Sat 13 Aug 2016
JOHN BUCHAN – John Macnab. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1925. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1925. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback.
So speaks Sir Edward (Ned) Leithen, successful solicitor and political figure in the opening chapter of John Buchan’s novel John MacNab. It is a condition not unknown in England following the Great War. He’s suffering from the middle age blahs as well, tired of work, bored with play, sick of hunting and fishing, looking for something to enliven him to breathe life back into existence. Acton Croke (Buchan was superb at the naming of names of fictional creations and places), the surgeon Leithen consults, has a prescription for what ails him too: “If you consult me as a friend, I advise you to steal a horse in some part of the world where a horse-thief is usually hanged.”
Soon, with his friends Charles, Lord Lamancha, and John Palliser-Yeates, he will take up Sir Archibald Roylance’s offer of his house in Scotland at Crask (“Crask’s the earthenware pot among the brazen vessels–mighty hard to get to and nothing to see when you get there.â€) and put Acton Croke’s prescription to the test, with the birth of the poacher, they call John Macnab.
Only in Buchan would a vacation involve physically and mentally pushing yourself to your very limits.
Most writers at the time did not tie their created worlds together, so that there is no mention of the Scarlet Pimpernel in Baroness Orzcy’s tales of the Old Man in the Corner or Lady Molly and the Old Man, or his Watson Polly Burton never meets Lady M, and Manly Wade Wellman aside, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger might as well exist on different planets, moreso Brigadier Gerard.
True, Ayesha runs into Allan Quatermain, but then it was almost impossible for anyone to not run into Quatermain in Haggard’s fiction, even if it was only in a vivid dream. Edgar Rice Burroughs does have Tarzan visit Pellucidar, but he never meets David Innes, and all his fiction is only loosely tied by Jason Gridley and his Gridley wave by which they communicate their tales to Burroughs.
The Count of Monte Cristo never casually thinks about the Three Musketeers; Jane Austen’s heroines don’t seem to be overly neighborly, Pride never meets Senibility; David Copperfield never stumbles across Fagin or Little Nell; Rochester never discusses brutish behavior and romantic lassitude with Heathcliffe.
But John Buchan’s creations inhabit the same world and class system. They literally belong to the same club (The Rungates Club, also the title of a collection of short stories where they share adventure tales). Richard Hannay knows Lamancha and Leithen and Palliser-Yeates, Ned Leithen knows Archie Roylance from Mr. Standfast and The Courts of Morning, Archie Roylance knows Dickson McCunn from Huntingtower.
It may be the most extensive shared fictional world of its time in that sense. Even in Sapper and Yates only one character connects the different worlds (Ronald Standish in Sapper, Jonah Mansel in Yates). Buchan’s world is unexpectedly cozy, if a bit tweedy and closed. It’s as if Lamont Cranston and Richard Wentworth both knew Doc Savage and belonged to the same club.
Crask is small, remote, and ideal for the game the three gentleman decided to play to treat what ails them, but not without complications. Archie has three chief neighbors in the region, Claypool, the Radens (cursed with daughters), and the American’s the Bandicoots. The three friends will write a letter to each of the landowners declaring their intention to poach on a specific night and time and sign it John Macnab and then set the game in motion.
In other hands, this would play out obviously. The canny old highlander would prove the most difficult, one of the trio would fall for one of the Raden’s daughters, and the American would show off a bad sport and have to be dealt with, but Buchan is too a good a writer for that, and while I won’t give too much away readers of Buchan know what a force of nature Janet Raden is when she becomes Archie Roylance’s wife.
In fact what sets this apart is how it plays with your expectations. Characters show depth and unexpected growth. Nobility sprouts in ignoble ground, and at the moment that John Macnab threatens to blow up in everyone’s face, a slip of a girl and a man of lesser class with an unexpected sense of honor and humor saves them all.
You might not think a novel about poaching would amount to much in terms of suspense, but you would be wrong. Buchan’s splendid feel for the outdoors, and especially the highlands, his characters almost spiritual connection with both nature and nature’s darker side, all make this as suspenseful and meaningful as any thriller.
I’ve always thought of this in cinematic terms, an Ealing comedy though with a more extensive cast and across time. Basil Rathbone or Ronald Colman for Leithen, Patric Knowles for Lamancha, and Kenneth More for Palliser-Yeates, David Tomlinson for Archie, Jean Simmons or Glynis Johns as Janet, Edmund Gwenn as the gillie Wattie Lithgow, Margaret Rutherford for Lady Claypool with her yappy dog, and so on.
