledge of a secret plot or conspiracy or hideous plight, transforms everything.
This is the feeling of terror and vertigo which Leithen experiences in the latter stages of The Power-House when he has to trek across a London packed with the spies of the secret organisation which is out to murder him, and this is the feeling he suddenly has, sitting listening to Miss Arabin tell her spine-chilling stories of ancient rituals, blood letting and human sacrifice on a remote island.
Anyway, the key fact which emerges is that all these revelations are happening just after Christmas and the New Year and Koré is not planning to return to the island until March – which is, of course, as the build-up to the spring festivals begins and also, when Vernon’s recurrent nightmare afflicts him (start of April). This chapter (6) ends on a deliberate cliff-hanger when Leithen asks Kore if she’s ever heard of a place called Kynaetho, and she tells him it’s the name of the biggest village near to her house! My God, all those bloodthirsty ancient rituals stem from right next door to where she lives!
Chapter 7
Leithen is now obsessed with the figure of this slender Englishwoman, hard as nails on the outside, sensitive and terrified inside, and the weird and horrific and primal pagan danger she finds herself in.
a solitary little figure set in a patch of light on a great stage among shadows, defying of her own choice the terrors of the unknown.
Madly, he sometimes thinks he’s falling in love with her, toys with proposing to her, that a wealthy older man could protect her. Then Koré leaves. She’s due at a dinner party but never shows up. Leithen enquires at her solicitors and discovers she’s packed and left for Greece. He confers with Ertzberger who tells him Koré has sold off all her investments for cash, which suggests she’s going to do something reckless or dangerous. So Leithen winds up his affairs and leaves London that weekend.
Part two
Chapter 8
Leithen arrives in Athens. Ertzberger had given him the name of a contact, Captain Constantine Maris. This man has gathered a ragtag squad of recruits in case things get rough. They’re a rough-looking bunch. They have a stormy voyage from Athens to Plakos (aboard ‘a dissolute-looking little Leghorn freighter, named the Santa Lucia’) and are put ashore in a deep fog.
Turns out they’ve landed on the wrong jetty, the one below the village, not the house. They soon trigger a wary terrified crowd of villagers who lead them to the village priest. An old bent man he repeats the villagers’ beliefs that Koré is a witch and should be driven from the village and her house burned down, but doesn’t want her harmed because he doesn’t want his villagers to have a mortal sin (murder) on their consciences. So he is prepared to help Leithen get into the big old house, despite every approach being guarded by villagers.
Meanwhile, Maris will walk south along the coast to the next village of Vano where, for obscure reasons, they decided to land a second force (of five) under the second-in-command, one-armed Janni (wounded in the war). How this all turned into a military assault is an authorial sleight of hand and why, a bit of a mystery.
Chapter 9
Leithen spends the long hot day in the care of the local priest waiting for nightfall. They fall upon the expedient of writing messages to each other in rough Latin and the priest emphases the peril, the danger etc, chiefly to stoke up a sense of genuine panic in the reader. Eventually night falls and Leithen slips out the back of the priest’s house and heads towards Kore’s mansion along the raised shoulder of flat land the locals call the Dancing Floor (where ancient ceremonies used to be held). It’s amusing the way Leithen the narrator keeps telling us how dull and prosey he is before going into a great dithyramb (‘A dithyramb is a speech or piece of writing that bursts with enthusiasm. ‘):
You will call me fantastic, but, dull dog as I am, I felt a sort of poet’s rapture as I looked at those shining spaces, and at the sky above, flooded with the amber moon except on the horizon’s edge, where a pale blue took the place of gold, and faint stars were pricking. The place was quivering with magic drawn out of all the ages since the world was made, but it was good magic. I had felt the oppression of Kynaetho, the furtive, frightened people, the fiasco of Eastertide, the necromantic lamps beside the graves. These all smacked evilly of panic and death. But now I was looking on the Valley of the Shadow of Life. It was the shadow only, for it was mute and still and elusive. But the presage of life was in it, the clean life of fruits and flocks, and children, and happy winged things, and that spring purity of the earth which is the purity of God.
Leithen makes an attempt to break into the demesne or land of the house by getting through what looks, at a distance, like a breach in the wall. But a) it is guarded and b) when he makes a bolt for it he finds out the hard way that it is completely blocked by a stout wooden gate, so he turns tail, howling and waving his arms in the manner of a banshee to freak out the peasant Greek guards and makes it all the way back across the meadow of the Dancing Floor without anyone firing on him. And then through bushes, along the path above the village cemetery and so back to the priest’s house, having completely failed in his mission.
He goes to the inn to discover the men he left there have gone, then out into the village street, at dawn, where a menacing crowd is gathering so he breaks into a run and sprints to the church, bursting through the doors and none of the villagers follow him.
Chapter 10
Leithen spends the day with the priest with whom he forms a bond, after praying by the side of the bier containing an effigy of Christ ready for the Easter festival and then Leithen helps wash and scrub the floor of the little old church. As night falls Maris appears at the window and reveals that all the other men have deserted. He headed south and rendezvoused with Janni only to discover that Janni’s five men had been so demoralised by chatting to the local peasants, who told them about the witch who poisoned the land, that they had asked permission to go home. And when he got back, Maris found his five had also deserted.
At night Leithen heads across country to meet up with Janni. This is beginning to feel needlessly drawn out and complicated. They go round the coast trying to find a way to climb the cliffs into the land of the big house but instead discover a yacht anchored out in the bay. Leithen strips and swims out to it and discovers it is crewed by a Greek who speaks no English and has been told to remain there until the return of his master, who has gone ashore.
Leithen persuades the man to row the yacht’s dinghy to shore where Janni, of course, can communicate with him. They tell him about the English girl who is in distress and get him grudgingly to promise to come and rescue them if they can get the girl down to this bay.
Chapter 11
God, this is getting complicated. Then Janni and Leithen head back to the ‘base’ and crash out, exhausted (the place on the bare downs where Leithen had encountered Janni at the start of chapter 10). The Penguin edition has a map of the island but I’m not sure it helps that much.
Map of (the southern part of) the fictional Greek island of Plakos showing The House where Kore is holed up, the village of Kynaetho to its north and the great extent of meadow called the Dancing Floor to the East, with Janni’s encampment on the eastern shore
Leithen wakens the next morning as Janni is cooking breakfast. At 1pm he approaches the mansion from the sea side but is dismayed to find it is completely surrounded by guards and that the villagers have made piles of firewood against all of the doors. They really do plan to burn the place down!
That night he returns with Janni, edging their way round the walls or cliffs or something to try and find a way to the house, when they come across an extraordinary sight: the Dancing Floor has been adorned as for a ritual. Flaming torches stand at intervals and the entire village has turned out to watch.
What the watch is a bunch of youths running round the perimeter of the floor several times, before the winner grabs the last torch as he runs past it, and runs into the centre of the meadow and douses the torch in a spring. Then another man, obviously a prisoner, is brought forward, has his shirt torn from him and is doused with water from the spring. Leithen realises two things: this is exactly the ritual described in the manuscript he found among the papers which Koré gave him. And the man is Maris, his erstwhile helper. Leithen realises he has been chosen as the sacrificial man who will join the sacrificial woman, Koré, when the house is burned down, a ritual sacrifice to revitalise the sterile land.
He feels himself overwhelmed by pagan feelings, an overwhelming need to worship, feels the caveman rising in him. It is only by fixing his thoughts on the wooden figure of the crucified Christ that he hangs onto his sense of civilisation and values.
I am not a religious man in the ordinary sense—only a half-believer in the creed in which I was born. But in that moment I realized that there was that in me which was stronger than the pagan, an instinct which had come down to me from believing generations. I understood then what were my gods. I think I prayed, I know that I clung to the memory of that rude image as a Christian martyr may have clung to his crucifix. It stood for all the broken lights which were in me as against this ancient charméd darkness. (p.171)
In that hour the one thing that kept me sane was the image of the dead Christ below the chancel step. It was my only link with the reasonable and kindly world I had lost. (p.175)
Chapter 12
The entire village is camping out on the Dancing Floor, so when Janni and Leithen sneak back into the village they discover it is empty. They return to the church where, bizarrely and surreally, since they are the only people around, the priest dragoons them into carrying the bier containing the wooden effigy of Christ around the bounds of the village. What emerges clearly is that, although Leithen considers himself only a half believer, still, the Christianity he learned as a boy
I am not a religious man in the ordinary sense—only a half-believer in the creed in which I was born. But in that moment I realized that there was that in me which was stronger than the pagan, an instinct which had come down to me from believing generations. I understood then what were my gods.
And so carrying the bier is an act of defiance against pagan barbarism.
We were celebrating, but there were no votaries. The torches had gone to redden the Dancing Floor, sorrow had been exchanged for a guilty ecstasy, the worshippers were seeking another Saviour. Our rite was more than a commemoration, it was a defiance, and I felt like a man who carries a challenge to the enemy.
Then there is an incredibly long, drawn-out description of him and Janni approaching the causeway and jetty to the house, Janni going off in one direction to act as a distraction, while Leithen crawls the other way, under the wall of the causeway, it’s the middle of the day and blistering hot, till he comes to wall which he follows for a while and finally, finally, scrambles over it and into the demesne of the bloody house.
He is running through the large garden towards the house when he sees a tremendous whoosh of flame go up into the night sky. The villagers have started the fire! For some reasons numbers of the hillmen who had been guarding the house comes stumbling past him with terror in their yes. Why? Then he stumbles into Maris, who also is wild-eyed but recognises him, is free, and has his pistol. Will they need it?
Part 3
Chapter 13
Part 3 cuts away from the present action to jump back to Vernon. You might well have forgotten but this is the spring when the sequence of his dreams is finally meant to result in the Big Thing arriving, the thing which has been moving one room, one year at a time, towards him, the great revelation.
So that spring Vernon left London to travel to Greece, as he had many times before. He travelled by train to Venice where he joined his yacht which had been shipped there. Then we get a long, over-detailed description of his journey by sea, sailing a yacht from Italy, through the Corinth canal, up the east coast of the mainland etc etc.
He had no plans. It was a joy to him to be alone with the racing seas and the dancing winds, to scud past the little headlands, pink and white with blossom, or to lie of a night in some hidden bay beneath the thymy crags. He had discarded the clothes of civilization. In a blue jersey and old corduroy trousers, bareheaded and barefooted, he steered his craft and waited on the passing of the hours. His mood, he has told me, was one of complete happiness, unshadowed by nervousness or doubt. The long preparation was almost at an end. Like an acolyte before a temple gate, he believed himself to be on the threshold of a new life. He had that sense of unseen hands which comes to all men once or twice in their lives, and both hope and fear were swallowed up in a calm expectancy.
So 1) the notion of leaving ‘civilisation’ behind is again invoked, along with 2) images of pagan religion, the ‘acolyte’ at the ‘temple gate’ and 3) the sense, in the final sentence, of a controlling destiny.
The stormy seas he and his shipmate (an unnamed Greek sailor he picked up in Epirus) last for days of perilous sailing in high seas and adverse winds and, at the end of it, he realises the Great night has passed and he did not have the dream. The great climax, the revelation of the meaning of the recurring dream he had been having for at least ten years and which he had so nervously revealed to Leithen that evening before the war, had simply not arrived (p.193). He feels like a fool for wasting the best years of his life keyed up for a fantasy.
