‘I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust.’
(Buchan’s central message, delivered in this book by John Heritage, poet and soldier, page 116)
I’ve been reading old John Buchan novels I’ve picked up in second-hand shops as a break from the Africa project which overflowed with famine, civil wars, military coups, massacre, torture and child soldiers.
However, reading the series of five novels about Sir Edward Leithen has not turned out to be as easy and relaxing as I imagined. They all show the same weaknesses, which include the off-puttingly upper-class milieu, his terrible way with names but, above all, the weirdly contorted and contrived storylines.
Having finished the five Leithen books, as an experiment I tried one other novel (he wrote 30), this one the first of the series of three novels featuring on the face of it a very different protagonist, the retired Glasgow greengrocer and businessman, Dickson McCunn, ‘late of Mearns Street, Glasgow, wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and fifty-five years of age’ (p.55).
He makes an effort to show McCunn as coming from a different class than the hunting, shooting and fishing, Oxford and the bar Leithen, moving in his high society circles – instead McCunn is obviously intended to be a broadly comical figure and the story does, here and there, raise a wan smile, although ‘comic’ is not the term. It’s quite funny that Heritage mishears Dickson’s name and insists on referring to him throughout as ‘Dogson’.
Instead the plot is standard Buchan thriller i.e. a number of thriller tropes strung together on a wildly improbable and frequently incomprehensible plot.
The plot
So this Dickson McCunn is not just any old greengrocer, that would be a bit too déclassé – instead he has, until the novel opens, been the owner of the largest food and greengrocery supply business in all Glasgow
- The big provision shop in Mearns Street—now the United Supply Stores, Limited
- ‘you’re a household name in these parts. I get all my supplies from you,’, says Lord
‘Comic’ touches are that he is a member of a literary society and likes to quote Tennyson and Browning i.e. is amusingly behind the times, and is inordinately proud of the safety razor he has just treated himself to. He has just the day before sold the grocery store he has built into the city’s premier emporium. Now, aged 55, he wants to have adventures. The broad comic joke of the entire novel is that he stumbles into an adventure and discovers that real-life adventures are not at all the entertaining romances he imagined.
What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. (p.53)
So McCunn packs his bags and heads off for a walking tour of the Carrick district of Galloway (p.25). Before he goes:
That morning he had received an epistle from a benevolent acquaintance, one Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who called themselves the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’. Behind the premises in Mearns Street lay a tract of slums, full of mischievous boys with whom his staff waged truceless war. But lately there had started among them a kind of unauthorised and unofficial Boy Scouts, who, without uniform or badge or any kind of paraphernalia, followed the banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and subjected themselves to a rude discipline. They were far too poor to join an orthodox troop, but they faithfully copied what they believed to be the practices of more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their pathetic parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader, a red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send them to camp in the country. Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not deny to others what he proposed for himself. His last act before leaving was to send Mackintosh ten pounds.
Tramping the roads turns out to be not quite as glamorous as the poets make it sound. On the first day he meets beggars and tramps who are not as picturesque as he hoped. The second day he is tired and the weather takes a turn for the worse.
At the Bull Inn at Kirkmichael McCunn meets John Heritage, a posh Englishman and would-be poet. They have an argument of sorts because Buchan makes Heritage the kind of superficial posing socialist that he despised. He makes Heritage a) sympathise with the Bolsheviks in Russia the novel was serialised in 1921 i.e. while the Russian civil war was still in full swing) and b) take a ludicrously dewy-eyed view of the working class. To which an irritated McCunn delivers an eloquent rebuke:
‘You ideelise the working-man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday…. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!’ (p.28)
McCunn then reads the slim volume of verse Heritage has published (titled Whorls), which is an opportunity for Buchan to ridicule modern poetry, thus showing what a philistine he was. NB Also at the inn is a stranger he chats to for a while, a handsome young man with an Australian accent. Anyway, after his argument with Heritage he goes back to Mrs Morran’s place and so to bed.
Next morning McCunn has breakfast early and sets off. He comes across a detour from the main road which apparently leads to a peninsula of land which leads from Kirkmichael down to the sea, with a sign reading ‘Dalquharter and Huntingtower. (The peninsula is known as the Cruives, an old name which is ‘something to do with fishing.’ Hence the name of the village pub, The Cruives Inn.)
McCunn tosses a coin to decide whether to walk on or take make a detour to see this Huntingtower place and it comes down tail, for the detour.
He is irritated, after walking a way, to see the poet’s figure approaching up a tributary road. They fall in together and walk onto a pretty village. The innkeeper here is surprisingly rude and says there’s no room, so they poke around and come across a private house which does rooms in the care of sweet little old lady Mrs (Phemie) Morran.
She makes them a fine tea and when McCunn asks about this Huntingtower delivers a handy history. It’s always belonged to the Kennedy family, until the most recent heir to the family, name, Quentin Kennedy, went off to the war and died of the influenza. Now the place is up for sale.
