‘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.
Books & Boots 