The thing is, after all their wild sailing across the Aegean, they have at last stumbled across an unnamed island and, as a thick fog swirled up, have anchored in a small bay. The make food and coffee and Vernon is sitting on deck mulling over his folly in wasting his life on a phantom when…a face appears at the gunwales! An old Greek has spotted their yacht and rowed out to greet it. When he sees that the master of it is a young Englishman, he begs for his help.
Because guess what island Vernon has come to out of the huge number of little Greek islands available, guess which one he just happens by complete accident to have come across, and guess just which bay he has, completely at random, anchored in?
Yes. Plakos! And he has cast anchor in the little harbour below THE HOUSE which is at the centre of the whole melodrama! The coincidence is so forced and preposterous that the reader can only marvel at what Buchan himself would probably call its ‘bare-faced cheek’.
Anyway, this old Greek servant in a dinghy persuades Vernon that his mistress is in great danger and wants him to come and talk to ‘Mademoiselle Élise’ waiting ashore. So Vernon grabs a cap and a revolver and is slowly rowed by the whiskery old boy through the fog the short distance to the jetty below The House.
Here Mademoiselle Élise (‘a middle-aged woman with the air and dress of a lady’s maid’) hurriedly recaps the story which we, the readers, already know inside out, about the obstinate Englishwoman, scion of a wicked family, barricaded into her own mansion by enraged villagers etc. Vernon, being a stout chap, accepts the preposterous story and promises to help a damsel in distress. So the servants guide Vernon, tiptoeing through the fog (to avoid alerting the guards Leithen has spent four days trying to dodge) and achieve at a stroke what Leithen had completely failed to do, namely find the one door into the building which isn’t blocked up with piles of firewood, unlock it and, hey presto! Vernon is inside the dank, mouldering old building.
Chapter 14
He finds himself in a massive room painted with a mural.
It was the walls, which had been painted and frescoed in one continuous picture. At first he thought it was a Procession of the Hours or the Seasons, but when he brought his torch to bear on it he saw that it was something very different. The background was a mountain glade, and on the lawns and beside the pools of a stream figures were engaged in wild dances. Pan and his satyrs were there, and a bevy of nymphs, and strange figures half animal, half human. The thing was done with immense skill— the slanted eyes of the fauns, the leer in a contorted satyr face, the mingled lust and terror of the nymphs, the horrid obscenity of the movements. It was a carnival of bestiality that stared from the four walls. The man who conceived it had worshipped darker gods even than Priapus. There were other things which Vernon noted in the jumble of the room. A head of Aphrodite, for instance – Pandemos, not Urania. A broken statuette of a boy which made him sick. A group of little figures which were a miracle in the imaginative degradation of the human form. Not the worst relics from the lupanars of Pompeii compared with these in sheer subtlety of filth. (p.201)
And the sickeningly realistic painting of Salome with the head of John the Baptist. And the exquisitely bound collection of pornography through the ages. The servants show him to a poky attic room where he lies down and sleeps for 10 hours (exhausted by the ordeal of the stormy sailing).
Next morning he’s given hot water for a wash and shave but still looks sunburned and rough, in his corduroy trousers and no shoes when he is introduced by the servants, to his amazement, to none other than Koré Arabin, the pesky young woman who he met half a dozen times at country house weekends back in England… What the devil?!
It’s a shock for both of them to recognise each other and even Buchan realises this is now a series of preposterous coincidences:
‘You have forgotten,’ she said. ‘But I have seen you out with the Mivern, and we met at luncheon at Wirlesdon in the winter.’ He remembered now, and what he remembered chiefly were the last words he had spoken to me on the subject of this girl. The adventure was becoming farcical.
What’s striking or funny or characteristic or a lot like a movie, is that the young woman at the centre of this overripe farrago turns out to be every bit as sarcastic, superior and obstinate as she was when Vernon and Leithen first met her in the drawing rooms of English country houses.
They quickly catch up with the situation – villagers think she’s a witch, they’re going to carry out the ancient ceremony to burn the house down and cleanse the evil etc etc – and Vernon insists she must come with her now. She refuses. He says he’ll carry her by force, if necessary. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the dashing heroes of silent cinema, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolf Valentino, rescuing a fair maiden in distress! To show her pluck, Koré pulls a small hand pistol on him. To show his, he snatches it out of her hand (discovering it was unloaded, anyway)!
Anyway, she now walks him to the window, shows him the bay and the fact that the fog has completely disappeared and so has the yacht which brought him. It has sailed away, probably alarmed by her village guardians some of whom are setting out on their own fishing boats. Vernon is a prisoner like herself!
Chapter 15
At this moment of peril, Vernon feels new purpose and energy. Accompanied by the stirrings of feelings for this plucky gal.
He understood the quality of one whom aforetimes he had disliked both as individual and type. This pale girl, dressed like a young woman in a Scotch shooting lodge, was facing terror with a stiff lip. There was nothing raffish or second-rate about her now.
Now they’re stuck together, she tells him more. The most important detail is the food. Although they are blockading the house, the villagers are bringing good food – barley cakes, honey and cheese, eggs and dried figs, along with plenty of milk, and fresh water. Odd, given that the villagers themselves have endured a semi-famine.
But Vernon realises its significance. This is the food you give to sacrificial victims. It is recorded in that ancient manuscript Leithen had passed on to him. And thus they draw closer and closer together, Vernon realising she is not at all the spoiled brat she came over as in their previous encounters but a woman with a core of steel, determined to pay back the debt incurred by her decadent forebears, determined to see it out to the last.
Talking to the ancient servant Mistri Vernon learns that the day appointed for the ceremonial burning of the house is three days hence on Good Friday. He also learns about the ceremony which is held a day or two prior to this, the race among the young men of the village on the Dancing Floor as soon as the moon rises, and the victor being crowned King and choosing the male sacrifice – the event Leithen observed in Part 2.
Aha! Vernon conceives a plan. He will get Mitri to smuggle him out of the house, he will get Mitri to put it about that he (Vernon) is a native of a remote mountain village. He speaks Greek. His face is brown from sailing. He will pass as a local, take part in the race and win. Koré is puzzled when he tries to explain, so he puts it in pukka English tally-ho style:
Since Koré still looked puzzled, he added: ‘We’re cast for parts in a rather sensational drama. I’m beginning to think that the only way to prevent it being a tragedy is to turn it into a costume-play.’ (p.221)
Chapter 16
Vernon climbs down a drainpipe, makes his way to the causeway, and bluffs his way past the guards, using his passable Greek (wildly improbable). Walks east round the coast till he sees his yacht anchored in the other bay, the one where Leithen and Janni had seen it. He swims out to it and is reunited with his loyal Epirote who has some choice insults to hurl at the people of Plakos who chased him away from the main harbour more or less at gunpoint.
It’s at this point that this Epirote (who we learned in the Leithen chapters is called Black George) tells Vernon that the day before an Englishman had swim out to the boat, made him row the dinghy to the shore where he’d met the man’s Greek assistant, and they’d told a wild tale about a woman in danger.
This is, of course, Leithen and Janni whose version of this event is given in Part 2. The two strands of narrative are converging.
To cut a long story short, Vernon mixes in with the village crowd heading towards the Dancing Floor for the evening of the race and manages to become one of the young men jostling around the start of the race. As we know, after a slow start, Vernon goes on to win, grab a torch, run to the sacred well in the centre of the meadow and dowse the torch, then listen to the instructions of the priest and master of ceremonies. This man makes it clear that Vernon’s role is to be placed inside the house and wait till the first fires are lit before murdering its inhabitants, then being let out by whichever door he exits to watch the climax of the ceremony.
Then the priest asks him to choose the male sacrifice and armed men bring forward Maris, Leithen’s assistant who had been captured. Vernon spots that he is unwilling and has the manner of a soldier so on the spot chooses him, he has a vase of holy water poured over him, then is manhandled alongside Vernon up to the house, to be sent inside.
Chapter 17
Once they’re inside the house Vernon reveals to Mitri who he is and the latter astonishes him by saying he has come to the island with an English colonel and Milord. Good grief! Leithen!! Vernon realises Leithen is in on the game.
Back to the present they have 24 hours to prepare (until Good Friday night) but are at a loss how to escape once the fire is lit because all exits will be thronged with fanatical villagers, who’ve been led to believe (it’s now made clear) that the whole ritual will lead to the advent of THE OLD GODS, a god and goddess risen from the ashes.
‘We are dealing with stark madness. These peasants are keyed up to a tremendous expectation. A belief has come to life, a belief far older than Christianity. They expect salvation from the coming of two Gods, a youth and a maiden. If their hope is disappointed, they will be worse madmen than before.’
Over the course of many fretful hours and intense conversations, they try to come up with an escape plan. The two servants will be allowed to leave by the mob outside, but as to Koré, how can Vernon get her out of the house and down to his yacht, how can he get his man to bring it round to the bay of the mansion etc?
Suddenly they jointly reach a realisation: they will give the villagers their gods. They enter a kind of visionary state whereby they both realise this is their destiny. Certainly this is the strange destiny the long story about Vernon’s nightmares from the start of the book, now seems to have been heading towards.
By very different roads both had reached a complete assurance, and with it came exhilaration and ease of mind…The only problem was for their own hearts; for Koré to shake off for good the burden of her past and vindicate her fiery purity, that virginity of the spirit which could not be smirched by man or matter; for Vernon to open the door at which he had waited all his life and redeem the long preparation of his youth. They had followed each their own paths of destiny, and now these paths had met and must run together.
So the text now partakes of the same visionary intensity as the villagers. Everyone has entered this state of religious exaltation.
Chapter 18
Chapter 18 cuts back to Leithen’s point of view. You may remember we left him charging through the gap in the wall and into the garden or olive grove just as the guardians of the house set it alight. He sees flames licking at the building and climbing into the sky but more immediate is that he keeps bumping into armed guardians of the house who are fleeing in terror.
Long story short, Koré and Vernon have exited the house dressed in immortal white and are processing, slowly and stately, as if they are the old pagan gods born again and Leithen himself is caught up in the panic hysteria.
What I saw seemed not of the earth – immortals, whether from Heaven or Hell, coming out of the shadows and the fire in white garments, beings that no elements could destroy. In that moment the most panicky of the guards now fleeing from the demesne was no more abject believer than I… For a second I was as exalted as the craziest of them. (p.246)
Even when he realises that it is Koré and Vernon, they are transformed:
It was not Koré I was looking at, but the Koré, the immortal maiden, who brings to the earth its annual redemption…What I was looking at was an incarnation of something that mankind has always worshipped – youth rejoicing to run its race, that youth which is the security of this world’s continuance and the earnest of Paradise…I recognized my friends, and yet I did not recognize them, for they were transfigured. In a flash of insight I understood that it was not the Koré and the Vernon that I had known, but new creations. They were not acting a part, but living it. They, too, were believers; they had found their own epiphany, for they had found themselves and each other. (p.247)
The impact on the assembled crowd is dramatic. At first the Dancing Floor is packed with villagers and people from the mountains gathered to witness this mystery and they watch in holy awe. Then a great ripple goes through the crowd and it breaks and panics. Everyone turns and runs. Soon the Dancing Floor is empty.