After lunch our boys set off to see the house but when they come to the lodge are met by a rude and officious gatekeeper who tells them no. This, of course, is a red rag to a bull, and Heritage and McCunn follow the wall round till it turns to hedge, slip through it and go to explore the house. En route they flop down in pretty fields with a view and talk about poetry and Heritage whistles an aria from a Russian opera then goes on to tell the story of how he was posted to Italy at the end of the war and from his rooms by the Spanish Steps heard a guest in the same hotel, a pretty Russian girl, sing this air.
Finally they arrive in sight of the house but are disappointed to see that instead of a weathered rocky old pile it is a newly built house but a pastiche of a Tudor mansion, completely inappropriate for this harsh northern clime.
Dickson had never before been affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted to get far away from it as fast as possible.
Buchan uses the same tactic in The Dancing Floor where he just asserts that the Greek village his heroes arrive at is eerie and spooky, without very much evidence, and then repeats the assertion in various ways until the reader is compelled to buy into it if you’re going to accept the story at all. He often does this. Asserts a factitious mood of foreboding with absolutely no justification, just because he needs to concoct an atmosphere of menace which then underpins the flaky plot.
Dickson’s mind was a chaos of feelings, all of them unpleasant. He had run up against something which he violently, blindly detested, and the trouble was that he could not tell why. It was all perfectly absurd, for why on earth should an ugly house, some overgrown trees and a couple of ill-favoured servants so malignly affect him? Yet this was the fact; he had strayed out of Arcady into a sphere that filled him with revolt and a nameless fear. Never in his experience had he felt like this, this foolish childish panic which took all the colour and zest out of life.
And:
‘I called this place Paradise four hours ago,’ Heritage said. ‘So it is, but I fancy it is next door to Hell. There is something devilish going on inside that park wall and I mean to get to the bottom of it.’
Forced. Contrived.
Then several things happen which justify the accusation of outrageous coincidences. They hear footsteps as another officious porter or lodgemaster arrives and so begin to head away, but Heritage suddenly falls to his knees. He’s heard singing coming from the open window of the house and it is the voice of the beautiful Russian girl he met at the Spanish Steps!!!!! Of all the people in all the world, they just happen to bump into the very one Heritage was telling a story about 5 minutes earlier…
They hasten back to the nice cottage of Mrs Morran for tea where they spread out a map, with Heritage determined to go back, defy the gatekeepers and get into the house, when there’s a commotion as a dirty ragamuffin boy forces his way through to the parlour where he identifies himself to McCunn as…the very leader of the Gorbals wanna-be Boy Scouts who McCunn gave some money to as his last gesture before leaving the city. Quite a coincidence!
The Die-Hards are on some kind of outward bound, Boy Scout trip to the region, when they, also, had stumbled across the mysterious house and then been rebuffed by the rude gatekeepers, since when they’ve taken to staking out. So not only a coincidence that the boys McCunn gives charitable donations too just happen to have come to the exact same corner of Scotland as he has, but are staking out exactly the same house which he and Heritage have developed an interest in!
Apparently Buchan sub-titled the novel ‘A Glasgow fairy tale’ and he tells us straight out from the first that McCunn was looking for romance and adventure. The Russian princess is referred to three times as ‘a fairy tale princess’. And the characters themselves archly refer to being in an old fashioned romance:
‘You should be happy, Dogson,’ said the Poet. ‘Here we have all the materials for your blessed romance – old mansion, extinct family, village deserted of men and an innkeeper whom I suspect of being a villain.’
Long story short, these lads, known as the Gorbals Die-Hards and led by one Dougal Crombie, join forces with McCunn and Heritage. Through a series of convoluted complexities and a great deal of sneaking down the valley of the adjacent river, and crossing fords, and sneaking behind bushes and across lawns etc etc they eventually gain admittance to the house and discover it contains two Russian women, Saskia and her elderly cousin, Eugènie (first named on page 67). Saskia is, of course:
- tall – that he could tell, tall and slim and very young. (p.63)
- Dickson insisted on stripping off his trusty waterproof and forcing it on the Princess, on whose slim body it hung very loose and very short.
- the slim girl, into whose face the weather had whipped a glow like blossom
And:
Dickson’s first impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. (p.65)
And:
Again Dickson was reminded of a child, for her arms hung limp by her side; and her slim figure in its odd clothes was curiously like that of a boy in a school blazer. (p.70)
Right at the end of the story:
She is no more the tragic muse of the past week, but a laughing child again, full of snatches of song, her eyes bright with expectation. (p.206)
Later:
He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy’s. (p.137)
All the classiest women are slim. The best kind of women have the quality of children. But the absolute bestest women are actually boys.
The younger prettier one, Saskia, explains. They once belonged to one of the grandest families in Russia. When the revolution struck they formed part of the general resistance of their class. As the tide turned against them they were tasked with saving jewels belonging to the Russian royal family. These they smuggled out as far as France.
But here some thriller voodoo intervenes because Saskia emphasises that the criminal Bolsheviks have agents everywhere on the lookout for them and the jewels. When these agents closed in on them in France they fled to Scotland. Saskia had met a noble Scot named Quentin Kennedy who told her he owned a fined house where she would be welcome to stay, and gave her a letter of introduction to his ‘factor’, Loudon (p.69). But when she arrived in Scotland and came to the house she found herself imprisoned and guarded by the three men who Heritage, McCunn and the Die-Hards have seen patrolling the grounds.
