If you’ve ever heard of John Buchan, it’s probably because of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of his novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Buchan was an amazingly productive author of over 100 works of fiction and nonfiction, averaging five books a year from 1922 to 1936. He wrote a 24-volume history of World War I during the war, at a rate of about 40,000 words a month, while also working for the Foreign Office, the Edinburgh publisher Thomas Nelson, and Reuters news service, as well as writing novels. He was also a devoted husband and father of four children and a faithful member of the Presbyterian church.
Based on the recommendation of George Grant’s King’s Meadow humanities curriculum, my 9th-12th-grade homeschool literature co-op class read Buchan’s novel Greenmantle (1916), a sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitchcock considered filming Greenmantle but decided not to because of “my respect for a literary masterpiece.”
Buchan wrote this World War I spy novel while the war was in progress. He focuses on the obscure political background of the relationship between Turkey and Germany and explores the strategic significance and threat of the Muslim world. In fact, the BBC canceled its planned broadcast of Greenmantle as its classic serial after the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London.
The brief but sympathetic depiction of the Kaiser, who was commonly considered the personification of evil, reflects narrator Richard Hannay’s shifting attitudes toward his enemies as the novel progresses. When Hannay seeks shelter in a woodcutter’s cottage straight out of a fairy tale, he relinquishes his dream of “giving the Huns some of their own medicine.” He reflects:
“I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.”
Hannay takes his undercover task seriously, yet he often describes the war in terms like stark lunacy, farce, idiocy, and crazy folly. Still, he finds it a thrilling adventure. He says the guns “intoxicated me” and “kept me cheerful.” The sound of artillery fire reminds him of the first time he heard it:
“Then I had been half afraid, half solemnized, but every nerve had been quickened. Then it had been the new thing in my life that held me breathless with anticipation; now it was the old thing, the thing I had shared with so many good fellows, my proper work, and the only task for a man. At the sound of the guns I felt that I was moving in natural air once more. I felt that I was coming home.”
This double perspective reminds me of Robert E. Lee’s comment at the Battle of Fredericksburg: “It is well that war is so terrible; otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”
At a point when Hannay is facing almost certain death, he reflects:
“I fancy it isn’t the men who get most out of the world and are always buoyant and cheerful that most fear to die. Rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling most fiercely to life. They have not the joy of being alive which is a kind of earnest of immortality.”
Some readers criticize the novel for being too full of coincidences, and Buchan addresses this issue in the novel’s dedication:
“Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land. The one chance in a thousand is habitually taken, and as often as not succeeds.”
George Grant identifies the novel’s “strange and sudden providences” as “its greatest attribute” that shows the intervention of God.
The Richard Hannay series includes:
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Greenmantle
Mr. Standfast
The Three Hostages
The Courts of Morning
The Island of Sheep