‘I need a rest. I’ve been pretty busy all my days and I’m tired.’
(Sir Edward Leithen setting the tone of Sick Heart River, page 2)

‘Every man’s got to skin his own skunk.’
(Wise words from Indian guide Johnny Frizel, p.90)

This is the final one in the series of five novels Buchan wrote featuring the fictional barrister and Tory MP, Sir Edward Leithen. It was also Buchan’s last book, completed only a few days before he died on 11 February 1940 and published posthumously.

Leithen is dying

It opens with a sequence that immediately feels better than anything in the previous four books, with an extended passage showing a tired and ill Leithen winding down his work at his barristers’ chambers and as an MP at the House of Commons. He says goodbye to his faithful clerk of 30 years in the chambers and to the Tory whip in the Commons. Why? He has for some years felt increasingly exhausted, with symptoms like night sweats, waking as tired as he went to bed, and so on. Finally he goes to see the eminent doctor, Acton Croke (Buchan is really bad at making up names, in my opinion – they’re neither plausibly realistic, nor comically exaggerated. They just feel bad.)

Anyway, this Acton Croke tells him he has tuberculosis, probably a long-term consequence of the gassing he experienced in the First World War, and that he has only a year to live, give or take. The passage where he walks back to his old rooms in Down Street W1, letting memories flood back into his consciousness – the winter funeral of Queen Victoria, the hot hectic days of August 1914, his love of the different smells of the different London seasons – all this is worth reading by itself. I thought for a moment that Buchan was going to let his guard down and really let us into a character’s soul, really break through to engage the reader, with real depth and emotion. These ten or fifteen pages suggest what a considerably more powerful writer Buchan might have been if he’d really let down his guard, and shared, instead of being so punctilious and tightly wrapped in all his fiction.

Leithen and ‘society’

Alas, he is not that type of man or writer. Other people intrude into Leithen’s musings and, with their advent the character, and the narrator, close up, button up, seize up, return to being the tightly-wrapped, stiff-upper-lip, impeccably well-mannered Calvinist Scotsman of all the other novels.

Maybe my problem with reading the Leithen novels has been not so much that he’s a snob (though he is) so much as that his consciousness remains so highly socialised, so polite and well mannered, stuck on the level of the high-toned society he moves in. What I’m trying to express is that his characters not only mix in the highest circles but almost entirely function at a highly socialised level: they think about everything in terms of country house parties, hunting, shooting and fishing parties, dinner parties and luncheons, and the matrix of society figures they all meet there. Their conversation is all about each other. None of them has anything to say about ideas, or art or theatre or music. They like the same things their Victorian parents liked, and hate the new Jazz Age of the 1920s with its barbaric music, its over-made up women, and the ridiculous younger generation with its upstart ideas.

Blenkiron’s commission

Anyway, the very affecting first 10 or 15 pages of wistful reminiscence are quickly crushed when Leithen is paid a visit by a wealthy American from his social set, one John S. Blenkiron (a figure who appears in several Buchan novels). He’s heard about Blenkiron chap from two of his best friends, Sandy Arbuthnot and Richard Hannay. (It came as a shock to me to learn that Leithen knows Hannay and Arbuthnot, the two lead characters in his other great series of novels focusing on Hannay. I’m sure this is the first time in the Leithen series that either name has been mentioned.)

This meeting straightaway plunges us back into the world of extended posh families, contacts and connections. Blenkiron thinks Leithen knows his niece, Barbara (he does). Well, he’s come about her younger sister, Felicity.

‘Babs has a sister, Felicity – I guess you don’t know her, but she’s something of a person on our side of the water. Two years younger than Babs, and married to a man you’ve maybe heard of, Francis Galliard, one of old Simon Ravelston’s partners. Young Galliard’s gotten a great name in the city of New York, and Felicity and he looked like being a happy pair.’ (p.14)

In a nutshell, this promising young chap, Francis Galliard, has done a bunk. Left a note for his wife saying he felt unwell, and disappeared without a trace. Been weeks now. Poor Francis is worried sick. Well, Sir Edward, Dick and Sandy sort of suggested that you might be the fellow who can track young Francis down. Willing to give it a shot?

