This is the first of two posts on John Buchan’s novel. The second will follow in the next few days.
John Buchan (1875-1940) was the son of a Scottish manse – not an especially privileged place to start, but certainly not ordinary. From that start Buchan proved himself extraordinary. Through application and hard work he became a prolific author and highly popular novelist, first getting published while an undergraduate. At the same time, he grew into a stolid part of what we would now call the Establishment; in 1935 Buchan was created Baron Tweedsmuir and appointed Governor-General of Canada, where he died in office.
If the characters in his novels are anything to go by, Buchan’s success must also have been due in part to assiduous networking. He was fond of coteries of recurring characters, each book seeing selected members through further stages in their professional careers and personal lives, showing their development but not sparing them setbacks. Perhaps as a group they collectively reflected Buchan’s complex and wide-ranging personality. Edward Leithen, the character generally regarded as the most autobiographical of them, first appeared in The Power-House (1916). Twenty-five years later, in Sick Heart River, Leithen is mortally ill and knows it – yet still determined to come to the aid of a friend while also saving an indigenous Canadian tribe. In between, Edward Leithen (and friends) participated in many a lively and often dangerous adventure – including John Macnab, first published one hundred years ago in July 1925.
It is London on a hot day in early July. Sir Edward Leithen, who had ‘left forty behind him, but was still on the pleasant side of fifty’, is informed by his doctor that it is a ‘dismal obsession that you are ill. I can find no earthly thing wrong, except that you’re stale.’ Leithen, a former Attorney-General but still a Conservative MP and sought-after barrister, self-diagnoses taedium vitae – a ‘special kind of ennui’. There can be no medical cure – it’s up to the patient. As the doctor tells him: ‘You’ve got to rediscover the comforts of your life by losing them for a little. […] If you could induce the newspapers to accuse you of something shady and have the devil of a job to clear yourself it might do the trick. […] Therefore I say “steal a horse”’.
Ignoring his work and an invitation to dine out, Leithen wanders the streets before finding sanctuary at his club. What might have been a solitary evening turns into the gathering of a Buchan coterie. Leithen joins John Palliser-Yeates, who although ‘at first sight had the look of an undergraduate’, is 45 and ‘head of an eminent banking firm and something of an authority on the aberrations of post-war finance’. He had also been to the same doctor as Leithen – and with the same complaint. Two other friends are also dining: war veteran and prospective parliamentary candidate Sir Archie Roylance, ‘a youth with lean, high-coloured cheeks, who limped slightly’, and Lord Lamancha, a ‘tallish older man with a long dark face, a small dark moustache, and a neat pointed chin’. A member of the Cabinet, Lamancha is ‘believed to have that combination of candour and intelligence which England desires in her public men.’ He also admits to being ‘weary in mind.’
Roylance’s relentless cheerfulness contrasts so much with his three companions’ confessed ennui that action is called for. He recalls Jim Tarras, who had ‘invented a new kind of sport’. Tarras would challenge Highland landowners, daring them to catch him before he could kill a stag and deliver it to the owner to show he was not a thief. These escapades appeal to the three ennui-laden men, who decide to emulate Tarras. They would each ‘steal a horse’ – and attain their cure in the process.
The targets are quickly identified: Roylance’s three neighbours at Crask, his house in the Highlands. The friends would travel there in secret and stay in hiding while they each devised and attempted to execute the crime of killing a stag or salmon belonging to one of the neighbours. They would also deliver it to its owner, and whether or not they were caught, make a substantial donation to charity. Because such a daring and brazen challenge could only come from a highly skilled and experienced criminal, an exceptional man, they create one – signing their letters with the nom de guerre ‘John Macnab’.
Leithen is by no means unaware of the irony and danger when a top lawyer and former government chief legal advisor decides to break the law and undermine everything he stands for. Could so extreme a cure for ennui be worth it? By their example the three men would demonstrate openly the worthlessness of their class and the system it upholds – to Buchan, a denial of modern civilised society. The fragility of this ordered world, with the constant possibility of its sudden downfall, is a recurring theme in Buchan’s work – his ‘figure in the carpet’. As Leithen was told in The Power-House: “Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.” The theme is there in John Macnab – treated with a lightened heart and twinkle in the eye.
The outcome of the John Macnab caper is no surprise, and Buchan gets everyone that far with his characteristic fast-paced assurance. Although Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and Lamancha choose to leave ‘civilisation’ behind them for a much more ‘natural’ setting – full of scenery and weather, in places literally down to earth – the consolations of good fellowship, hot baths, and staunch dinners with plenty to drink are never far away. For members of a John Buchan coterie the division really is no more than a sheet of glass.
(John Howard)
Image: John Buchan Society