Illogically, although her coming was anticipated, none of these bad guys intercepted her before she actually got to Huntingtower nor, since she arrived, have they searched or interrogated her to find the whereabouts of the jewels. Well, they asked her where the jewels were and she refused to tell them and these international terrorists left it at that! This simply doesn’t make sense and is typical of the yawning plot holes or lack of logic which lace Buchan’s ‘shockers’.
Saskia says her gaolers are awaiting the arrival of another man, their master, the leader of the conspiracy, who McCunn and Heritage nickname The Unknown.
Chapter 6
Well, they decide McCunn should take the jewels to his bank in Glasgow. This he does, although the episode is milked of as much paranoid thriller voodoo as possible, with a messenger from the besieged house racing after the horse and cart McCunn goes to the railway station in, the creepy inn-keeper Dobson who is clearly in on the conspiracy leaping onto the train and keeping tabs on him, and then the package which McCunn accidentally on purpose leaves exposed in a cab he’s hired, sure enough being stolen. As in The Power-House, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan is at pains to convey the sense of a vast invisible conspiracy with its tentacles in every city.
Anyway, the box the baddie steals from the cab was a decoy and McCunn gaily walks into the biggest bank in Glasgow to reveal that he has the princess’s precious jewels sown into his shirt and waistcoat, he cuts them free and puts them in a safety deposit box.
So, on the face of it, grocer supremo Dickson McCunn has done more than his fair share of helping a damsel in distress and ensuring that her treasure is safe. However, this is a thriller and we all want to know what happens back at Huntingtower and how the siege will play out, right?
And so Buchan gives his middle-aged grocer a crisis of conscience, making him pause as he catches a tram back to his town house and ask himself whether he isn’t running away precisely when his friends need him most etc (p.85). Maybe this is a plausible piece of plotting but it feels a lot like Buchan bending his character in order to reinvolve him with the entire convoluted plot to the end.
By the time he’s gotten off the tram he has come to the decision to go back into the valley of doom and help Heritage and the beautiful princess. However, being a practical businessman he takes practical steps. First of all he orders a huge hamper of luxury provisions which he will take with him to feed the allies (Heritage, the ladies, the Die-Hards).
Then he goes to see his Glasgow lawyer (Mr Caw of Paton and Linklater) to ask him to contact the firm in Edinburgh responsible for renting out Huntingtower. He makes as if he, the wealthy Glasgow businessman, wants to buy it and to warn the factor, Loudon, that he is on his way, today or tomorrow.
Then he goes to see Mr McNair a gunsmith who is a fellow elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. Unfortunately, the careful Scot says he can’t sell him a gun – but he can lend him a service pistol and 50 cartridges (p.88). Thus armed, McCunn hastens to catch the 7.33 from Glasgow to Kirkmichael.
Chapter 7
McCunn checks into the Salutation Hotel at Auchenlochan and sets off to visit the lawyer Loudon. Loudon gives him a thorough, intelligent summary of the state of Huntingtower and is readily willing that McCunn see it and buy it; he just reasonably insists that he needs to inform the owners, who live abroad, how about visiting sometime next week? He insists that nobody is allowed inside the building so is fazed when McCunn insists he saw some women in it. He then changes his story to tell some cock-and-bull yarn about a mad old relative of the family that’s being kept there – it’s she who will take a week or so to get out of the way before McCunn can visit. At this point McCunn realises Loudon is lying and is in on the conspiracy.
He doesn’t let on and instead says he’ll be returning to Glasgow by the late train, shakes hands and leaves. His suspicions are confirmed when he hangs around in the shadow on the other side of the street and see Dobson, the dodgy inn-keeper, slouch up and go round the side of Loudon’s house. They’re in on it together.
McCunn walks along the main road to Dalquharter and is accosted by one of the Die-Hards who takes him to their camp in the woods, very neatly done with a fire burning. Dougal tells him they’ve smuggled Heritage into the house again. McCunn tells Dougal to send some of the boys to the station to fetch the big hamper of food which has been delivered to the station. Dougal then introduces him to the rest of the ‘men’, being:
- Thomas Yownie, the chief of staff
- Peer Pairson
- Napoleon
- Wee Jaikie
- Auld Bull
Chapter 8
After this sojourn with the Die-Hards McCunn goes straight to Mrs Morran’s, checks in and falls fast asleep. At 1o the next morning Dobson pays a visit and is rudely officious, warning McCunn that he is not allowed to go near the house nor to walk along the coast. it degenerates into a shouting match with McCunn saying Dobson is obviously hiding something he doesn’t want other people to see and Dobson losing his temper, shouting abuse, banging his head on the lintel and falling down the stairs on his way out (p.107).
To be one the safe side, to forestall attack, McCunn persuades little Mrs Morran to accompany him along the main road to the bridge across the river where she turns to go home while he cuts down a track beside the river running to the sea. Maybe this is intended to be spooky, maybe it’s intended to be comic, but it comes over as bizarre.