Finding Francis

Leithen says yes. And that’s what the rest of the novel will be about, Sir Edward Leithen on the trail of the mysteriously vanished young man.

Why? Because Leithen had spent some soulful days wondering what a man should do with his last year of life. Travel the world? Go to India, Africa? He thinks about the ill-fated Greek island he visited (an adventure recounted in The Dancing Floor) no, not there. Then into his mind drifts a memory of the time he was trekking in Canada and came across a highland meadow with a stream running through it. It struck him as paradise. And so the key fact about young Francis Galliard, as explained by Blenkiron, is that, although he has become a naturalised American and was living in New York with his wife, he is of Canadian origin, and has almost certainly done a bunk back to his native land.

So the Quest for Francis Galliard immediately solves Leithen’s dilemma: here is somewhere to go for a reason; instead of just mooning around and feeling sorry for himself, he will have a job and not just for money – he doesn’t need money any more – but to help people, to serve, to live a socially useful honourable life right up to the end. As he later explains to Johnny the guide:

‘Is Galliard your best pal?’ ‘I scarcely know him. But I have taken on the job to please a friend, and I must make a success of it. I want to die on my feet, if you see what I mean.’ (p.61)

New York

And that’s what the remaining 170 pages of the novel describe. Leithen flies to New York. He, inevitably, attends a dinner party at which everyone is amazingly eminent and successful (top bankers, world’s leading classical scholar etc etc), hosted by Simon and Mrs Ravelston, formerly US ambassador to Great Britain. He begins to learn about Galliard which, as so often in the Leithen novels, is little about him as a personality, as such, and everything to do with his relationships with others, his place in society: ‘I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota with George Lethaby, and he’s a trustee of Walter Derwent’s Polar Institute’

In a private members club overlooking the East River, he meets with the eminent financier Bronson Jane (see what I mean about terrible names?) who gives him a detailed profile of Galliard and ‘his people’. These turn out to be French Canadian from Quebec, originally spelling their name Gaillard. We learn that Galliard came from a farming background but had a gift for finance, was partner in a bank at 35 and now, aged 43, is one of the top five financiers in America.

At the same club Leithen is introduced to Clifford Savory (‘There were few men alive who were his equals in classical scholarship’) who adds his ha’pennyworth about Galliard and the culture of the French Canadians.

Then he meets the abandoned wife, Felicity Galliard, slim (like all the eligible or admirable women in Buchan), wealthy, urbane, worried sick. She shows him Galliard’s goodbye note:

‘Dearest, I am sick – very sick in mind. I am going away. When I am cured I will come back to you. All my love.’ (p.29)

Leithen begins to have the sense that Galliard felt cabined and confined, that he needed to escape all this perfection and high expectation.Then he is introduced to Walter Derwent, a scientist who runs a Polar Institute. Galliard was his treasurer. (As this series of interviews progressed, it began to feel a bit like a detective novel, with Leithen gently quizzing a whole series of suspects.) Derwent tells him that Francis contacted him a few months back asking if he could recommend a guide to the Canadian wilderness, and Derwent did: a ‘half-breed’ (are we allowed to say that any more? is the correct term ‘mixed race?’) named Lew Frizel (‘His mother was a Cree Indian and his father one of the old-time Hudson’s Bay factors’). The implication is that Francis hired Lew as a guide to the bush, the outback, the wild North of Canada and they’ve headed off somewhere.

Handily, this guide has a brother, Johnny Frizel, and Derwent has already reached out to him to see if he can come back east to help Leithen track down Francis (p.34).