John Macnab proved popular and interesting enough that a sequel, and a good one, The Return of John Macnab by Scottish novelist Andrew Greig came out in 1996, a critically acclaimed work in which a group of friends set out to recreate the legendary John Macnab’s exploits in a modern setting. It’s a different and more serious work than the original but every inch its equal with its own splendid feel for the Scottish landscape.
This is a different Buchan perhaps than what you may know from the Richard Hannay series, different still from the more obvious humor of the tales of grocer Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Diehards. The books featuring Ned Leithen, the most autobiographical of Buchan’s creations, are unique among his output: The Power House, the first modern spy novel from 1910 predating the more famous Thirty Nine Steps; The Dancing Floor a near supernatural novel about middle age romance and adventure; and Sick Heart River Buchan’s own rough country version of Hilton’s Shangri-La and an elegaic farewell to his readers, full of duty and sacrifice and the hard won rewards and cost of honor. Leithen is a far more complex character than Hannay as Buchan himself was.
John Macnab is not the best place to start reading Buchan, but it is a perfect place to end up. It’s a rare thing, an adventure novel full of physical action but little violence, a thriller where no one dies and nothing more important than a man’s honor and reputation is at stake, and a novel of ideas and heart about something as ignoble as poaching. It is a book well loved and appreciated by his readers, and one I wholeheartedly recommend you get around to, but only after some of the other better known works so you fully appreciate its charms.
August 13th, 2016 at 10:07 pm
I really like the idea of the “connected universe” that Buchan created. I knew about some of the interconnections between his various characters, but not to the extent your review goes into, David. It sounds fascinating.
August 14th, 2016 at 8:16 am
Available at Gutenberg Australia.
August 14th, 2016 at 1:24 pm
I’ve always enjoyed John MacNab and recently re-read it for the umpteenth time. Steve, check for a spelling error — Jane Austen’s last name is spelled with an e, not an i.
August 14th, 2016 at 1:50 pm
Ah, so it is.
August 14th, 2016 at 3:29 pm
It’s one of my all-time favourite books. You could hardly imagine a mainstream thriller novelist coming out with something like this nowadays. There is all the usual skill displayed by Buchan in the ‘action’ sequences, but he also able to wring suspense from something as un-thriller-like as one of the characters having to give a political speech.
I’m about the least hunting-shooting-fishing type of person that you could imagine, but every time that I’ve read it I’m seized with the desire to go fly-fishing or go bag a deer. I never thought that a book with that kind of setting would interest me, but Buchan manages to make it sound fascinating.
Whenever I read about Leithen, the image in my mind is of an actor/director called James Maxwell. I’d always assumed that he was British, and only realised that he was an American when I read his obituary. He was a co-founder of the Royal Exchange Theatre, but I suspect that most people would recognise him from ’50s/’60s/’70s British TV, where he appeared to be in everything. He had a tweedy, professional quality, but with a twinkle in his eye that would have made him perfect for the part. If I were casting him, then the perfect version would have been some late ’70s BBC film/video serial, and I could spend a lazy Sunday afternoon casting all of the other parts from the actors available at the time.
August 15th, 2016 at 7:20 pm
Sorry I didn’t catch my spell check on Austen. And just had to correct it again.
Re Buchan’s shared universe it also extends to my favorite Buchan A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY. Beginning with 1910’s THE POWER HOUSE most of his contemporary novels are connected by certain recurring characters, most often Leithen or Archie Roylance who features in the Hannay,
Leithen, and McCunn series.
The historical novels are mostly stand alone.
August 21st, 2016 at 7:56 am
One of Buchan’s contemporaries, P. G. Wodehouse also established a wide shared universe in his novels–for example, the last Psmith novel features the whole cast of Blandings Castle characters, nearly all of his young upper-crust heroes from various books belong to the Drones Club, supporting characters like Percy Pillbeam (the shady private eye), Sir Roderick Glossop (the eminent psychologist) and the Molloys (a husband-wife team of American crooks) flit through multiple books, etc. Shortly before his death, he was even entertaining the notion of a book that would have Bertie and Jeeves visiting Lord Emsworth at Blandings.
I could be wrong, but I think Anthony Trollope is the first major “literary” writer to establish a “universe” like this. His major and minor characters in various books are related to each other, belong to the same clubs, and continually pop up in each other’s books. For example, Plantagenet Palliser, the central figure of the six-novel “political” series of Trollope novels, first appears in the last of the six Barsetshire novels. Other characters like the Duke of Omnium, the fictional Prime Ministers Gresham and Daubeny, the fiery Lord Chiltern, the lawyer Chaffanbrass, and so on, appear in multiple stand-alone novels as well as in “series” novels.
August 23rd, 2016 at 6:33 am
A most interesting list of literary worlds unto themselves, Daniel. Thanks!