After a great deal of unnecessary fuss and complication, McCunn crosses the river where it hits the beach under the guidance of Auld Bill and arrives at cliff tops beneath the house and has to be helped up them etc etc. All instead of just walking up to the house and pulling out the gun if any of the three guards try to stop him. There’s always a huge amount of sneaking over heather, and fording rivers, and clambering up cliffs in Buchan stories, rather than just knocking on the front door.
Chapter 9
Incomprehensibly, rather than just take the princess far far away, for example to Glasgow, the allies have decided to spirit her out of the main house and down to the old ruined watch tower in the grounds (!?). Having dumped equipment here, they all then sneak up to the house, across the verandah (pretty easily avoiding the supposed guards) and into the garden room.
Here he meets Heritage who tells him the latest news. Saskia has given more details about Mr Unknown, about the Mastermind behind her (not very effective) kidnap. He comes from a rich family but when the revolution broke out, threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He is a kind of evil genius, ‘none of your callow revolutionaries’.
A digression on antisemitism
Buchan, or his character, betrays the typical bourgeois or aristocratic belief that mere working class people couldn’t have overthrown an entire social order, couldn’t possibly win a war against armies led by aristocrats and bolstered by British and allied forces. Ghastly oiks couldn’t possibly do all that by themselves. This is one source of the popular stereotype that there must be mysterious powers behind the revolution, either renegade aristocrats (as here) or, much more perniciously, the Jews. According to the notes to this book there was an academic spat about whether Buchan was antisemitic or not, a long time ago, in the 1970s. Buchan may or may not have been but some of his characters certainly are. Here’s the view of the ‘fairy tale princess’ Saskia:
‘Our enemies were very clever, and soon the hunt was cried against me. They tried to rob me of [the jewels], but they failed, for I too had become clever. Then they asked the help of the law – first in Italy and then in France. Oh, it was subtly done. Respectable bourgeois, who hated the Bolsheviki but had bought long ago the bonds of my country, desired to be repaid their debts out of the property of the Russian Crown which might be found in the West. But behind them were the Jews, and behind the Jews our unsleeping enemies.’ (p.68)
And here’s Heritage, supposedly one of the good guys:
‘The place for you,’ said Dickson dryly, ‘is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.’
Mr. Heritage approved. ‘They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods – they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them – but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.’
Mind you, Heritage’s antisemitism lies alongside his ignorant support of the Bolsheviks, of which he is later completely cured. So possibly antisemitism is expressed by characters who are intended to be callow, naive and ignorant, and who eventually learn better. Maybe.
Anyway, the allies all conclude that the Big Bad Man is coming that very night. They continue into the house and deliver McCunn’s magnificent hamper of luxuries to the Russian ladies. Saskia is overwhelmed and gives McCunn a kiss. This transports him to seventh heaven, a moment familiar from a million movies where the glamorous young heroine gives the middle-aged old hero’s assistant a kiss and transports him back to his youth!
Heritage has a plan. They’re inside the house now. Rather than go outside to engage in battle he plans to lure the three guards inside and lock them up. And using the Die-Hards, this is exactly what they do, wait for the guards to enter, then turn the lights off and lure them via noises or mutterings or distant lamps into three separate cellars or rooms where they can be locked tight. But not before one of them, the one called Léon, bumps into McCunn and, mistaking him for Dobson, shares the news that the Unknown is arriving at dawn aboard a Danish brig. When the bad guy realises it’s not Dobson he’s talking to there’s a mad scuffle in which Heritage gets knocked to the stone floor and knocked unconscious. At which point half a dozen Die-Hards jump on him, disarm him and bundle him into a cupboard which they lock.
All the good guys emerge onto the verandah, along with provisions, waterproofs and whatnot. There’s a banging of pots at the other end and McCunn sees a figure against a glass door. In that moment McCunnis convinced that this must be the Fourth Man they are all waiting for and pulls out the loaded pistol he was lent by Mr McNair and fires. He wings the figure who spins and disappears into the house. but something about the way he moved makes McCunn realise it is Loudon the factor (p.125).
Now, I was genuinely shocked by this. McCunn, up until now a figure of fun, is ready to shoot dead someone whose identity he can’t even make out in the dark. He’s as bad as the Bolsheviks.
Chapter 10
Inexplicably, rather than heading inland and getting as far away from the coast where the boat full of baddies is about to arrive, heading, for example, to the bloody train station, catching a train to Glasgow, reporting everything to the police and putting Saskia under diplomatic protection, the Allies decide instead to hole up in the ruined tower stop the cliffs. Here they Heritage comes round from his concussion, and they have another long debate about their plight.
Here something emerges into the full light which I hadn’t noticed previously which is somewhere along the line, Saskia had told them that she had been told to wait at Huntingtower for ‘her friend’. McCunn makes the super-sensible point that they should get to safety then send this ‘friend’ a message. Saskia obstinately refuses to leave (p.130). This is just stupid and feels like a contrivance to drag out the already thin and creaking plot.