Leithen then goes to the offices of Ravelston’s, the bank where Francis had risen to executive level. Here he interviews Francis’s assistant who tells him the missing man had called for papers about the Glaubstein pulp mill which had recently been built at a place called Chateau-Gaillard which, as the name suggests, is deep in the ancestral land which has belonged to various members of the Gaillard family for centuries. Aha. That’s the place to start, then.

Canada

So it is that Leithen takes a steamer up the East Coast, beyond the American border, along the St Lawrence Waterway and disembarks at the pulp paper town of Chateau-Gaillard, a scrappy, ugly, industrial place. He has hired the guide, Johnny Frizel, brother of Lew (physical description [short] p.42).

They drive out of town, up into the hills to a valley, which a local tells them is called Clairefontaine. Suddenly they come across the very spot, the very same beauty spot whose memory had floated into Leithen’s mind back in London in those early pages of reminiscence. Now, he is horrified to discover that it’s been ruined.

The valley above the township was an ugly sight. The hillsides had been lumbered out and only scrub was left, and the shutes where the logs had been brought down were already tawny with young brushwood. In the bottom was a dam, which had stretched well up the slopes, for the lower scrub was bleached and muddied with water. But the sluices had been opened and the dam had shrunk to a few hundred yards in width, leaving the near hillsides a hideous waste of slime, the colour of a slag-heap. The place was like the environs of a town in the English Black Country. (p.38)

They continue their journey higher into the hills, to the village of Clairefontaine where they are shown hospitality by the kindly Catholic priest. The Gaillard land has been inherited by an uncle of Francis’s who turns out to be a 60-year-old drunk (p.44). Frizel gets put up with the drunk while Leithen stays with hospitable Father Paradis (p.43).

The priest gives him an extended briefing on the ancient Gaillard family which owned all the land hereabouts, the vagaries of various fathers, uncles, errant sons and so on. Buchan’s stories are always very, very heavily conceived around families. They are like his units of meaning, the concepts of ‘families’ and ‘races’ underpin Buchanworld.

Next morning Johnny tells Leithen that the drunk uncle Gaillard told him that (Johnny’s) brother, Lew, had been there recently. Between them they speculate that Francis came here, to the ancestral land, was disappointed by what he found, and for unknown reasons decided to head further north, towards Ghost River.

The chains of race and tradition are ill to undo, and Galliard, in his brilliant advance to success, had loosened, not broken them. Something had happened to tighten them again. The pull of an older world had jerked him out of his niche. But how? And whither? (p.38)

Leithen goes back to Montreal and hires a plane and a pilot, Job Teviot (p.49). They fly over awesome Canadian scenery which is lyrically described, across the Great Slave Lake and ‘the Barrens, then land at Dog-Rib river to spend the night in a tent. Up and flying further north next day, landing at a place called Little Fish, where Johnny finds a white man with two Indians camped a bit further up the river. Leithen goes for a chat.

The white man is a New Yorker, Taverner, who has, of course, visited England, London, sat in the House of Commons visitors gallery and watched Leithen make a speech! It’s a small world, Buchan’s world. Moreover, this chap happens to be a cousin of the financier Bronson Jane and so, when Leithen mentions Francis Galliard, yes, he’s heard of him! Smaller than small world. Microscopic world. His main role in the book is to deliver a long speech criticising his own country, presumably venting some of Buchan’s (negative) opinions:

‘I’m saying nothing against my country. I know it’s the greatest on earth. But my God! I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me there isn’t one section of society that hasn’t got some kind of jitters—big business, little business, politicians, the newspaper men, even the college professors. We can’t talk except too loud. We’re bitten by the exhibitionist bug. We’re all boosters and high-powered salesmen and propagandists, and yet we don’t know what we want to propagand, for we haven’t got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really the movies. We’re one big movie show. And just as in the movies we worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny. Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.’ (p.53)

The Quest

Slowly the narrative changes from just looking for some guy into something more driven, into a quest, into a manhunt.

