"John Macnab" by John Buchan

I don't think I have ever read a book about poaching before and certainly not about a poaching practical joke. A barrister, a banker and a cabinet minister decide to go to Scotland and poach deer and salmon but before each crime they will warn the landowner of their intention. Thus they hope to cure their boredom.

Weird plot. But Buchan is brilliant at describing the joy of hunting (and being hunted) in a cold, wet and foggy highland landscape. He is brilliant at capturing the native tongue of the gillies and gamekeepers. He has the joyous character of tinkler orphan Fish Benjie and the feisty Janet Raden. There is a moment of high comedy when Archie, the prospective Tory MP for the area, has stage fright making his maiden speech and can only repeat (twice) the words of the chairman who welcomed him to the stage.

There are, of course, terrible un-PC moments. The posh people and the poor people might as well inhabit different universes. Posh people, who have a natural air of command, expect to hoodwink and terrify the poor. If they dress like them, their clothes are unmentionable and appalling. But a hot bath and a stiff whisky at the end of the day and a glorious dinner cooked by a poor person makes it all better. At the end of the book an ex-soldier, down on his luck ("The Gov'ment don't seem to care what 'appens to us poor Gawd-forgotten devils, sir.") has had his leg broken by the cabinet minister who, to his credit, is awfully sorry, especially realising that such an injury might destroy the man's source of income. But in the epilogue, Buchan has forgotten all about this man, concentrating only on the upper classes.

Buit Buchan was not entirely without redemption. The prospective Tory MP's doctrine is one of "Challenge.; of no privilege without responsibility, of only one right of man - the right to do his duty; of all power and property held on sufferance. ... What was Bolshevism but a challenge, perhaps a much-needed challenge, to make certain of the faith that was in a man? He had no patience with the timorous and whining rich. No law could protect them unless they made themselves worth protecting. ... So soon as a cause feared inquiry and the light of day, that cause was doomed." It is an interesting position. Is this still what the Tories believe?

This is the first appearance in fiction that I have encountered of the tremendously famous then and unheard of now Italian poet d'Annunzio about whom Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote her brilliant biography entitled The Pike.

A remarkable book. It made me want to tramp the hills of Scotland in the fog and the rain (and then go home to a roaring fire and a groaning table). A brilliant evocation of landscape.

September 2015; 248 pages

Other books by Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• The Three Hostages starring Richard Hannay which is rather silly but very readable (and ends with a wonderful chase in the Scottish hills).
• Huntingtower which is also set in Scotland and stars an urchin quite like Fish Benji; another silly plot but a wonderful presentation of the way highland Scots talk and live.
• Witch Wood, probably Buchan's best book, set in seventeenth century Scotland which yet again gives us a fantastic feel for the Scottish speech and the landscape, though this is rather more in the lowlands.
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"The Three Hostages" by John Buchan

This is the fourth Richard Hannay adventure in the series which started with the much better known The Thirty-Nine Steps. Following becoming a General and a Sir in the Great War, Hannay has retired to the countryside with his wife and young son. But a mysterious criminal gang has kidnapped three people linked to the highest echelons of British society and the baffled authorities appeal to Hannay to find the abductees. All that he has to go on is six lines of poetry which his local doctor can help to interpret. Sure enough, the poetry leads him to where each hostage is hidden and to the master criminal himself who, despite his outward respectability as an MP (how times have changed there!), on first meeting Hannay hypnotises him. But Hannay is able to resist the mesmeric influence and though he continues to act as if he is the puppet and slave of the master, he is slowly able to unravel the crime.

It is well written even though the plot, as outlined above, is a monstrous load of rubbish. It is very much of its time in that it plays to all the prejudices of the Empire-loving Brit: it is racist and anti-Jewish. Working people are good eggs when they are in their place and Hannay's wife is a strong character without whom he could not have freed all the hostages. But the plot, and there is no getting away from the plot in what is, after all, meant to be a thriller, has no tension in it, is almost completely black and white, and revolves around the most audacious set of circumstances.

September 2015; 255 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"Witch wood" by John Buchan

Having read Huntingtower I was prepared to find that Buchan was better than the thriller writer of The Thirty Nine Steps and Prester John that I remembered from my youth but I was not prepared for this. It is a very good book indeed.

It is set in Scotland during the War of the Three Kingdoms and much of the dialogue is in broad lowland Scots which is a challenge. Nevertheless I found myself getting by in it quite comfortably and it was only about two-thirds of the way through that I discovered the glossary in the back!