Now McCunn comes up with a hare-brained scheme. Coming into the village several times he’s noticed a big white house (i.e. country house) on a hill. Why doesn’t he go there and try to recruit the laird and his people? He’ll need some evidence or they’ll think him mad, so he says he’ll take Saskia and, improbably, she agrees to go. Meanwhile, they’ll take Eugenie to Mrs Morran’s where she can be put to bed in a nice warm bed. (Good grief, do they think a gang of international terrorists aren’t capable of storming a little old lady’s b&b?)
So first McCunn accompanies both women through gathering rain and wet grass and grounds and along the empty road to Mrs Morran’s cottage. Here the old lady, with the instinctive reverence for aristocracy which conservatives like Buchan like to believe hide in the hearts of every peasant, curtseys to the princess. Then she tells McCunn to go stay in the attic room while the strips, dries and dresses both ladies in good solid highland clothes. McCunn is astonished in the change in Saskia’s appearance once she is wearing:
a heavy tweed skirt cut very short, and thick homespun stockings, which had been made for someone with larger feet than hers. A pair of the coarse low-heeled shoes, which country folk wear in the farmyard, stood warming by the hearth. She still had her russet jumper, but round her neck hung a grey wool scarf, of the kind known as a ‘comforter’. (p.135)
Mrs Morran then makes them a fine breakfast with hot tea as if they had all the time in the world. Eugènie is put to bed and McCunn and Saskia, covered in waterproofs, set off into the rain again, and there is a typically tortuous description of the elaborate route via roads, tracks, heather, moorland and whatnot till they get to the front door of the big house on the hill overlooking the railway station. (Get on a train at the railway station and hie to Glasgow, maybe then to London and complete safety? No.)
Mrs Morran had told McCunn over breakfast that this house belonged to the dashing hero Sir Archibald Roylance, one of Buchan’s recurring characters. The one-armed butler shows them into Roylance who is lounging in a chair bored, reading a book. As McCunn tells him the story, he leaps out of the chair exclaiming, in an impeccably posh dropped h, that ‘It’s more absurd than this shocker I’ve been readin’.’
Chapter 11
Astonished at the turn of events, Roylance bows to the princess and then they converse. He confirms that he was one of Quentin Kennedy’s best friends, they went to the same school together etc. Saskia tells him her story but Buchan says explicitly that she gives more detail now that she is talking to someone of her own class. In particular, she identifies the Great Unknown as a Russian man named Paul Abreskov.
Once he’s heard the full story, Roylance declares he’ll take Saskia to the local head of police and then bring her back here where he can defend her. But Saskia obstinately insists that she return to the hunting tower, to meet with her friend and to support Heritage and the Die-Hards who are fighting on her behalf.
When McCunn expresses his wish to get back in the fight, too, Roylance is inspired to join them. Unfortunately every single member of his staff, including himself, was wounded or crippled in the war. So McCunn tells Roylance to take Saskia to see the cops while he borrows his bicycle to get back to the house. But on the way his bike has a stick through the spokes which sends him flying and knocked unconscious, by two mercenaries paid by Dobson to get him.
Out for a walk, Mrs Morran comes across McMunn’s hat, sees a scuffle took place in the roadside mud, finds the bicycle hidden in bushes and concludes that McMunn has been captured. On the road back she comes across Wee Jaikie and tells him to sound the alarm (p.149).
Chapter 12
When McCunn comes round he’s tied to a tree. He has a couple of pages of regretting ever getting caught up in ‘romance’ and adventures (‘He did not want to die’ etc) before Wee Jaikie appears and cuts most of his bonds but is interrupted by the return of his capturers. These loiter just long enough to taunt him for being captured and sharing with the reader the vital information that the Danish brig has arrived and anchored and the baddies will be landing in half an hour. Then they move off, allowing Wee Jaikie to return and finish cutting McCunn free.
McCunn staggers back up to the public highway and encounters a man squatting down and repairing his motorcycle. He is a handsome young man who McCunn recognises as the man with the Australian accent he met at the Black Bull inn way back at the start of the story. Now the thing is that, during one of the many conversations between McCunn and Heritage about the mysterious Unknown Man who Saskia has told them she’s terribly afraid of, the mastermind of the kidnappers etc, our guys had decided it must be this Australian fellow. So the chap has barely looked up from his tinkering with his bike before McCunn grabs a spanner and takes a wild swing at him. Luckily the man ducks and then stands and punches McCunn, knocking the older man flat.
After some moments of understandable confusion, the man reveals that, far from being the Enemy, he is in fact The Friend who Saskia keeps going on about, the one she promised she’d meet here, the meeting which is her excuse for not doing the sensible thing and catching a train to Glasgow.
He introduces himself as going by the name of Alexander Nicholson but his real name is, of course, Russian, being Alexis Nicolaevitch. He quickly gives his backstory i.e. he left Russia before the war and emigrated to Australia, went back when war broke out, and when Russia signed its ceasefire made his way to join Australians fighting on the western front, and so found himself in Paris after the war.