Leithen and Johnny fly down to the Ghost River Delta and camp on the shore. Leithen is appalled by what a vast bleak emptiness it is. He thought the Arctic would be cold and bracing but pure and clean and healing, whereas this is a desolate landscape of mud and gravel, abandoned by the Demiurge who made the world, who gave up and walked away (p.55).

To their surprise there’s a schooner anchored on the muddy shore, with a Danish captain, for conversation and some supplies. They find an Eskimo cemetery and here Johnny recognises the mark of his brother, Lew. Lew had very recently carved his own distinctive version of the Saint Andrew cross onto two crosses made of driftwood which appear to commemorate members of the Gaillard family (p.57). Father Paradis had mentioned that one of Francis’s uncles, named Aristide, had left the meadows behind to go exploring North. Looks like this is where he ended up dying. Still, extraordinary coincidence that in all this vast waste, Leithen and Johnny happen across the tiny cemetery where Aristide happens to be buried AND that Lew has been helpful enough to do a bit of whittling on the grave markers.

So many of Buchan’s plots are like this – they make a sort of sense as you read them through but, if you stop to think for even a moment, they don’t quite hang together, are inexplicable. ‘Contrived’ doesn’t adequately convey their factitiousness (meaning: ‘1. formed by or adapted to an artificial or conventional standard 2. produced by special effort 3. sham.’)

Johnny slowly reveals that his brother Lew is sort of mad, a creature of mad enthusiasms. He asks if Leithen has ever heard of Sick Heart River? It’s a kind of Eldorado or Shangri-la, a fabled territory deep in the mountains which nobody quite knows how to access. Lew saw it once, on some hunting trip ten years ago, and was mesmerised by it and its inaccessibility.

‘Which watershed is it on?’ Leithen asked.
‘That’s what no man knows. Not on the South Nahanni’s. And you can’t get into it from the Yukon side, by the Pelly or the Peel or the Ross or Macmillan – Lew tried ’em all.’ (p.60)

That, with not much evidence, is where Johnny tells Leithen he thinks his brother is heading. Here’s his precise reasoning:

‘I don’t think, but I suspicion. See here, mister. Lew’s a strong character and mighty set on what he wants. He’s also a bit mad, and mad folks have persuasive ways with them. He finds this Galliard man keen to get into the wilds, and the natural thing is that he persuades him to go to his particular wilds, which he hasn’t had out of his mind for ten years.’ (p.60)

So the story started off being about Leithen looking for Galliard but it slowly morphs into being more about mad Lew Frizer, the obsessive backwoods guide.

Fort Bannerman

Weather conditions are getting bad, with fogs and rain. It is several days before they make it to the jumping off point for Sick Heart River, Fort Bannerman on the Mackenzie River (p.62). The inhabitants of this wretched spot are the Hudson’s Bay postmaster, two Oblate Brothers, a fur trader, a trapper in for supplies, and several Indians. It stinks of rotting food.

Johnny sets about buying up the equipment needed for a major expedition, being a thirty-foot boat with an outboard motor and a couple of canoes; clothes consisting of parkas and fur-lined jerkins, leather breeches and lined boots; gloves and flapped caps, blankets and duffel bags; dog packs to carry everything in and a light tent; a couple of shotguns and a couple of rifles and ammunition. Food, consisting of bacon and beans and flour, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, and a fancy assortment of tinned stuffs, plus a folding tin stove to cook it on. And they hire two of the local Hare Indians as porters and guides (p.64).

The plan is to head up the river against the current to find this Sick Heart River area, on the assumption that this is where mad Lew the guide is leading Francis Galliard.

During their stay at the Fort, as is his wont, Leithen discovers links between the people he’s meeting and his network of people and values. Turns out that one of the Oblate Brothers had served in a French battalion which had been on the right of Leithen’s regiment, the Guards, at the Battle of Loos, so they spend time together talking about the Great War. Meanwhile, Father Duplessis was from Picardy and Leithen had once been billeted in the shabby flat-chested chateau near Montreuil where his family had dwelt since the days of Henri Quatre.