Leithen turns to Maris and orders him to go alert the yacht to move in closer (he still doesn’t realise it’s Vernon’s yacht, thinks they’re just dealing with Black George). Leithen runs forward and embraces Vernon and Koré who are both now coming down off their high of exaltation, and starting to show the effects of nervous exhaustion. He helps them along the street to the main harbour, and they all – Koré and Vernon, Élise and old Mitri, Maris and Janni, and Leithen – go aboard the yacht and cast off.
That’s it. They are saved with not a shot fired and no-one harmed. The wicked old house of sin has gone up in flames. And the terrified locals have fled to the church which they are packing out and pleading for mercy from the Christian God they had shunned. Everything sorted. Happy ending.
And Leithen has the last word, lighting a pipe as the dawn wind freshens and looking at the young lovers who have fallen into a dead sleep. He concludes the story with a sentiment which would have warmed most reader’s hearts until the last few generations, a vision of heteronormativity, for he wonders how these two strange, obstinate young people will actually fare together.
How would these two, who had come together out of the night, shake down on the conventional roads of marriage? To the end of time the desire of a woman should be to her husband. Would Koré’s eyes, accustomed to look so masterfully at life, ever turn to Vernon in the surrender of wifely affection? As I looked at the two in the bows I wondered.
But even as he thinks this, they move closer together in their sleep and, unconsciously, Vernon moves a protective arm around his woman. They will be fine. What a long, drawn-out, convoluted and outlandish farrago of a story!
P.S.
The Wikipedia summary says that: ‘In the house, Vernon had recognised the room that appeared in his dreams, and Koré as his yearly-advancing presence’ thus very neatly giving meaning to his annual nightmare – but I just read the last chapters quite carefully and didn’t notice this, slick though it would have been.
Social history
A selection of the chance, throwaway comments by the narrator which shed light on the values and ideas of the time i.e. just before and after the Great War. Often, in these old texts, I find the peripheral details more interesting than the shallow characters and preposterous plots.
Freud
Those were the days before psycho-analysis had become fashionable, but even then we had psychologists…
The Great War
My path was plain compared to that of many honest men. I was a bachelor without ties, and though I was beyond the statutory limit for service I was always pretty hard trained, and it was easy enough to get over the age difficulty. I had sufficient standing in my profession to enable me to take risks. But I am bound to say I never thought of that side. I wanted, like everybody else, to do something for England, and I wanted to do something violent. For me to stay at home and serve in some legal job would have been a thousand times harder than to go into the trenches. Like everybody else, too, I thought the war would be short, and my chief anxiety was lest I should miss the chance of fighting. I was to learn patience and perspective during four beastly years.
The post-war
He gives a vivid description of the frenetic atmosphere of 1919, young men rootless and aimless, young women desperate to capture the four lost years of fun, colliding in a world of wild parties and frantic dancing (pages 59 to 61).
He had called her tawdry and vulgar and shrill, he had thought her the ugly product of the ugly after-the-war world. (p.216)
Though Leithen doesn’t like it, regarding it as ‘a good deal of shrillness and bad form’, under the circumstances, he can understand it. In among his bad-tempered grumbling about the new world and its manners, he has an amusingly unkind word for the movie industry:
Well-born young women seemed to have taken for their models the cretinous little oddities of the film world.
A hundred years later those cretinous little oddities dominate the worlds of celebrity, fashion, merchandise and even social movements (#metoo) to an unprecedented degree.
Buchan’s racism
One night Vernon and I had been dining at the house of a cousin of mine and had stayed long enough to see the beginning of the dance that followed. As I looked on, I had a sharp impression of the change which five years had brought. This was not, like a pre-war ball, part of the ceremonial of an assured and orderly world. These people were dancing as savages danced – to get rid of or to engender excitement. Apollo had been ousted by Dionysos. The nigger in the band, who came forward now and then and sang some gibberish, was the true master of ceremonies.
Doesn’t need any comment from me.
Buchan’s antisemitism
Leithen expects to dislike Ertzberger because he is a Jewish banker:
If any one had told me that I would one day go out of my way to cultivate a little Jew financier, I would have given him the lie…
Although, in the event, he likes Ertzberger – ‘I had liked him, and found nothing of the rastaquouère in him to which Mollie objected.’ (I had to look up rastaquouère. It means: ‘A social upstart, especially from a Mediterranean or Latin American country; a smooth untrustworthy foreigner.’). But Leithen’s liking doesn’t extend to Ertzberger’s wife.
She was a large, flamboyant Belgian Jewess, a determined social climber, and a great patron of art and music, who ran a salon, and whose portraits were to be found in every exhibition of the young school of painters.
Buchan’s sexism
Is this sexist? Is it misogynist? It’s not full of hatred of women, just, maybe, rather patronising.
I once read in some book about Cleopatra that that astonishing lady owed her charm to the fact that she was the last of an ancient and disreputable race. The writer cited other cases – Mary of Scots, I think, was one. It seemed, he said, that the quality of high-coloured ancestors flowered in the ultimate child of the race into something like witchcraft. Whether they were good or evil, they laid a spell on men’s hearts. Their position, fragile and forlorn, without the wardenship of male kinsfolk, set them on a romantic pinnacle. They were more feminine and capricious than other women, but they seemed, like Viola, to be all the brothers as well as all the daughters of their father’s house, for their soft grace covered steel and fire. They were the true sorceresses of history, said my author, and sober men, not knowing why, followed blindly in their service.
It’s certainly the kind of tone and opinion you read in older (Victorian, Edwardian) criticism and essays. To me it’s a romantic fantasy as fantastical and concocted as the spirit and plot of the rest of this cooked-up fantasia.
Slim women
Buchan prefers slim women, women who are, in fact, almost indistinguishable from boys – so he approved of this aspect of post-war fashion, the skinny flappers, even if he hated their too much makeup and frenetic dancing to barbarous music.
There were several girls, all with clear skins and shorn curls, and slim, straight figures. I found myself for the first time approving the new fashion in clothes. These children looked alert and vital like pleasant boys, and I have always preferred Artemis to Aphrodite.
Hence Vernon’s first sight of Kore in the doomed House:
He saw a slim girl, who stood in the entrance poised like a runner…
And when he realises he’s falling in love with her, Vernon, characteristically for his ilk, juvenilises her even more, making her a child:
Vernon had suddenly an emotion which he had never known before—the exhilaration with which he had for years anticipated the culmination of his dream, but different in kind, nobler, less self-regarding. He felt keyed up to any enterprise, and singularly confident. There was tenderness in his mood, too, which was a thing he had rarely felt—tenderness towards this gallant child. (p.218)
Which, of course, tends to give him the feeling of being the responsible and in-control father.
Boys
Mind you, it’s not just young women who are reverted to childhood. Both Leithen and Vernon feel rejuvenated and restored to a feeling of boyish adventure by these preposterous high jinks:
All this care would have been useless had Vernon not been in the mood to carry off any enterprise. He felt the reckless audacity of a boy, an exhilaration which was almost intoxication, and the source of which he did not pause to consider. Above all he felt complete confidence. (p.222)
Civilisation and barbarism
I had a moment of grim amusement in thinking how strangely I, who since the war had seemed to be so secure and cosseted, had moved back to the razor-edge of life. (p.179)
A comment in a critical essay has alerted me to the idea that Buchan’s central notion is the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism, and it’s certainly at the heart of this book. In his office in London Leithen is seized by a sense of unreality at the discrepancy between the mad pagan rituals he’s reading about and the everyday boredom of London traffic and tea at 4.
The opposite of civilisation is barbarism and, once settled on the island, he comes to think of the local Greek peasants as barbarians.
Here was I, a man who was reckoned pretty competent by the world, who had had a creditable record in the war, who was considered an expert at getting other people out of difficulties – and yet I was so far utterly foiled by a batch of barbarian peasants. (p.156)
What is barbarism? At its core is the intention to murder, in the case of the Greek islanders, organised, premeditated murder:
The madmen of Plakos were about to revive an ancient ritual, where the victor in a race would be entrusted with certain barbarous duties.
But it doesn’t just happen to others in remote communities – as Leithen becomes more and desperate about Koré’s safety, he himself undergoes a transformation back down the rungs of the ladder.
I was now quite alone – as much alone as Koré – and fate might soon link these lonelinesses. I had had this feeling once or twice in the war – that I was faced with something so insane that insanity was the only course for me, but I had no notion what form the insanity would take, for I still saw nothing before me but helplessness. I was determined somehow to break the barrier, regardless of the issue. Every scrap of manhood in me revolted against my futility. In that moment I became primitive man again. Even if the woman were not my woman she was of my own totem, and whatever her fate she should not meet it alone. (p.168)
The same reversion to a primitive avatar which he undergoes when he sees the Dancing Floor all decked out for the ceremony:
The place was no more the Valley of the Shadow of Life, but Life itself – a surge of daemonic energy out of the deeps of the past. It was wild and yet ordered, savage and yet sacramental, the home of an ancient knowledge which shattered for me the modern world and left me gasping like a cave-man before his mysteries.
And:
I was struggling with something which I had never known before, a mixture of fear, abasement, and a crazy desire to worship. Yes – to worship. There was that in the scene which wakened some ancient instinct, so that I felt it in me to join the votaries.
An unhallowed epiphany was looked for, but first must come the sacrifice. There was no help in the arm of flesh, and the shallow sophistication of the modern world fell from me like a useless cloak. I was back in my childhood’s faith, and wanted to be at my childhood’s prayers.
And Vernon, as he mingles with the young men about to start the sacred race, feels just the same:
He saw the ritual, which so far had been for him an antiquarian remnant, leap into a living passion. He saw what he had regarded coolly as a barbaric survival, a matter for brutish peasants, become suddenly a vital concern of his own.
In other words, not only communities of outsiders and foreigners (the Greeks in this story, the Black rebels in Prester John) can be barbarians i.e. fired up to murder the innocent and unarmed according to ancient and bloodthirsty values – but even men as calm, sedate, educated and civilised as Sir Edward Leithen or as prosaic and urbane as Vernon Milburne, can be sent reeling back through the centuries to a primitive core, reduced to a primitive man, cave man level of cognition and emotion. We are all susceptible.
English countryside
From time to time Buchan gives lyrical descriptions of the English landscape:
I had fallen in love with the English country, and it is sport that takes you close to the heart of it. Is there anything in the world like the corner of a great pasture hemmed in with smoky brown woods in an autumn twilight: or the jogging home after a good run when the moist air is quickening to frost and the wet ruts are lemon-coloured in the sunset; or a morning in November when, on some upland, the wind tosses the driven partridges like leaves over tall hedges, through the gaps of which the steel-blue horizons shine?
They remind me of Saki’s rhapsodies about the countryside in his novels, for example 1913’s When William Came except that Saki is much better at this sort of thing than Buchan.
Credit
The Dancing Floor by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1926. References are to the 1987 Penguin paperback edition.
‘Could you have me at Crask this autumn?’ [Lamancha] asked…
‘I should jolly well think so,’ cried Archie. ‘There’s heaps of room in the old house, and I promise you I’ll make you comfortable. Look here, you fellows! Why shouldn’t all three of you come? I can get in a couple of extra maids from Inverlarrig.’