And, of course, he is not just a ‘friend’ but the fiancé of the beautiful princess (‘She is my kinswoman. She is also my affianced wife’ p.159). He is, in fact, the fairy prince. And of course, desperately interested when McCunn reveals that he, McCunn, knows where the princess is and has been helping her.
So he helps McCunn onto the back of the bike and they set off towards the village but are almost immediately intercepted by Dougal, head of the Die-Hards. He tells the two men that the enemy ships have arrived, three boatloads of 23 or 24 men.
As usual with Buchan the situation feels needlessly complicated. Dougal tells them the enemy are on their way to besiege the tower. Heritage and some of the boys are inside and will put up a stiff fight. But when Lord Roylance returned with Saskia, Dougal insisted on putting them up in the house, allowing the enemy to think they’re in the tower, while they remain safe and at large (why oh why don’t they head away from the blasted enemy?).
Apparently, Roylance and Saskia got to meet the chief constable who believed their story but said it would take a while to rouse his men (really?) so there’ll be no help from that quarter for a while (really? when the country is being invaded by foreign nationals?)
Chapter 13
Cut to John Heritage holed up in the old tower and barely believing that an enlightened modern man could be caught up in an adventure out of romance. He’s alone in the tower but a) notifies the guards (who have managed to get out of their locked rooms in the main house) by shouting at them from the windows, b) and convinces them the princess is with them by waving skirts around and mimicking conversations in French for the guards’ benefit.
Dawn comes up and the morning passes and then the afternoon with nothing much happening except Heritage becoming more and more anxious. He fondly imagines the police, tipped off by Roylance, will arrive any moment and capture the whole pack of enemies. It gets chilly and in a typically waspish incident, Buchan has the one-time poet tear up his own slim volume of verse in order to feed the fire in the tower. You see, once a young man has tasted ‘action’ all his poetic vapourings, as well as his foolish left-wing tendencies, will evaporate.
Finally something happens which is a whole crowd of wet-looking rough sailors arrive and form a siege party. A posh man yells up at him to let them in, but Heritage stoutly refuses. He has been charged with defending the tower and he will stay to the end. When several try the door he shoots. Then they get a battering ram and pound the door again, and he shoots through a crack in the masonry and hits someone. Finally he sees something lob a bomb at the door which explodes in a great crash of timber and he hears the mob pouring into the ground floor of the tower. So Heritage retreats up the stairs to the topmost parapet and prepares to sell his life dear.
But at that moment he sees a white figure come running from the house and with horror realises it is the princess who he thought was miles away. She’s obviously seen the mob besiege and then storm the tower where a brave man is prepared to give his life for her. And so she runs down to within earshot of the mob and harangues them in Russian, then turns and runs off. The enemy forget all about Heritage, pour back out of the tower and set off in pursuit of the girl.
So really, Heritage’s occupation of the tower for most of the day had absolutely no practical value because it didn’t allow the princess to go anywhere, in fact the opposite, as soon as it began to fall she rushed within sight of her enemies. Like so much in Buchan it’s quite exciting and action-packed so long as you don’t actually think about its plausibility.
Chapter 14
Back to Dougal when Sir Archie arrives along with Sime the butler, Carfrae the chauffeur, and McGuffog the gamekeeper, and an armful of guns and two big cartridge-magazines. There is a typically long-winded debate about what to do: Roylance is for going to join Heritage in the tower, but Dougal objects that they would then be presenting themselves as sitting ducks. Dougal; counter-suggests that the ten or so of them go down to the beach heavily armed and fire on the sailors when they try to land, killing many of them. Roylance says that is illegal in a law-abiding country, and so they find themselves pushed back into the strategy of reoccupying the house and withstanding a siege. Innumerable details of how they barricade every door and window, Roylance all the time worried in case the whole thing is a mistake and they get in bad trouble with the law.
Eventually they see the figures coming from the seaward end of the house’s lawns and making for the tower. Panic stations. They hear the shots Heritage fired and then the explosion of the bomb. Saskia is wound up into a fever of concern and suddenly tells Roylance she’s going to save Heritage, wriggles through one of the blocked doors and is gone.
As we saw through Heritage’s eyes, she breasts a ridge and shouts at the attackers who promptly leave the tower to chase her. We see the breathless pursuit through Roylance’s eyes, who shoots the lead enemy who is getting within yards of the tiring girl in the leg. She reaches the ladder up the steep wall to the veranda as the leaders of mob close in but then suddenly a tall man emerges from nowhere, picks her up and forces her up the ladder our boys had leaned against the wall and turns to face the mob, addressing them in Russian. It is, of course, Alexis the fairy prince.
He harangues the mob then turns, races up the ladder, drawing it up after him, and through a part-open door into the house which is quickly barricaded. Saskia recognises her Alesha and runs into his arms. Our chaps hurriedly deploy their forces and then the whole thing turns into the defence of the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift, as the enemy try to break through various doors or windows only to meet fierce resistance.