In other words, Leithen has this gift for finding something in common with more or less everyone he meets. Or, to put it another way, Buchan can only conceive of his hero being able to really communicate with people who plug into his set of values.

This is vividly demonstrated when Johnny gets chatting about his family and brother, once they’ve embarked on the boat up the river. Turns out that his surname, Frizel, is a corruption of Fraser, and so that his guide has Scottish ancestors. At one point Johnny shows him his ring.

Leithen examined it. The stone bore the three cinquefoils of Fraser. Then he remembered that Frizel had been the name for Fraser in the Border parish where he had spent his youth. He remembered Adam Fraser, the blacksmith, the clang of his smithy on summer mornings, the smell of sizzling hooves and hot iron on summer afternoons. The recollection gave Johnny a new meaning for him; he was no longer a shadowy figure in this fantastic world of weakness; he was linked to the vanished world of real things, and thereby acquired a personality.

People only acquire full personhood for Leithen/Buchan if they can be plugged either 1) into his matrix of social connections i.e. all the bankers and lawyers and whatnot who all went to public school and are all related to each other or 2) into his sense of peoples or ‘races’, which each come complete with ancestries and stereotypes. It’s bigger and deeper than snobbery; it’s an entire existential worldview, a system of values to make sense of the world, and anybody who doesn’t fit into these categories (i.e. most of the population of Britain and the world) don’t really exist, not fully, not with a full personality.

Hares Indians

Anyway they chug up the river, camping on the bank at night, for several days, till they reach the camp of the Hares Indians. This is a squalid dump, stinking of rotten food and poverty, not at all what Leithen wanted from the wilderness.

Leithen sat in the presbytery in a black depression. The smells of the encampment – unclean human flesh, half-dressed skins of animals, gobbets of putrefying food – were bad enough in that mild autumn noon. The stuffy little presbytery was not much better. But the real trouble was that suddenly everything seemed to have become little and common. The mountains were shapeless, mere unfinished bits of earth; the forest of pine and spruce had neither form nor colour; the river, choked with logs and jetsam, had none of the beauty of running water. In coming into the wilderness he had found not the majesty of Nature, but the trivial, the infinitely small – an illiterate half-breed, a rabble of degenerate Indians, a priest with the mind of a child. The pettiness culminated in the chapel, which was as garish as a Noah’s Ark from a cheap toyshop… He felt sick in mind and very sick in body. (p.71)

The Catholic priest of this wretched hole is Father Wentzel and he has news of Lew and Francis, who passed through less than a week previously, so our guys are definitely on the right track. But he also indicates that Lew and Francis are not getting on. Lew was:

‘In a furious haste, as if vengeance followed him, and he did not sleep much. When I rose before dawn he was lying with staring eyes. For his companion, the gentleman, he seemed to have no care – he was pursuing his own private errand. A strong man, but a difficult. When they left me I did not feel happy about the two messieurs.’ (p.72).

Well, this isn’t good news. So Leithen, Johnny and the two Hares Indians leave the squalid camp and push on up the river, the scenery changing to become scenic and beautiful, with varieties of colourful trees, many birds and even bears. Leithen’s spirits lift.

Three long portages took them out of the Big Hare valley to Lone Tree Lake, which, in shape like a scimitar, lay tucked in a mat of forest under the wall of what seemed to be a divide. (p.73)

Picking up the trail

They camp near some woods and Johnny finds tangible evidence of the pair ahead of them: Lew and Francis have cached supplies and their canoe here but Johnny can tell from their tracks that there was a gap of 50 yards between them and the second man was limping. Looks like they’ve quarrelled. Looks like Francis is injured. Worse and worse (p.75).