(Early exchange from John McNab by John Buchan, page 17)
‘Of course we’re all blazing idiots – the whole thing is insanity – but we’ve done the best we can in the way of preparation. The great thing is for each of us to keep his wits about him and use them, for everything may go the opposite way to what we think.’
(The Earl of Lamancha admitting the absurdity of their prank, page 163)
This is the second of Buchan’s series of books featuring the fictional character, Scottish barrister and Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leithen.
Executive summary
Three posh Scots, eminent figures in the British Establishment, discover they are all bored to tears. They concoct a plan to go stay on the Highland estate of a fourth member of their group and send a challenge to the owners of his three neighbouring estates, to the effect that they will poach game off their estates. They won’t steal the game, they’ll place it on the respective front doorsteps. It’s a bet made in a gentleman’s club like at the start of ‘Around The World in 80 Days’.
Who should these letters of challenge come from? They invent a name, ‘John McNab’. What none of them anticipate is that the very lairds they set out to defeat will themselves come in on their side, that the population around the estates will hear about John McNab’s brave exploits, that they will even be reported in the local and then the national press and even that, in some conversations, some of the characters see in John McNab’s pluck and daring a solution to the widespread malaise afflicting post-First World War Britain.
This atmosphere of comedy reefed with sometimes serious themes, and the way all members of a highly stratified society are brought together in a common endeavour, reminded me of the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going and, on a lighter tone, the Scotland-based Ealing comedy, Whiskey Galore.
Longer version
Three middle-aged posh Scots meet up at their London club. They were at school and then ‘the University’ together, have prospered in their careers and now discover they are bored and restless, suffering from taedium vitae, ennui. They are:
Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Leithen (lawyer, Member of Parliament and ex-Attorney General)
John Palliser-Yeates (banker)
Charles, the Right Hon. the Earl of Lamancha, M.P., His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, possessor of ‘insatiable ambition’
They are joined for dinner by Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, D.S.O., prospective Conservative candidate for Wester Ross and Laird of Crask, an estate in the Highlands, an irritatingly boisterous and good-humoured war veteran (game left leg giving him a pronounced limp).
Over dinner and cigars they tell yarns about figures back in Scotland and one mentions Jim Tarras, the fellow who played a prank by poaching game on other people’s estates (this class of character only knows people who own estates) but warning them in advance that he was coming.
The idea catches fire and the bored threesome agree to travel incognito to the estate of Archie Roylance. It is August, fine hunting weather. They arrange to send out letters to the owners of neighbouring estates announcing that they will poach game off their land between set dates. It is an ironic point of gentlemanly etiquette that they will not remove the game from the estate owner’s land, in fact they will deliver the shot stag or caught salmon to their doors, thus not being guilty of anything as common as theft. Lamancha’s letter template reads:
‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I propose to kill a stag [or a salmon as the case may be] on your ground between midnight on – and midnight –. [We can leave the dates open for the present.] The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint. I have the honour to be, your obedient humble servant.’
Obviously they can’t sign the letters with any of their real names and so cook up the nom de guerre i.e. fictional name, John McNab, hence the title.
The point of poaching is that it is not only technically challenging in itself i.e. stalking game or catching salmon, but also dangerous in that it is illegal and so getting caught, taken to court, named in the papers, would potentially end all their careers.
For example Roylance, whose mansion they hide in and make their base of operations, is planning to stand as Conservative candidate for his constituency; getting caught poaching would ruin him.
‘You’re an ass, John,’ said Leithen. ‘It’s only a couple of pounds for John Macnab. But if these infernal Edinburgh lawyers get on the job, it will be a case of producing the person of John Macnab, and then we’re all in the cart. Don’t you realise that in this fool’s game we simply cannot afford to lose – none of us?’
The thing is that, unlike the other Buchan books I’ve read, John McNab is a comedy, written in high good humour. Here’s an example of Buchan’s dry, understated humour:
Sir Edward Leithen sighed deeply as he turned from the doorstep down the long hot street. He did not look behind him, or he would have seen another gentleman approach cautiously round the corner of a side-street, and, when the coast was clear, ring the doctor’s bell. He was so completely fatigued with life that he neglected to be cautious at crossings, as was his habit, and was all but slain by a motor-omnibus.
Boisterous young Sir Archie in particular is an upper-class noodle with the same posh mannerisms as Bertie Wooster et al, dropping their gs etc. Here’s an example of some of the replies they get to their letter, this is probably the funniest.
‘Sir, I have received your insolent letter. I do not know what kind of rascal you may be, except that you have the morals of a bandit and the assurance of a halfpenny journalist. But since you seem in your perverted way to be a sportsman, I am not the man to refuse your challenge. My reply is, sir, damn your eyes and have a try. I defy you to kill a stag in my forest between midnight on the 28th of August and midnight of the 30th. I will give instructions to my men to guard my marches, and if you should be roughly handled by them you have only to blame yourself. Yours faithfully, Alastair Raden.’
It’s all done in this kind of joshing, posh tone. The three men draw straws to decide who will poach what on which of Lord Archie’s neighbouring estates.
Lamancha is set to poach in the Haripol forest
Palliser-Yeates draws the straw to shoot a stag on the Glenraden estate
Leithen is set to poach salmon on the estate of Strathlarrig
Highland setting
It’s all set in the Highlands with a regular bombardment of Scots place names which might have well been in Ecuador or ancient Greece for all they meant to me. Here’s Lord Archie explaining that:
‘Haripol is about the steepest and most sportin’ forest in the Highlands, and Glenraden is nearly as good. There’s no forest at Strathlarrig, but, as I’ve told you, amazin’ good salmon fishin’. For a west coast river, I should put the Larrig only second to the Laxford.’
There’s miles of description like this, detailed word portraits of places with venerable Scottish names. In his introduction and notes, Buchan scholar David Daniell makes the elementary point that Buchan grew up in rural Fife with regular family holidays in Tweeddale, many hours spent yomping across the heather, through woods etc. He was a keen and expert fisherman from boyhood, publishing a book on the subject when he was barely 21 and continued fishing throughout his life.
So the point being that the descriptions of the landscape encountered by the three bored poachers, and especially the technical details of Leithen’s fly fishing, are painted from life, deep experience and love. It’s a love poem to the land.
However, it’s also a pretty basic fact that all the placenames in the book are fictional. They combine aspects of the various regions Buchan knew well to create a kind of perfect huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ paradise. There’s a map but all the place names and the entire layout are invented. On reflection, the map is a bit too simple and conveniently arranged around the narrative to be true.
Complications
It’s a comedy so there are comic complications, mainly in the shape of new characters. The poaching forays are set for consecutive 2-day periods, so we are introduced to the owners of each of the targeted estates in order.
The Raden family
First up is Glenraden castle where John Palliser-Yeates is slated to shoot a stag and deposit it at the castle door. We are introduced to father of the house, Colonel Radel. More importantly he has two marrying-age daughters.
The Bandicotts
The eldest Radel girl, Agatha, is falling moonily in love with Junius Bandicott, the grown-up son of an elderly American archaeologist, Mr Acheson Bandicott, who has the Colonel’s permission to excavate an ancient barrow on his land, because he is convinced it’s the burial mound of the renowned Viking Harald Blacktooth.
The Bandicotts have rented the second of the neighbouring estates, Strathlarrig House, whose magnificent but very exposed salmon streams Leithen is set to poach.
Janet Raden
Colonel Radel’s youngest daughter is Janet or ‘Nettie’ for short. She’s small and shrewd. In an early comic encounter she watches Lord Archie jumping over stepping stones in order to test his gammy leg, but when he realises he is being watched he slips off a stone and plunges into three foot of water, further emphasising his character as an upper class twit.
Janet sits in on the meetings convened by her father with their groundsmen and gamekeepers as they plan how to prevent this phantom ‘John McNab’ stalking a deer on their land and it’s she who makes the shrewdest suggestions. In the event, she goes out walking over the heather on the second day McNab has promised to strike and catches him, in this case John Palliser-Yeates.
Mission 1. Palliser-Yeates against Glenraden
Our guys had got wind that the American archaeologist was going to use dynamite (!) to blow out the heavy stones concealing the barrow and so the man tasked with the Glenraden estate, Palliser-Yeates, makes his shot in between this series of small explosions. But unlucky for him, Janet was sitting on hilltop not far away, comes running and confronts him just as he’s bending over to hoist the stag up. Being a gentleman, Palliser-Yeates tips his hat, says it’s a fair catch and he’s lost, but then turns and runs.
Fish Benjie
At this point I need to introduce Fish Benjie. Chapter 4 opens with a long and beguiling description of a certain type of all-purpose tinker and hobo you see on the roads of Scotland, then zeroes in on the life story of the young tinker, hustler and survivor, Benjamin Bogle. He’s acquired his nickname because, with his father in prison and his mother unwell, he’s independently travelling the roads of the area where the novel is set and among other hustles, collects fresh fish from the coast and sells it at the big houses.
The point is that Benjie becomes aware of the three posh strangers hiding at Lord Archie’s house and catches one of them, Leithen, sneaking around. Faced with having their whole scam blown, Leithen makes a snap decision to let Benjie in on the secret and take him on the team. He becomes a spy, recording the comings and goings at each of the estates and in the early evening reporting all to our guys at Crask Lodge.
When Palliser-Yeates shoots his stag the plan had been for him to lug it a hundred yards or so to where Benjie was waiting with his cart, towed by a knackered old horse. But Janet came running up before he could hook up with Benjie and, after Palliser-Yeates took to his heels and Janet came across Benjie a 100 yards down the track, she mistakenly thought he just happened to be passing. In the event, she gets Benjie to help her load the dead stag onto the cart telling him to take it to the castle. In fact being the hustler he is, Benjie instead trots in the opposite direction and finds Palliser-Yeates, offering him the stag. Palliser-Yeates is touched by his loyalty (and cunning) but explains that he (Palliser-Yeates) is a gentleman and has given his word to a lady – so Benjie must turn round and deliver the stag to the castle. Here he is richly rewarded by the Radens for his help, thus getting paid twice, by the attackers and defenders. Benjie is that kind of character and deeply enjoyable for it.
Harald Blacktooth
Incidentally the day of dynamiting turns up trumps for the American archaeologist who does indeed discover impressive relics – two massive torques, several bowls and flagons, spear-heads from which the hafts had long since rotted, a sword-blade, and a quantity of brooches, armlets, and rings – but most strikingly, a necklace of shells which could only have come from North America!
On the basis of which Bandicott Senior makes the wild claim that this Harald Blacktooth must have sailed to and back from America (compare The Saga of Eirik the Red) and the even wilder and comic suggestion that, as a result, the Radel family include among their ancestors the discoverers of America! A trope which is repeated with droll humour by other characters for the rest of the story.
But more than that, Bandicott, being American, is all about press and publicity and so he rings up the local and national press, the British Museum, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, telling them about his amazing discovery.
The practical results of this are that a dozen or more journalists descend on Glenraden Castle and the neighbourhood, snooping round, trespassing and generally making the self-appointed mission of the three toffs significantly more difficult.