Despite valiant fighting our team are forced to make an orderly retreat to the first floor landing. Suddenly out of the mob of sailors steps the elegant figure of Paul Abreskov, former lover of Saskia and now Bolshevik leader. In impeccable English he politely says the fight is now over and asks Saskia to come with him.
Obviously Saskia defies him, backed up by Roylance. Suddenly the mood in the mob at the bottom of the stairs changes. Messengers come from outside and they start to waver. Paul makes another plea as Dobson re-enters and tells him they must go now, the police have arrived, they’ll all be arrested. Then an evil look comes into Paul’s eye and he says if he can’t have Saskia, no-one can have her, and he reaches into his pocket, they hear a click and his hand comes out ready to throw.
At that second a figure comes out of nowhere, grabs Paul’s hand and makes a throw into the corner. The bomb Paul meant to throw at our team goes off with a terrific bang, blowing a hole through the fireplace into the next room. When the smoke clears their saviour is revealed to be Heritage, come from the tower, and Paul, like all the attackers, has gone.
Heritage announces that the police have just this moment arrived. Then who the devil was worrying the mob so for the previous ten minutes? At which one of the Die-Hards enters the room, wet and torn and scratched and bleeding, to be greeted by his chief, Dougal. Yes it was the Gorbals Die-Hards who saved the day!
Chapter 15
Goes back in time a few hours to tell things from McCunn’s point of view. Having escaped from being tied up, and mistakenly hitting out at Alexis, he had let the fairy prince and the Die-Hard zoom off on their motorbike and walked to Mrs Morran’s. Here he discovered was the command post of Thomas Yownie. He, the other Die-Hards and especially Mrs Morran are very concerned for nice Mr Heritage. First they hear the bomb go off which blows in the tower door, then Napoleon bursts in to report that he’s seen at least 27 baddies swarming up from the beach. At which point Yownie has a brainwave. Dobson is a lead figure in the opposition and he has a mortal fear of the police. Now night has fallen it is very dark so…why don’t the Die-Hards pretend to be the police?
And that’s what they do in a great comic set-piece which Buchan emphasises by adopting the tones of a military historian or, even better, a bard singing of the deeds of heroes. So he describes how the five or so boys dispose themselves around the building, blowing their police whistles from near and far, engaging in threatening conversations about how many of the mob had been captured, a constable informing his superior that the boats have been seized, Loudon is taken and so on, sowing doubt and fear into their listeners, especially Dobson who keeps rushing into the house to tell the irritated Paul that their cause is lost and they must flee.
There’s then a tense description of how Heritage escaped from the burning tower which was more fraught and dangerous than you’d think since he tried climbing down the outside only to find a great hole blocked his way and had to climb back up to the attic room and fight his way down the red hot stairs where he picked up burns and set his clothes alight before finally making it out into the cool wet heather.
Meanwhile McCunn and Mrs Morran listened to the effective cries of the Die-Hards and then witnessed the arrival of the actual police, some mounted on horses, who gave chase to the fleeing baddies. In the bay two boats are riding and pitching in heavy seas but the third is still ashore waiting for someone. McCunn and Napoleon realise it must be the enemy mastermind and then he’s upon them, rushing through the dark across the grass. Both McCunn and Napoleon try to tackle him, the boy being thrown off and McCunn being shot at at close range, but both fail to stop him and the agile young Russian leaps into the third boat, which quickly casts off.
But the storm is blowing up and the Atlantic breakers growing with each passing minute. From his vantage point ashore McCunn watches the three ships, one by one, founder and sink. Next day the dead bodies are washed ashore.
Chapter 16
Which ties up the loose ends. It’s only a week since McCunn set off on his merry ramble through the countryside but what a week! Now the storm has blown itself out and spring has arrived and the house, which seemed so threatening under lowering skies, now seems handsome set amid beautiful gardens.
1. The affair is hushed up. The police are leaned on by a superior not to make a report. The coroner gives death by drowning of unknown sailors to the baddies. Loudon is found dead at the foot of the cliff and the papers give him a glowing obituary as a sound member of the community (cf the glowing obituary given to Andrew Lumley who everyone thinks is a leading light of the community and only a handful know is the leader of a wicked international conspiracy in The Power-House).
Anyway, this is a fairy tale so all the goodies live happily ever after. 2. Some of the Russkies survive the storm and Alexis, in fine aristocratic style, forgives them and pays their passages to British Dominions where they can start new lives.
3. Saskia and Alexis walk hand and hand on the sunny greensward with their lives ahead of them.
4. Dickson and Heritage can see the lovers from where they’re sitting. Dickson is worried that Heritage will be devastated that Saskia, who he was in love with, is affianced to another man. But on the contrary, Heritage has the true gallant knight’s happiness that he served a beautiful princess. And he goes on to deliver an Author’s Message:
‘The trouble about you, Dogson,’ says Heritage, ‘is that you’re a bit of an anarchist. All you false romantics are. You don’t see the extraordinary beauty of the conventions which time has consecrated. You always want novelty, you know, and the novel is usually the ugly and rarely the true. I am for romance, but upon the old, noble classic lines.’ (p.207)
Which reminds me of the huge biography of Lord Salisbury I read a year ago, a lifelong arch-conservative whose philosophy was summed up in a pithy quote:
Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.
