As I mentioned in the last blog, I was at St. Hilda’s mystery conference where – amongst other goodies – Natasha Cooper talked about John Buchan. She made the interesting comment that Buchan’s work always contains a quest for identity and, like all good critical comments, that was really illuminating. I love JB and whole passages in his books came to life again as I mentally reviewed them in the light of what Natasha said.
Take The 39 Steps for instance. This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film. There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.
Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity. Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand. Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.
He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay. (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)
Now, so far, so jolly. However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper. Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money. Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is. Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.
Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is. Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity. It’s significant, isn’t it?
I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book. Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print. However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again; success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui. Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world. A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid. He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.) Was it enough? Perhaps not.
It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.