Mission 2. Leithen against Strathlarrig
Long story short the next night Leithen manages to catch his salmon but is spotted by one of the Strathlarrig gillies, Jimsie who, with two assistants, quickly captures him. Now Leithen had disguised himself as a tramp with a dirty face, ragged clothes and dishevelled hair and so he tries to pretend the salmon had been caught by an otter, which had taken a chunk out of it and he had come across it half eaten. Jimsie hands him over to the Strathlarrig head-keeper, Angus (‘a morose old man near six-foot-four in height, clean-shaven, with eyebrows like a penthouse’) who doesn’t buy Leithen’s story and has him thrown in the estate garage and the door locked pending arrest and charge for trespassing and poaching the next day.
Now it gets a bit complicated. The Americans who have rented Strathlarrig, the Bandicotts, are hosting a fine dinner for their neighbours and persuaded Sir Archie to go along. Now, Angus’s men not only captured Leithen but one of the many journalists brought to the area by the discovery, who recognised Leithen and Leithen was forced to let in on his secret. In fact Leithen had recruited this man, Crossby, to create a distraction by trespassing up near the house.
Now when Junius Bandicott learns that his zealous head-keeper has imprisoned these men, he thinks he’s over-reacted. Also it’s clear that neither of them are the famous John McNab everyone’s het up about. And so he orders them released.
It’s Agatha who goes to the garages and orders the servants to set the men free. Leithen is so discombobulated at the sight of her that he forgets to put on a yokel accent and speaks with his posh educated accent. Agatha realises he is indeed of her class. Leithen quickly improvises a story about being down on his luck having made many bad life decisions.
It’s only the next morning, when the salmon, complete with the bit Leithen cut out to make it look like it had been caught by an otter, restored, and deposited on the doorstep of Strathlarrig House along with a message from ‘John McNab’ saying here is the poached animal he promised, that Agatha, Junius, Archie and Jimsie all realise the rough old tramp they locked up – then released – was McNab himself!
Lord Archie at the hustings
Another complication is that Lord Archie had forgotten that slap bang in the middle of the McNab campaign he has a pre-arranged appointment to give a political speech, part of his campaign to elected Conservative candidate for Wester Ross (arranged by his enthusiastic agent, Brodie, ‘a lean, red-haired man’) a short train ride from Crask Lodge. Buchan gives a vivid description of what it’s like to stand up in front of an audience of thousands and your mind to go completely blank, completely forgetting the tissue of bromides and clichés he had spent days memorising.
But more than that, he finds himself inspired to use the story of ‘John McNab’ who, of course, his entire audience knows about, taking him up as an example of how we must ‘challenge’ ourselves in order to become fully awake, to test the old values which he, as a Tory, believes in but also believes just be renewed in every generation. To his surprise he gets a standing ovation. McNab has become a figure who lights up political campaigns!
Mission 3. Lamancha against Haripol
The owner of Haripol House is a different kettle of fish. He’s not Scots. He’s an Englander, Lord Claybody, who made his pile from business in the Midlands. He’s bought Haripol House and adorned it in horrendous taste. He reacts worst of the three addressees of the John McNab letters, getting his lawyers to send a formal reply threatening arrest and conviction. Now, while the campaigns against Glenraden Castle and Strathlarrig House have garnered a lot of support among the local population and even among the owners of those houses (!) Claybody’s attitude has hardened. He sees McNab’s prank as an assault on property everywhere. To this end, our heroes learn that Claybody has imported 100 navvies from a major dam building project he is responsible for in the vicinity. These men will guard his property making the McNab assault almost impossible.
But that is precisely why Lamancha is determined to see it through. On the eve of the campaign, there comes a night so dark and stormy night that none of the conspirators, poring over maps and exchanging battle plans, notice the front door open and Colonel Raden and his two daughters cross the threshold to escape the weather. At just the moment that Leithen and Palliser-Yeates enter the hall from different rooms. the two daughters, Agatha and Janet both exclaim ‘John McNab!’ for each man is the John McNab who they’ve encountered.
Lord Archie enters, greets his guests, gets them to take off their wet things, come into the study by a fire, and proceeds to come clean, telling them they see before them the collaborators on the great John McNab scam. To everyone’s merriment, the Colonel accepts the situation and goes so far as to say he and his daughters will help the conspirators poach a deer off Claybody, so much do the old lairds of the locality despise the jumped-up new English owner.
But what with all those navvies the situation seems impossible until Janet and Benjie pull off a masterstroke. They kidnap Lady Claybody’s adored little doggie, Roguie. Janet had paid her a visit and noticed a) how she doted on the little critter and b) how she let it off the leash to run wild. So she got Benjie to kidnap it, the idea being that she will insist on a large number of navvies being sent out to find it. Genius!
Long vivid description of Lamancha being led a-stalking by top Crask gillie Wattie Lithgow. He gets a shot at the oldest biggest legendary stag in the region, doesn’t kill him in one but fatally wounds him. They follow the blood trail and find the stag dead in a burn. Wattie lugs him across country to where Lord Archie and Janet are waiting. They load it up and drive it back to Crask without incident.
(While they waited, Janet and Archie had built a bridge across the river Doran (from old planks) during which they’d both gotten wet and messy and as he watched her wash herself in the stream Archie suddenly realised this slender young women was one with the heather and the hills and he proposes to her. ‘Yes,’ she turned a laughing face, ‘of course I will.’ It’s a festive comedy.)
To cut a long story short:
Lamancha bags his stag, which is dragged away by Wattie, down to the car where Lord Archie and Janet drive it back to Crask.
Lord Archie and Janet wash and change and drive over to Haripol House to return Lady Claybody’s kidnapped dog. En route Palliser-Yeates emerges from the heather and they invite him to come along.
Meanwhile Leithen had been given the task of distracting the gillies and navvies and does a very good job of it, his tortuous journeys and then flight from the navvies described in immense detail. It has a comic denouement when he stumbles down towards Haripol House and is astounded to see Lord Archie and Janet there being politely entertained.
Lamancha, the man who shot the stag, is not, however, so lucky. He is cornered by a tough navvy who he can’t dodge, they get into a clumsy wrestling match, fall into a hollow and the navvy’s leg is broken, only at this point does Lamancha realise the fellow is Stokes, his old orderly in the army. Suddenly (when he no longer poses any threat) Lamancha is all aristocratic concern. When a bunch of other navvies and gillies surround him, Lamancha is only concerned that Stokes gets the best treatment, has his leg splinted, and is carried by the gillies down to Johnson Claybody’s car.
In all this Lamancha displays natural, unforced compassion and gentlemanliness, which is strongly contrasted with Johnson Claybody’s selfishness, ill manners and bad grace. Johnson really hates the way Lamancha makes all the right moral decisions and effortlessly commands Johnson’s own keeper and gillies. He has class, dontcha know, whereas Johnson is forced to resort to caddish bluster: ‘Damn your impudence! What business is that of yours?’ etc.
When Lamancha approaches Haripol House, under guard by the head-keeper etc, he is astonished to find waiting for him, not just Lord and Lady Claybody, but his partners in crime, Palliser-Yeates, Leithen, Lord Archie and the lovely Janet!
Happy ending
And there’s a happy ending worthy of a stage comedy. Lamancha admits they he and his friends as ‘John McNab’, something the other two had not, in fact, let on. After their initial astonishment, Lord and Lady Claybody react well, if perplexed. Claybody says he would have given them free range of his estate if they’d wanted it; or organised a real challenge to poaching on it, if only they’d asked.
As they all discuss it, Ned, John and Lamancha come round to feeling they’ve misunderstood the whole enterprise. They were never in any real danger, it was never a real challenge, they feel silly and heartily apologise. Janet apologises for kidnapping Lady Claypole, which momentarily introduces an ill note into proceedings which is glossed over when Lady C learns that young Archie and Janet are engaged, at which point she gives them a big-bosomed hug. Even Johnson Claybody who has behaved so ill-manneredly to Lamancha, now changes his tune and apologises. Everyone shakes hands and Lord and Lady C say they will hold a big dinner tonight, and invited Lord Radel and the Bandicotts, to celebrate the triumph but also the death of the fictional character of ‘John McNab’. If it was a Jacobean or restoration comedy they would have all joined hands, come forward and bowed to the applauding audience.
Snobbery, class, body shape and clothes
Snobbery
The final part of the third mission exists solely, as far as I can see, to express Buchan’s Tory snobbery. The Right Honourable the Earl of Lamancha, MP, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, is caught by one of the navvies deployed by Claybody. Their bodies reflect their class: Lamancha tall and erect, the navvy bent by labour.
He was a tall fellow in navvy’s clothes, with a shock head of black hair, and a week’s beard—an uncouth figure with a truculent eye.
But the working class navvies are really an extension of Lord Claybody who is depicted as a gauche arriviste, a ghastly industrialist who has earned his wealth instead of inheriting it, as all right-minded aristocrats do. He is depicted as lacking all the depth and class, as faking a tartan kilt, doing up his mansion with hideous modern extension while his wife is depicted as foolishly trying to recreate an English country garden in the Highlands which, Janet waspishly observes, won’t last long.
The correct response to this beastly nouveau rich is expressed by Colonel Radel: ‘He and his damned navvies are an insult to every gentleman in the Highlands.’ When Lamancha has his extended argument with Claybody’s son, he comes within an ace of using the ultimate insult and calling him an ‘infernal little haberdasher.’ This is plain snobbery.
The argument is a dramatised contrast between the true class and gentlemanly attitude and behaviour of Lamancha vividly contrasted with the selfish, ill mannered and unchivalrous behaviour of Johnson Claybody towards his own injured employee. Lamancha insists that Stoke is carried down off the moors and then insists that he is placed in the car and driven to the nearest house which a doctor can be called from, Claybody furiously bridling at being ordered about on his own property.
Buchan vividly describes and explains the nature of aristocratic confidence:
The truth is, that if you belong to a family which for a good many centuries has been accustomed to command and to take risks, and if you yourself, in the forty-odd years of your life, have rather courted trouble than otherwise, and have put discipline into Arab caravans, Central African natives, and Australian mounted brigades – well, when you talk about wringing necks your words might carry weight. If, too, you have never had occasion to think of your position, because no one has ever questioned it, and you promise to break down somebody else’s, your threat may convince others, because you yourself are so wholly convinced of your power in that direction. (p.222)
And draws the Conservative conclusion:
It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.
Class
Alongside it goes the Tory notion of duty. This is vividly depicted in Lamancha’s fight with the navvie. When he’s just an anonymous navvie, he is depicted as foul-mouthed and bent, leaning over i.e. not straight and erect like a gentleman. But after he’s fallen badly and broken his leg it isn’t the fall as such but Lamancha suddenly recognising who he is which transforms him in Lamancha’s eyes.
He recalled now the man who had once been his orderly, and whom he had last known as a smart troop sergeant…’You remember me – Lord Lamancha?’ He had it all now – the fellow who had been a son of one of Tommy Deloraine’s keepers –a decent fellow and a humorous, and a good soldier.
So long as he is an anonymous working class man, he is just a brute antagonist. As soon as he enters into the network of contacts, via gamekeepers and the army, he acquires an identity, a name, and becomes of value. To the Tory ruling class, the great mass of the population have no identity or worth unless they enter into the aristocrats’ networks of privilege. At that point they cease to be a blundering swearing drunken threat and suddenly swim into focus as a gamekeeper’s son or someone’s servant or orderly etc. Only then do they count as human beings.