The trail heads away from the lake and up beside a tributary stream. The other three carry all the supplies but Leithen is feeling increasingly weak and ill and has to stop to rest every hour. Days go by and Johnny gets chatty, praising the high woods and the adventures he’s had there. But he worries more and more about his brother, pointing out that the other man (Francis) is lagging hours behind him and arriving at the bivouacs late, probably not getting enough sleep. Why isn’t Lew waiting for him?

Leithen slips into a daze, one day leaching into another. Johnny has to mash up his bacon and beans till it’s nearly soup before Leithen can eat it. There’s more game, they see ptarmigan and willow grouse, and then moose, huge on the hillsides. At nights they hear the wolves nosing around the woods nearby. Leithen admires the Aurora Borealis flickering like a curtain of delicate lace (p.80).

Buchan and Canada

In 1935 Buchan had been appointed by King George V to become Governor General of Canada, a post he held till his death in 1940. His tenure was distinguished by intensive travel the length and breadth of the country. According to the introduction to this Authorised Edition of the novel, written by his grandson James Buchan, in 1937 Buchan undertook his most extensive tour, of the far North of the country. He and his party travelled by steamer down the Athabasca river, then the Slave River, carrying their gear past rapids and transferring to another steamer for a 1,000 mile journey into the Arctic Circle. At the Great Slave Lake they joined the Mackenzie River, stopping at forts and trading posts along the way where they met Catholic priests and nuns, traders, trappers and Hudson Bay officers, seeing on their left the vast Mackenzie range of mountains before coming out at the vast and barren delta described in the book. At Aklavik they switched to plane and flew over the Great Bear Lake to Coronation Gulf, before flying back by way of Alberta and British Columbia. It was an epic journey and many aspects of it are transferred wholesale into this novel, which contains page after page describing the breath-taking scenery.

Landscape description

Here’s an extended quotation a) to demonstrate what the book feels like to read b) to demonstrate Buchan’s way with description of scenery and c) to demonstrate his handling of the way this huge description gracefully circles back round to the plot (the quest for Galliard) and Leithen’s own plight.

Mountains prematurely snow-covered had been visible from the Hares’ settlement, and Leithen at Lone Tree Camp had seen one sharp white peak in a gap very far off. Ever since then they had been moving among wooded ridges at the most two thousand feet high. But now they suddenly came out on a stony plateau, the trees fell away, and they looked on a new world.

The sedimentary rocks had given place to some kind of igneous formation. In front were cliffs and towers as fantastic as the Dolomites, black and sinister against a background of great snowfields, sweeping upward to ice arêtes and couloirs which reminded Leithen of Dauphiné. In the foreground the land dropped steeply into gorges which seemed to converge in a deep central trough, but they were very unlike the mild glens through which they had been ascending. These were rifts in the black rock, their edges feathered with dwarf pines, and from their inky darkness in the sunlight they must be deep. The rock towers were not white and shining like the gracious pinnacles above Cortina, but as black as if they had been hewn out of coal by a savage Creator.

But it was not the foreground that held the eye, but the immense airy sweep of the snow-fields and ice pinnacles up to a central point, where a tall peak soared into the blue. Leithen had seen many snow mountains in his time, but this was something new to him – new to the world. The icefield was gigantic, the descending glaciers were on the grand scale, the central mountain must compete with the chief summits of the southern Rockies. But unlike the Rockies the scene was composed as if by a great artist – nothing untidy and shapeless, but everything harmonised into an exquisite unity of line and colour.

His eyes dropped from the skyline to the foreground and the middle distance. He shivered. Somewhere down in that labyrinth was Galliard. Somewhere down there he would leave his own bones. (p.81)

This novel is arguably Buchan’s best because he takes us far away from the tiresome world of posh society and pukka families and City bankers and fox hunting, he goes beneath the surface social veneer which dominates the other books. The descriptions of the Canadian wilds are awesome, but what really impresses is the extended descriptions of a dying man confronting his mortality. Every page contains Leithen’s feelings or thoughts as he collapses at the end of another gruelling trek.