David Sempril returns to the village where he grew up as the Minister of the Presbyterian Kirk, a rather hell fire and damnation puritanical sect fixed firmly on a retributive God from the Old Testament. He has high hopes of fulfilment in his new role. But on the edges of his parish lurks the Black Wood. Despite the warnings of his housekeeper, the brilliantly characterised Isobel (Buchan describes her "charity seasoned with maledictions") and others, he travels through the wood to rush to the bedside of a dying parishioner. Suddenly the mood turns sombre: "It was as if he had stripped and dived into a stagnant pool." It grows cold and dark as the pines close in. "He recited a psalm, but his voice, for usual notably full and mellow, seemed not to carry a yard." He hears owls and moths flap into his face. His horse shies. Its "flanks were damp with sweat." He is too late. His parishioner has died before he arrives.

And from this begins his descent. That night he meets some soldiers in the woods and guides them to the local laird's house where he encounters a beautiful girl. Later he discovers that these soldiers are Montrose and two of his men, on their way to fight the armies of the Kirk. Then the winter sets in and he is busy rushing around his village trying to keep the poor folk alive. Towards the end of the winter a lot of babies are born out of wedlock; many of them are born dead. Something strange is going on. And then ...

By chance he meets the girl again in a beautiful part of the wood that she calls Paradise. Shortly after that, trying to find the same place after dark, he blunders into the Black Wood and gets lost. Again terror rises. And he stumbles across a coven of witches celebrating a black mass.

Armed with the wrath of the Kirk, he decides to expose the hypocritical parishioners who are selling their souls to the devil. He is repeatedly advised to let things be, by Isobel, by villagers and by his elder priests. But he is determined to prosecute the Satanists. He seeks to spy on their next Black Mass and collects evidence against them. This he lays before the elders of the Kirk, despite being again warned (by them) to let things lie. Then, half way through the book, a simple act of charity puts him on the wrong side of the Law of the Kirk.

There is still so much to come, so much of it inevitable as his life spirals into despair. He is censured. Plague arrives at the village. And finally, when everything has gone wrong, there is a confrontation with the Arch Priest of Satan.

Stunning descriptions, brilliant characters, and a wonderful plot, perfectly paced: this book has it all. It is a classic tragedy of an innocent struggling against the evil of the world. The monolithic Kirk, a religion with no charity, and the dark forces of Satan which seem to be able to destroy at will, are the Scylla and Charybdis between which David is unable to navigate.

Read it! July 2015; 301 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"Huntingtower" by John Buchan

Set in the immediate aftermath of the first world war (and we are constantly reminded of the war from the scars of the protagonists to the remembered dead to the availability of Service revolvers), this is a Scottish adventure story. At the same time it is a modern myth with heavy overtones of fairy tale.

Dickson McCunn (his surname means son of a dog) has just retired having sold his very successful grocery business and decides (his wife being away at a spa hotel) to go on a ramble through the Scottish countryside. Despite his bourgeois profession he is a romantic at heart. Meeting up with a younger man, a poet who scorns romance, they embark on an expedition to take a look at a rather dishevelled stately home and discover a Russian Princess who has been locked up by villains with Bolshevik leanings who want to steal her jewels. Coincidentally, she is the Russian Princess that the poet fell in love with when he was being nursed back to health in Italy after being wounded on the front. Also by coincidence, a self-organised scout troupe made up of a Glaswegian boy gang called the Gorbals Die-Hards happen to be camping on the moor. So grocer Dickson and his boy band resolve to rescue the princess in distress.

The adventure that follows becomes even more incredible as the characters move back and forth across the moor. After springing the Princess from her perilous situation she then goes back there to do battle with the forces of evil, now reinforced from the sea.

So the plot is bizarre but what makes the book great is the wonderful descriptions of the Scottish countryside; the brilliant vernacular in which most of the characters speak (though some are speaking broader Glaswegian than others); the brilliant counterpointing of the heroic and the humdrum, the romantic and the practical, the poet and the grocer; the regular injection of humour when the book threatens to slide into farce; and the fabulous characters of Dickson, all the Die-Hards, and 'Aunt Phemie'. Even the rather silly and irrelevant poet has a trajectory to fulfil. The only poor characters are the villains who, apart from the slightly scary but farcically stupid innkeeper, are non-entities.

It is a fairy tale saddled with a silly plot but in the hands of a master storyteller like Buchan, it comes to life. April 2015; 211 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War