Body shape and class
All this, believe it or not, is correlated with body shape. Aristocratic men are tall and thin, like Sir Archie:
No other country, she thought, produced this kind of slim, graceful, yet weathered and hard-bitten youth.
Or Colonel Alastair Raden:
A lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, and high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye.
Or John Palliser-Yeates:
A tall man, apparently young, with a very ruddy face, a thatch of sandy hair, and ancient, disreputable clothes.
Or Edward Leithen:
A tallish man, they said, lean and clean-shaven, rather pale, and with his skin very tight over his cheek-bones. He had looked like a gentleman and had behaved as such.
And:
Before it became the fashion he had been a pioneer in guideless climbing in the Alps, and the red-letter days in his memory were for the most part solitary days. He was always in hard condition, and his lean figure rarely knew fatigue… (p.198)
By sharp contrast, ghastly nouveau riche types like Lord Claybody and his son, are short and squat:
Lord Claybody entered, magnificent in a kilt of fawn-coloured tweed and a ferocious sporran made of the mask of a dog-otter. The garments, which were aggressively new, did not become his short, square figure…(p.196)
A stout gentleman in a kilt…(p.227)
Same goes for what this class calls the memsahibs. The most salient aspect of lovely Janet who Lord Archie falls in love with is that she is slender and boyish.
A slight girl with what seemed to him astonishingly bright hair and very blue and candid eyes
Compare and contrast Lady Claybody, whose ghastly taste, whose foolish plan to plant an English country garden in the Highlands, and whose tacky obsession with her little yapping dog, are all summed up by the fact that she has an extensive bosom:
Lady Claybody was a heavily handsome woman still in her early fifties. The purchase of Haripol had been her doing, for romance lurked in her ample breast, and she dreamed of a new life in which she should be an unquestioned great lady far from the compromising environment where the Claybody millions had been won.
The contrast between busty vulgarity and slender classiness is explicitly made:
For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road – they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds – her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict.
Bosoms bad, boyish slimness good.
And clothes
Johnson Claybody is pernickety about being properly dressed, clean and trim. Lamancha is a true gentleman because he doesn’t care. He knows his class will shine through no matter what he’s wearing:
Now Johnson was the type of man who is miserable if he feels himself ill-clad or dirty, and discovers in a sense of tidiness a moral superiority. He rejoiced to have found his enemy, and an enemy over whom he felt at a notable advantage. But, unfortunately for him, no Merkland had ever been conscious of the appearance he represented or cared a straw about it. Lamancha in rags would have cheerfully disputed with an emperor in scarlet, and suffered no loss of confidence because of his garb, since he would not have given it a thought.
So hopefully you agree with me that this novel, harmless entertainment though it appears at first sight, is in fact a kind of primer of snobbish, class consciousness.
Disguises
In my review of Buchan’s novel Prester John, I noted how the baddie, the leader of the black rebellion John Laputa, was a man of many disguises, now a Christian minister, now leader of a pagan ritual, a suited and tied westerner among London MPs, a leopard-clad war leader in Africa, and so on. I’ve just watched a kids TV programme where a class went from uniformed, dull and bored, to being allowed to dress up in garish costumes and dance around, and the change in mood and engagement was startling. Maybe dressing up is just a basic element of play.
Intellectuals, historians, theologians, all lard their descriptions of the religious ceremonies of Catholics, the Byzantine Church, Islamic centres or the African ceremonies Chinua Achebe describes, with serious interpretations of symbolism and deep meanings and so on. But maybe, at the same time, it’s just fun, it’s a release and an escape from everyday routine and it’s also, as women know better than men, a very community and team-building and bonding activity to dress up and fuss and fret over costumes and make-up and presentation.
Comedy has always overflowed with disguise and dressing-up. I think of the comic plays of ancient Rome I read last year where at least one of the characters dressed up as someone else, with comic consequences. Or the cross-dressing in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, or in almost all the Restoration comedies.
In a sense reading fiction is a sort of dressing up, an imaginative dressing-up: it allows our imaginations to assume the persona of other people, narrators and characters, for the duration of the reading. Apart from all the heavyweight moralising which fiction often does, and the arousal of serious or intense emotions, maybe its most primal function is to take us out of ourselves. Maybe we need regular holidays from ourselves.
So a little light dressing up and disguising is the least you’d expect in a humorous novel like this. At least some of the comedy derives from supposedly strict and stern, upright and proper Establishment figures like a top lawyer and banker behaving like children. I imagine this had more impact in 1925 than in 2024.
But dressing up and disguise can, of course, have a serious darker side and this is gestured towards in the fertile imagination of Janet Radel, who over-worries about who John McNab is and what he’s going to do.
Horrible stories which she had read of impersonation and the shifts of desperate characters recurred to her mind. Was John Macnab perhaps old Mr Bandicott disguised as an archaeologist? Or was he one of the Strathlarrig workmen? (p.69)
Visions of John Macnab filled her mind, now a tall bravo with a colonial accent, now a gnarled Caliban of infinite cunning and gnome-like agility. Where in this haunted land was he ensconced—in some hazel covert, or in some clachan but-and-ben, or miles distant in a populous hotel, ready to speed in a swift car to the scene of action?
In this excerpt we can clearly see that disguise allows a large element of indeterminism to enter a narrative. Our everyday lives may contain large amounts of uncertainty – will we be given a mortgage, will the man we fancy agree to a date, will you get the pay rise you’ve asked for etc – but generally within finite and boring limits. You can see how, as soon as you allow disguise into a fictitious narrative, the possibilities hugely expand, whether for comic or tragic purposes.
Making fictions
The book is ostensibly about the poaching, but at its centre it is about making fictions and telling stories. John McNab is a completely invented person, but all four conspirators find themselves drawn, despite themselves, into feeling somehow committed to the idea he represents. Arrived at Crask, on the first evening all express overt reluctance to get drawn into this silly prank, but at the same time find it difficult to let the non-existent figure of John McNab down. This makes no logical sense but a lot of emotional sense. It explains how the thing grows into being described as the ‘John Macnab proposition.’ And once they’ve reconnoitred the ground and weighed up the obstacles and begun to commit to the prank, the entirely non-existent persona of ‘John McNab’ begins to assume greater and greater power.
In a different way, all three of the households which receive the John McNab letter are plunged into speculation about who he is, what he looks like – big and bluff or small and cunning – especially in the vivid imagination of young Miss Janet Raden, with her ‘taste for the dramatic’ (p.83).
So the figure of McNab turns into a kind of symbol of the power of creating a fictional character; he comes to demonstrate the uncanny power of fictional characters. It’s one thing that he imposes himself on the three households he has announced he will ‘attack’, that’s understandable, they know no better. But that he comes to dominate the lives and feelings of the three men who invented him says something fascinating about the power of fiction and invention.
Fictions make news
The newspapermen gathered to report on the Harald Blacktooth find that all their editors give ancient archaeology perfunctory attention before switching their interest to the glamorous mystery of ‘John McNab’. Millions of readers read about his failure to get his stag at Castle Raden, his
Nature painting
There are numerous descriptions of this, Buchan’s idealised Scottish landscape.
Darkness gave place to the translucence of early dawn: the badger trotted home from his wanderings: the hill-fox barked in the cairns to summon his household: sleepy pipits awoke: the peregrine who lived above the Grey Beallach drifted down into the glens to look for breakfast: hinds and calves moved up from the hazel shows to the high fresh pastures: the tiny rustling noises of night disappeared in that hush which precedes the awakening of life: and then came the flood of morning gold from behind the dim eastern mountains, and in an instant the earth had wheeled into a new day. (p.67)
Since the war
‘What about yourself?’ she asked. ‘In the words of Mr Bandicott, are you going to make good?’ She asked the question with such an air of frank comradeship that Sir Archie was in no way embarrassed. Indeed he was immensely delighted. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know…I’m a bit of a slacker. There doesn’t seem much worth doing since the war.’ (p.127)
Various characters express the feeling that the war knocked the stuffing out of the generation who went through it. It’s dramatised in the dinner party Colonel Raden gives:
‘I suppose,’ said old Mr Bandicott reflectively, ‘that the war was bound to leave a good deal of unsettlement. Junius missed it through being too young – never got out of a training camp – but I have noticed that those who fought in France find it difficult to discover a groove. They are energetic enough, but they won’t ‘stay put’, as we say. Perhaps this Macnab is one of the unrooted. In your country, where everybody was soldiering, the case must be far more common.’
Mr Claybody announced that he was sick of hearing the war blamed for the average man’s deficiencies. ‘Every waster,’ he said, ‘makes an excuse of being shell-shocked. I’m very clear that the war twisted nothing in a man that wasn’t twisted before.’
Sir Archie demurred. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases of fellows who used to be as sane as a judge, and came home all shot to bits in their mind.’
‘There are exceptions, of course. I’m speaking of the general rule. I turn away unemployables every day – good soldiers, maybe, but unemployable – and I doubt if they were ever anything else.’
Something in his tone annoyed Janet. ‘You saw a lot of service, didn’t you?’ she asked meekly.
‘No, worse luck! They made me stick at home and slave fourteen hours a day controlling cotton. It would have been a holiday for me to get into the trenches. But what I say is, a sane man usually remained sane. Look at Sir Archibald. We all know what a hectic time he had, and he hasn’t turned a hair.’
‘I’d like you to give me that in writing,’ Sir Archie grinned. ‘I’ve known people who thought I was rather cracked.’
It’s given a comic turn at the end but there are clearly four points of view here. Bandicott Senior, as a foreigner, makes a valid generalisation about young men of Britain, traumatised by the war. Claybody is revealed as a loudmouth reactionary who is down on the young but did not himself serve in the war, classic example of the reactionary armchair expert. Archie himself did serve and was injured, but takes the thing lightest of all. And Janet, type of the zealous young woman who would have been a suffragette 20 years before and would be a woman’s libber 40 years later, takes up the cudgels on his behalf.
In Chapter 8 Janet and Lord Archie go for a walk across the moors, hills and whatnot, and she reveals herself to be quite a radical, not in a doctrinaire socialist way (she herself and various other characters refer to the ‘Bolsheviks’ who were, of course a relatively recent phenomenon in 1924), but in saying that her family are fading out, their time is up and the land should be held by newcomers.
‘I’m quite serious about politics,’ said Lord Archie. ‘I wonder,’ said Janet, smiling. ‘I don’t mean scraping into Parliament, but real politics – putting the broken pieces together, you know. Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won’t do – not in the world we live in to-day. If you’re going to do any good you must feel the challenge and be ready to meet it.’
Basically, she believes in force and energy. In the confused landscape after the war, describing her like that makes her sound more like a proto-fascist. Her emphasis on primal values reminds me of D.H. Lawrence.