Leithen reaches exhaustion

At their next stop Johnny confirms what he’d already suspected, that Lew is pressing on regardless and that his companion, Francis, has fallen behind and then lost the track altogether. Francis is now lost in the wilderness, limping, probably not carrying much. Chances are he’s lying in one of the great wild woods, freezing and starving to death.

The thing is, Leithen is so ill and has been so worn down by the physical challenges of the trek that he doesn’t care any more. Nobody can say he didn’t move heaven and earth to track down this Francis guy, did more than anybody could decently have expected of him. And anyway, before he even left Britain he knew the entire quest was really a way of distracting himself from his coming death.

Oddly enough, Johnny’s news had not made him restless, though it threatened disaster to his journey. He had wanted that journey to succeed, but the mere finding of Galliard would not spell success, or the loss of him failure. Success lay in his own spirit. (p.84)

They find Galliard

Next day Johnny and the Hares go early to scour the surrounding woods to see if they can find Galliard. When the sun comes out Leithen goes for a small walk up into the woods. As he comes back to their little encampment he sees a bear snuffling into his tent. At least he thinks it’s a bear. When he gets closer he realises it’s a man, wearing rags, covered in mud, so exhausted he can’t speak – it is Galliard! (p.86)

Leithen lays him down, washes his face, discovers he has a deep wound in his leg which he tries to clean. A few hours later Johnny returns and, with much more advanced fieldcraft, cleans and dresses the leg wound, cleans Galliard more and makes broth to spoonfeed him with. Galliard can barely speak, mumbling broken phrases about a sacred river, obviously a degraded articulation of his and Lew’s obsession with finding the fabled Sick Heart River. He has undergone what so many characters do in Buchan (cf Vernon Milburn in The Dancing Floor) and regressed back from the state of high civilisation which he enjoyed in New York, back to life in the wilds, and then on backwards into the barely human.

The partner of Ravelstons had suffered a strange transformation. Leithen realised that it would be idle to try to link this man’s memory with his New York life. He had gone back into a very old world, the world of his childhood and his ancestors, and though it might terrify him, it was for the moment his only world. (p.93)

This is a hobby horse of Buchan’s so he repeats it in different words:

Galliard had lost all touch with his recent life. He had reverted to the traditions of his family, and now worshipped at ancestral shrines, and he had been mortally scared by the sight of the goddess. (p.94)

A lot later Leithen joins a hunt for caribou, and:

He was primitive man again who had killed his dinner. (p.176)

Johnny declares that it will take weeks for Galliard to heal in body and who knows how long to heal in him in mind. They can’t risk moving him and winter is coming. So Johnny and the Hares are going to build a cabin against the coming winter.

Leithen feels guilty that he has now concluded his quest and Johnny is being a faithful employee and going to build a log cabin to protect them all and yet is very anxious about the physical and especially mental wellbeing of his brother Lew. So after some thought Liethen announces that he will press on to find Lew himself. Johnny explodes with laughter, given that Leithen is at death’s door. But he insists that, with the help of the bigger and stronger of the two Hares, he can do it.

It is another of those wild improbabilities and yet it is necessary for the Quest-like, fable-like structure of the book, that it is Leithen and not Johnny who finally makes it to the fabled valley.

Sick Heart River

And that is indeed what happens. After three days trekking (p.102), during which the Hare time and time again has to wait for Leithen to catch him up, or to support him, the pair come to an extraordinary chasm, deep, a mile across, with sheer sides, down into a meadow landscape across which flows a wide river – the famous Sick Heart River of the title.