If you are convinced that change, any change, is for the worst, then of course you will try your damnedest to prevent any change and conserve things just the way they are. And that is the conservative mindset.
5. Dickson wanders on and looks down on the camp of the Die-Hards who are camping in the house’s empty grounds. He reflects on how few chances they’ve had in life and decides he will adopt them as his wards, house and clothe and feed them and pay for their educations.
6. Throughout the tumultuous week McCunn’s wife, referred to only as ‘Mamma’, has been away at a spa. Now she returns home to find her husband looking tanned and with a few cuts and bruises. He seats her by the fire and treats her to some of their maid’s scones. Then McCunn ends the novel by taking out and giving to her a beautiful necklet of emeralds. It is, of course, a gift from the grateful Saskia and Mamma is delighted.
Thoughts
I watch too many movies for my own good. The thing about American films is how smoothly (by and large) they are plotted and how swift the action is. By complete contrast, Buchan’s shockers come from another era, when readers (apparently) enjoyed rickety plots and an extreme amount of circumstantial detail.
The descriptions of McCunn or Heritage or one or other of the Die-Hards creeping through heather, hiding in bushes, fording the river, sneaking across the lawn, doubling back on this road, that track, this path, that bit of beach or wood or orchard or whatnot, initially add atmosphere but eventually become very wearing.
Arguably, these long, long descriptions of the scenery the various protagonists traipse or creep or hurry through is a central characteristic of Buchan’s novels. All the kind of thing which would be immediately dropped if American scriptwriters got their hand on the plot, stripped out the persiflage and made it simpler and more coherent.
The comic climax, with the Die-Hards running round pretending to be the police, entirely makes sense, in its own terms, as a comic scene in a comic novel. But plenty of the other scenes – for example the immense fuss surrounding McCunn’s train trip to Glasgow with the princess’s jewels – feel clunky and over-detailed.
The basic premise, of a Russian princess bearing priceless jewels hiding in a remote Scottish house make reasonable sense and you can imagine it being the workable premise of a movie or TV series – but almost everything else about the story (starting with how she is imprisoned but her captives make barely any efforts to ask where she’s hidden them) would have to be radically rethought to achieve something like grown-up plausibility.
The rejuvenating effect of adventure stories
It’s a recurring theme in the six Buchan novels I’ve just read, that adventures make you young again.
But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. ‘I haven’t been doing badly for an old man,’ he reflected with glee. What, oh, what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a Bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor’s and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairy-tale Princess. I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many more in the same line. ‘Gosh, but I’m seeing life,’ was his unregenerate conclusion. (p.133)
But not just McCunn:
Sir Archie was never very clear afterwards about the events of the next hour. The Princess was in the maddest spirits, as if the burden of three years had slipped from her and she was back in her first girlhood. (p.183)
When I mentioned this to a friend she pointed out that it’s not just the character who is rejuvenated by these boyish adventures, it is the reader, too, who feels young again. The rejuvenation of the character in the text mimics or echoes the juvenilisation of anybody who reads what is, in effect, an adventure story for children.
And this is because, in this type of adventure yarn, we the readers know beyond any doubt that the good guys will win – and, indeed, that there are clearly identified good guys and bad guys. (Almost as simple-minded as US foreign policy.) There is a reassuring, comforting predictability about these ‘shockers’ so that immersing yourself means that all the complexities of adult life not only fall away from the characters, but from the reader as well.
After that Dickson leaves him [Heritage] and wanders among the thickets on the edge of the Huntingtower policies above the Laver glen. He feels childishly happy, wonderfully young, and at the same time supernaturally wise. (p.208)
And, of course, the stars of the story are a group of slum children, ranging from teenage years to toddlers. It is a child’s adventure story which features a gang of spunky kids, themselves readily envisionable as cartoon characters.
The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, currently on display at Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace at the Photographers’ Gallery until 2 June 2024
The character of Russia
‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘I cannot make any one understand – except a Russian. My country has been broken to pieces, and there is no law in it; therefore it is a nursery of crime … My people are not wickeder than others, but for the moment they are sick and have no strength … Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilising everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. Today that is true about criminals… It is not Bolshevism, the theory, you need fear, for that is a weak and dying thing. It is crime, which to-day finds its seat in my country…’ (p.142)
Exactly a hundred years later I’m listening to current affairs programmes which countenance the idea that Russia might trigger a third world war, while Putin’s security state works day and night to undermine the economies, infrastructure and culture of the West. So plus ça change…
In praise of the middle classes
In contrast with a Russia that has been run by proletarians, commissars, a communist tyranny, and now oligarchs and yet another dictator, Buchan has his character Alesha, the exiled Russian aristocrat, deliver a paean to the value of the British middle classes, which is also a tribute to the unflappable nature of the book’s hero, Dickson McCunn:
‘You will not find him in Russia. He is what we call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.’ (p.206)
1977 BBC Scotland dramatisation
Credit
Huntingtower by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1922. References are to the 2008 World Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 