Janet had got off her perch, and was standing a yard from Sir Archie, her hat in her hand and the light wind ruffling her hair. The young man, who had no skill in analysing his feelings, felt obscurely that she fitted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of his clean elemental world of the hill-tops. (p.127)
Later, in his election speech, Lord Archie articulates sentiments which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s rejection of the old words and the old values which the war had destroyed, albeit clothed in posh pukka phraseology:
He began by confessing that the war had left the world in a muddle, a muddle which affected his own mind. The only cure was to be honest with oneself, and to refuse to accept specious nonsense and conventional jargon. (p.145)
McNab started as a prank by three bored toffs but it is instructive to discover just how many other people it gives a sense of purpose. Janet reports that her father has never been so energised as in the few days he got his staff together to repel the advertised attack, and the various groundsmen and gillies reflect this excitement. Beginning as a small personal gag the turns out to shine a light on an entire civilisation, revealing how bored and directionless it is.
For 20 years this generation looked for and hoped for something new but, like Janet, struggled to express it in any meaningful way. In the event, all their hopes for new worlds and new values were sunk by the rise of horrifying evil on the Continent and the advent of the Second World War.
(Incidentally, it’s interesting to see the words ‘waster’ and ‘slacker’ which I thought were of contemporary coinage, being freely used a hundred years ago.)
The active narrator
Breaching protocol, the narrator from time to time refers to himself in the first person:
I am at a loss to know how to describe the first shattering impact of youth and beauty on a susceptible mind. The old plan was to borrow the language of the world’s poetry, the new seems to be to have recourse to the difficult jargon of psychologists and physicians; but neither, I fear, would suit Sir Archie’s case. (p.46)
Colonel Raden plucked feebly at his moustache, and Janet, I regret to say, laughed. (p.87)
He even claims to have visited the scene of one of the hunts and of the book’s triumphant conclusion:
If you go to Haripol, as I did last week, you will see above the hall chimney a noble thirteen-pointer, and a legend beneath proclaiming that the stag was shot on the Sgurr Dearg beat of the forest by the Earl of Lamancha on a certain day of September in a certain year.
This makes the story feel very chummy, like a yarn being told you over dinner. At the same time it places that narrator very much among the charmed circle of this blithe and happy circle of aristocrats, lawyers and bankers. A sound member of the British ruling class.
Tory irony
The well-off can afford to enjoy life little’s ironies.
Sir Edward Leithen was a philosopher, with an acute sense of the ironies of life, and as he reflected that here was a laird, a Tory, and a strict preserver of game working himself into a passion over the moral rights of the poacher, he suddenly relapsed into helpless mirth. (p.155)
An awful joy fell upon Sir Archie’s soul. He realised anew the unplumbed preposterousness of life.
Credit
John McNab by John Buchan was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1925. References are to the 1994 World Classic’s paperback edition, edited and introduced by David Daniell.
I was alone in that great crowd, isolated and proscribed, and there was no help save in my own wits.
(The Power-House, page 88)
A short book, at just 110 pages in this paperback edition, The Power-House was expanded from a 1913 short story. It starts slowly but builds into an exciting (if sometimes incomprehensible) thriller set among the posh upper class of Edwardian England. The narrator is Sir Edward Leithen, a Scottish barrister and Conservative MP living in London, a character who was to go on and feature in four other Buchan novels which are, as a result, regarded as a set. Half-way through the novel we are told that he is 34 years old.
Frame narratives
It’s a frame narrative or story within a story. The first page explains that the following story was told by Leithen to a group of ‘us’ one evening during a hunting trip in Scotland, duck shooting at Glenaicill to be precise. We’re given the names of some of their circle of posh friends and their wacky adventures.
The main narrative starts with one of Leithen’s circle, fellow Conservative MP Tommy Deloraine, throwing a dinner party at which we’re introduced to a second group of posh, pukka pals (‘an Indian cavalry fellow; Chapman, the Labour member, whom Tommy called Chipmunk; myself, and old Milson of the Treasury’). I confess to finding this blizzard of names and characters a bit confusing. I was left wondering who was going to emerge as the central protagonist.
The use of a frame device reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s use of the technique in the novels narrated by his character Marlow (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Chance, The Arrow of Gold and the short story Youth). But the comparison only highlights the difference. Conrad is a literary giant, Buchan is a cheapjack entertainer. In Conrad the frame story of, say, Heart of Darkness, is an intimate part of the meaning of the narrative, giving it immeasurable depth and significance. Here the only reason for these two sets of posh names and settings (the Scottish duck shoot and the dinner party) is nothing creative or artistic but, as far as I can tell, snob value. It simply indicates the posh, upper-crust setting.
(Actually, half-way through, another thought occurred to me. One of Buchan’s chief characteristics as a writer is his prolificness. I’ve just read Prester John, whose protagonist is a young and relatively hard-up Scotsman; a few years after this book, Buchan published his most successful novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, which features a middle-class protagonist. Maybe the very showy showcasing of posh friends and connections in the Leithen books is not pure showing off but more to signal the difference in social class and setting of the Leithen novels from the other types. Not snobbery, but narrative positioning.)
Where is Pitt-Heron?
Anyway, when all the guests have left the party, Tommy tells Leithen (the narrator) that a mutual friend, Charles Pitt-Heron, a well-known adventurer and free spirit, has disappeared, not returning home to his lady wife a few days previously. His valet has found a card in his things with a Russian name on it, Konalevsky, and enquiries have shown that it belongs to an official at the Russian embassy. When Tommy went to see him Konalevsky told Tommy that Pitt-Heron has gone to Moscow, nobody knows why.
Now Tommy explains that he’s telling Leithen all this because he, Tommy, is all set to depart for Moscow with a view to tracking down Pitt-Heron, finding out what it’s all about, and offering him help. But he needs someone back in London to know what’s going on, where he’s gone, and generally look after his interests while he’s away. Puzzled by the whole thing, Leithen agrees.
So next day Tommy catches the boat-train from Victoria and Leithen goes round to see Pitt-Heron’s wife, Ethel. With the incestuousness characteristic of the British upper class, Leithen himself had feelings for Ethel before she married the mad adventurer, Tommy, so the visit has undertones. But she tells him she’s discovered the draft of a letter he wrote but obviously never got round to completing, warning of terrible danger and telling her to come and meet him at …. and the chosen destination hadn’t been filled in. What does it mean? Leithen promises his old flame to find out.
The Lumley-Pitt-Heron connection
The plot then thickens or gets more cluttered. Through a series of random incidents, Leithen becomes aware of a man who owns a big house in Blackheath named Pavia, and that he has an aggressive butler named Tuke. Checking up information in court cases he’s involved in, Leithen then discovers the house in South London is also registered to a man named Lumley. Could they be the same person?
When Leithen goes to this house to interview the butler (because he’s been involved in a car crash which is going to court), the owner is away, but Leithen discovers a scrap of paper with a cryptic message on it: ‘Suivez a Bokhare Saronov’. Why Bokhara? Who is Saronov?
The country house
In a huge coincidence, Leithen undertakes a motor car tour of the West Country (the car is driven by his chauffeur, Stagg) but, on the way back, in Surrey, they crash, not seriously, but both are a little cut and shaken. Leaving Stagg to look after getting the motor repaired, Leithen goes wandering the neighbourhood to see if he can find a nice upper-middle-class chap who can put him up. The coincidence is that he comes across a lovely grand house, home to a very friendly old man.
Altogether it was a very dignified and agreeable figure who greeted me in a voice so full and soft that it belied his obvious age. Dinner was a light meal, but perfect in its way. There were soles, I remember, an exceedingly well-cooked chicken, fresh strawberries and a savoury. We drank a ’95 Perrier-Jouet and some excellent Madeira.
International anarchy
After dinner the two very civilised men sit by the fire for a long conversation. The gracious host very slowly steers the subject round to international affairs, points out the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, suggests how little it would take to sink the currency, the only thing which keeps civilisation together is the compact of most of its educated members to do so. But what would happen if that failed, if some members rejected the compact or social contract?
What is everything you read in the papers is just persiflage, even the stuff about wars and new weapons is only the surface? What if the real power lies hidden?
The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret
And so, in this mesmeric scene, Leithen finds himself being drawn into a vision of a vast international conspiracy. ‘Supposing anarchy learned from civilisation and became international,’ the host says. But you would want a great military genius, a modern-day Napoleon to manage such a conspiracy, objects Leithen.
‘Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon. All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin.’
Their after-dinner chat tails off and Leithen goes to bed in the spare bedroom, but he can’t sleep because of the vision of international anarchy which has opened before him. Next morning he is up early, deliberately to avoid further conversation with his unnerving host.
In fact it is only as the housekeeper serves him an early breakfast, that she mentions that her master’s name is Mr Andrew Lumley. Lumley! The same name that’s come up regarding the house in London and mysterious connections with Pitt-Heron.
Leithen is driven back to London by Stagg, in the now-repaired motor, reeling from the coincidences which have brought him to spend the night in the home of the very person who seems to be involved in Pitt-Heron’s disappearance.
Developments
Mr Lumley, the quietly civilised connoisseur and man behind the Power-House, not only has a country house in Surrey, and a house in Blackheath, but mostly stays in rooms at the Albany in central London.
His butler’s real name is Josiah Routh. Leithen finds out that he is a crook who made a career as a trade unionist until he was caught embezzling funds and did a runner. Now, as he pieces together the evidence, Leithen realises that:
Pitt-Heron is mixed up somehow with Lumley and become so frightened for his life that he fled to Moscow.
Tommy has contacted a mutual friend in the Moscow embassy and gone to find Pitt-Heron.
Leithen has a contact at ‘one of the embassies’ (surely the French embassy?) who he calls Felix. He goes to see Felix and together they ponder where the Tommy and Pitt-Heron would then travel to. If Pitt-Heron was going on from Moscow to Bokhara, then they would probably head south towards British India.
This Felix becomes a source of information, first that Tommy arrived in Moscow, then that he set off towards central Asia, and then that he was pursued by another Englishman, a man answering to the description of Tuke, the super-butler, also known as Routh. This Routh had hooked up with a Russian named Saronov. So Saronov and Tuke are in pursuit of Pitt-Heron and Tommy in the wilds of Central Asia.
Complicated, isn’t it? And doesn’t totally make sense. We have no idea how Pitt-Heron is connected to Lumley or why he’s fleeing into Central Asia of all places.
Anyway, Leithen also reaches out to a contact of his in Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, one Macgillivray. They meet for a drink and Leithen asks this old hands if he’s ever heard of the Power-House? Macgillivray laughs and says there are hundreds of criminal organisations with florid names, colourful names are the hallmark of half-baked political subversives round the world.
Pursued
Leithen becomes convinced he’s being spied on, the eerie feeling that people are watching him and following him in the streets. He bumps into Lumley in Piccadilly who very politely warns him to steer clear of the Pitt-Heron affair. The sense of paranoia and urban claustrophobia thickens.
So much so that Leithen reaches out to the bluff Yorkshire Labour MP Chapman and asks him to move in with him, to be a kind of bodyguard. He has to tell Chapman about the international conspiracy he’s stumbled across and the latter is very excited at the prospects of fighting and punch-ups. The pair take to practicing boxing for half an hour every morning.
Der Krafthaus
Leithen runs into Macgillivray in his club who tells him that, as it happens, a letter from a German colleague contains references to several espionage plans, all linked to something called the Krafthaus, Krafthaus being German for ‘power house’.
Macgillivray’s correspondent concluded by saying that, in his opinion, if this Krafthaus could be found, the key would be discovered to the most dangerous secret organisation in the world. He added that he had some reason to believe that the motive power of the concern was English.
Premonitions
In his imagination Leithen sees Tommy and Pitt-Heron riding south from Bokhara, being pursued by Tuke and Saronov, certain that when they meet up there will be death – ‘and I knew, though how I could not tell, that death would attend the meeting.’
Leithen has come clean to his friend in the Foreign Office, Felix, and asked him to get the British Embassy to despatch help to Tommy and Pitt-Heron. All he can do is hope that help will arrive in time.
Leithen attends a big political dinner given by the chief of his party in the House of Lords. There are fifty or sixty guests and he is horrified to see Lumley sitting at the top of the table as one of the most honoured guests. When he asks the man sitting next to him who the guy at the head of the table is, the man (an Under-Secretary) replies that he is Lumley, one of the most powerful men in England: ‘If you wanted any out-of-the-way bit of knowledge you could get it by asking Lumley. I expect he pulls the strings more than anybody living.’
The trap
Macgillivray phones Leithen to say he has something important to tell him and invites him to an out-of-the-way restaurant in Fitzrovia, Rapaccini’s in Antioch Street. It’s a trap. Leithen is shown into a small dining room and the door is locked behind him. There’s bottles of champagne and he’s tempted to drink but is too tense.
After a long wait, the odd-looking French windows open from outside to reveal a burly crook. Now, as it happens, this is a crook Leithen once acted as defence lawyer for and got off, one Bill Docker. (Not the most original name for a working class London man, is it?)
Docker is surprised to see him and explains that he’s been paid to force him outside and into a waiting car which will drive him away (why? where?). Leithen tries to persuade him to let him go, but Docker says if he does a) he’ll have his own throat cut and b) ‘they’ will just send someone else.
Now during this tense conversation Docker had helped himself to several glasses of the champagne and now begins to feel woozy. It is, of course, drugged, and when Leithen points this out to him, Docker becomes angry at his own employers and, with his bull-like physique, smashes the locked door down before proceeding to pass out.
Leithen grabs a champagne bottle as a weapon and goes out into the corridor where he immediately encounters one of the waiters with a knife but clobbers him over the head with the bottle. Just as Docker had been battering the door, Leithen had heard the voice of his friendly Labour MP, Chapman, yelling up the stairs. Now Leithen jumps over the banisters and falls amid three other waiters who try to corner him but they all fall in a roiling ruck. Chapman wades in, disperses them and pulls Leithen to safety.
Out in the street, Chapman explains that after Leithen rang to say he was going to Rapaccini’s, he suddenly remembered it was the London base for Tuke, the renegade trade unionist, and immediately suspected something fishy, so had hurried round. The supposed ‘manager’ tried to put him off but Chapman barged past him and started yelling Leithen’s name just, as chance would have it, as Docker was breaking the door down.
Now they booth hustle out of the place and walk sharpish along Oxford Street, west back towards Leithen’s flat. On the way he is several times jostled by random passersby off the pavement and once into the door into building works, crying out for Chapman who came wading in to save him.
In other words, the Power-House seems to be a vast organisation, with followers everywhere, who have been ordered to capture him.
News from Asia
They make it back to his flat where they virtually barricade themselves in before calming down. Leithen is smoking a pipe when Felix phones with news of goings-on on Turkmenistan. Felix had commissioned some British Indian frontier police to shadow Tuke and Saronov from Moscow. They followed them into a valley where they met Tommy and Pitt-Heron and, after a little parlay, Tuke had fired deliberately at Pitt-Heron, grazing his ear, whereupon Tommy had charged him and knocked the pistol from his hand. Tuke turned to flee but was killed by a long shot from the police on the hillside. Meanwhile Tommy had felled Saronov with his fists, and the man had abjectly surrendered.
This is all well and good but what’s it all about? What has Pitt-Heron got to do with Lumley? Why did he flee? Why did he flee to Moscow, of all places, and then onto Central Asia? What was so important that Tuke was sent thousands of miles to kill him?
Break for it
Next day Leithen writes a full account of events to date, in duplicate. He sends Chapman to deliver one of them to Macgillivray at Scotland Yard. But a few hours later he’s rung up by a doctor from St Thomas’s Hospital who tells him that Chapman has been admitted for cuts and bruises sustained when he was run over by a car in Whitehall. And that while he was being helped to his feet, someone pickpocketed the letter. The enemy now know how much he knows.
When Leithen tries to phone Felix he discovers the phone line has been cut. He is under siege in his flat. But he had previously arranged to be picked up by his man Stagg the chauffeur at 2pm. A little late, Stagg appears in the car and Leithen makes a dash for it. He has the other letter on him and is going to deliver it to the embassy in Belgravia. But he tells Stagg to do a detour west to throw followers off the scent. But half way down the Edgeware Road he realises the driver of his car does not have the Boer War scar on his neck that he and Stagg have sometimes discussed. He is an imposter!
Next time they come to a traffic jam Leithen jumps out and makes his way between cars then pedestrians to a shop he knows, where he asks the owner to be let out the back entrance into a mews. He doubles back through Hyde Park, across Park Lane and through Mayfair. He has that classic thriller sensation of moving among the urban crowds who are living their everyday boring lives while he is involved in a life-or-death, high stakes chase.
I was alone in that great crowd, isolated and proscribed, and there was no help save in my own wits.
As he crosses into Green Park more and more ‘innocent’ bystanders are revealed as being in on the conspiracy, moving in on him, trying to cut him off, as he runs down into Belgrave Square, and then along the mews behind the (French?) embassy. In a comic scene he bursts into the kitchen, mortally offending the chef who was in the final stages of creating a perfect casserole (surely the French embassy?).
A footman, nervously fingering in his pocket what Leithen suspects is a pistol, tries to apprehend him but at this moment the butler appears and suavely agrees to take Leithen to see his friend, Felix. For a moment I thought Felix might be in on the conspiracy (since it’s always the person you trust the most who betrays you), but Felix remains true and lets Leithen send a message to Macgillivray summarising events and, most boldly, to Lumley himself at the Albany, informing him that he intends to call on him at 8pm tonight. Then he makes one more request, that he be allowed a serving of the chef’s wonderful casserole at 7pm.
Face to face with Lumley
This short intense but puzzling yarn comes to a climax when Leithen makes his way from Belgrave Square up and along Piccadilly to confront Lumley at the Albany. He is shown into the quiet man’s rooms and they have a very enjoyable, highly theatrical confrontation. What is repeatedly emphasised is the way they respect each other as gentlemen and so won’t resort to anything crude. Instead Leithen says that at 9.30 he will hand over everything he knows to the police, which gives Lumley an hour and 45 minutes to pack his bags and flee the country. Why is he letting him go, in exchange for Pitt-Heron, in exchange for Lumley forgiving and forgetting whatever hold he has over Pitt-Heron. A favour for a favour.
Lumley delivers the classic speech of the baddie, respecting the brains and character of his enemy, lamenting that he didn’t meet him when he was younger and could have recruited him for his crusade.
Do you know, Mr. Leithen, it is a mere whimsy of fate that you are not my disciple. If we had met earlier and under other circumstances I should have captured you.
‘I abominate you and all your works,’ I said, ‘but I admire your courage.’ (p.101)
All accompanied with some bucket philosophy, because Lumley is the kind of baddie (like Moriarty) who justifies his crimes with specious sophistry.
‘I am a sceptic about most things,’ he said, ‘but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.’
Lumley asks to be left alone while he ponders his next move and/or makes plans to pack to catch the next boat-train. Leithen never felt so relieved as when he emerges back onto the busy streets of Piccadilly, among normal men and women.
I had carried myself boldly enough in the last hour, but I would not have gone through it again for a king’s ransom. Do you know what it is to deal with a pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.
So then he goes to see Chapman, the Labour MP who has been such a brick and sure ally. Chapman is understandably scandalised that Leithen is letting Lumley get away. He wants to have him arrested along with all the people in his network, and accused in a big public trial which would provide an opportunity for blockbuster speeches delivered by himself (Chapman) in Parliament, denouncing the wickedness of capitalism. It is only when Leithen points out that the deal he did was solely to protect his pal Tommy Deloraine and Charles Pitt-Heron, that Chapman grudgingly agrees to be sworn to secrecy.
(It’s easy to forget the suave humour which ripples all through Buchan. Even at the most tense moments his characters are liable to have a pukka quip on their lips, or a sly aside about the various character stereotypes they deal with, Docker the worker, Chapman tribune of the people etc. Part of upper-class sang-froid.)
Lumley’s end and tying up loose ends
In their big confrontation scene, Lumley had made the cynical point that maybe he wasn’t defeated, maybe he was relieved. He had been carrying the burden of super-intelligence and secret agency for decades. (‘No man since Napoleon has tasted such power.’)
So Leithen isn’t surprised to read in the following morning’s paper that Mr Lumley had not taken advantage of the time Leithen gave him to catch the boat-train to the continent but had, instead, died in his sleep of heart failure, presumably suicide (?). Three days later Leithen attends Lumley’s funeral and is impressed by the number of VIPs and top people who carry or follow the casket to the grave.
The papers, also, are full of Lumley’s charitable work, of his achievements as a collector and as a civilised host of parties and receptions. Not a word is breathed anywhere of the secret Leithen uncovered, Leithen’s role as leader of an international terror and anarchist organisation.
Leithen arranges for Lumley’s death to be mentioned in the Russian papers that Tommy and Pitt-Heron could be counted on to read. This is to alert Pitt-Heron that the man who had hounded him out of England is dead, without giving away the fact that he (Leithen) knows about the connection. In other words, done with delicacy and tact. Gentlemen.
All of which leads up very neatly to Leithen being paid a visit a few weeks later by Tommy, looking tanned and travelled, who – in complete ignorance of Leithen’s role in the affair – proceeds to rib Leithen about what a very boring, office-bound existence he leads.
And Leithen plays along, never letting him know that in Tommy’s absence, it was he, Leithen, who had played the key role in the affair, who had arranged for his protection in distant Asia, who had disposed of the great antagonist. How cool, clever and entertaining.
BUT – we never did find out what Lumley was up to and what he was holding over Pitt-Heron or why the latter fled 3,000 miles to escape it. Strange how this short text has all the feel of a thriller but with this great big plot hole right at the centre.
AND – Leithen is mighty confident that with Lumley dead the Power-House will evaporate into thin air, but will it? Surely such a vast enterprise would just find a new cog to fill the slot, like James Bond’s SPECTRE or SMERSH. And anyway, is Lumley really dead? Surely all the best baddies fake their deaths only to return from the grave in the gripping sequel!
Social history
People in conversation, on the radio and telly, in comedies and dramas, complain about the colonisation of the rest of England by Londoners buying up second homes and yet, here, in 1916, we have Leithen lamenting that:
The south of England is now so densely peopled by Londoners that even in a wild district where there are no inns and few farms there are certain to be several week-end cottages.
In 1916!
Artspeak
Lumley at one point dismisses the cheap rhetoric of anarchists and communists who spout slogans without appreciating the true nature of power, describing it as:
‘the half-scientific, half-philosophic jargon which is dear at all times to the hearts of the half-baked.’
Which rang a bell for someone who has just been to four contemporary art exhibitions and read hundreds of wall labels filled with the same endlessly repeated jingle of art critical terms.
Books & Boots 