After trekking along the edge of the precipice down into the valley, Leithen persuades a very reluctant Hare to descend a steep shute or landslide, now conveniently covered in snow. All goes well until the last thirty yards or so when the Hare slips on the ice, falls dragging Leithen with him, and they both roll and slide the last distance to the valley floor, Leithen banging his head and passing out (p.108).

When he groggily regains consciousness, the pair make a small camp near the the river and get a full sense of the strange and quiet, unnaturally warm landscape. Slowly they realise there isn’t a living thing in the place. Far from being Shangri-la, the place feels spooky and eerie.

The Hare spots smoke from a camp the other side of the river, presumably Lew! Leithen tells him to hang back while he, Leithen, goes ahead. So Leithen walks toward the camp and is aware of a shot being fired to the left, then one to the right of him – warning shots – but before anything worse can happen he simply he passes out from exhaustion (p.114).

Lew Frizel

Leithen awakes in a cave by a roaring fire with Lew marching up and down. Lew tends to him, introduces himself, the Hare makes his approach – soon all three are settled.

Long story short, Lew came from Presbyterian stock and had for long harboured an image he picked up from the Pilgrims Progress of passing beyond the Holy River, had become obsessed with travelling north to find Sick Heart River (p.120). But he’s been here a few days now and has become terrified, stricken with fear.

‘You’re over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you’re at the end of your road… I had a notion it was the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation.’
The man’s eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of melancholy.
‘Well, it ain’t. It’s the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know that and they only come here to die.’ (p.116)

Instead he calls it ‘a by-road to Hell!’ He gives more detail about how he and Galliard fell in together, both egging on each other’s obsession, how he eventually became so heedless he left Galliard behind in his mad obsession. But just a few days in the valley of death have totally cured him.

‘One thing I know – this is the River of the Water of Death. You can’t live in this valley. There’s no life here. Not a bird or beast, not a squirrel in the woods, not a rabbit in the grass, let alone bear or deer.’
‘There are warm springs,’ Leithen said. ‘There must be duck there.’
‘Devil a duck! I looked to find the sedges full of them, geese and ducks that the Eskimos and Indians had hurt and that couldn’t move south. Devil a feather! And devil a fish in the river! When God made this place He wasn’t figuring on humans taking up lots in it.’ (p.118)

And:

‘I was mad! It was the temptation of the Devil and not a promise of God. The Sick Heart is not the Land-of-Beulah but the Byroad-to-Hell, same as in Bunyan. It don’t rise like a proper river out of little springs – it comes full-born out of the rock and slinks back into it like a ghost. I tell you the place is no’ canny. You’d say it had the best grazing in all America, and yet there’s nothing can live here. There’s a curse on this valley when I thought there was a blessing. So there’s just the one thing to do if we’re to save our souls, and that’s to get out of it though we break our necks in the job.’ (p.121)

So that’s what they do. The Hare and Lew are keeping the fire going and cooking meals while they prepare their gear and pack. Then the next morning they trek for three hours back to the cliff face, to the shute the Hare and Leithen slid down. Now he supervises the reverse process, with him climbing slowly up and cutting footholds into the hard ice with an axe. He climbs with a rope tied round his middle so that when he eventually reaches the lip of the shute and climbs over the edge into snowy flat, he manages to tie the rope around a tree and tug it three times before collapsing (p.125).

Leithen regains consciousness (which is how so many of these chapters start) to find himself in a bowl scooped out of the snow with a fire at the bottom. The other two climbed up, made a camp, lit a fire. Now they have to trek back to the cabin Johnny and the other Hare was building. Leithen tries walking but passes out again and the others rig up a sled to haul him in.

Three days and nights of hard travelling, and holing up in the tent before a big fire every night. Clean air and huge skies. Leithen alternates between physical collapse and moments of religious exhilaration.

He had welcomed the North because it matched his dull stoicism. Here in this iron and icy world man was a pigmy and God was all in all. Like Job, he was abashed by the divine majesty and could put his face in the dust. It was the temper in which he wished to pass out of life. He asked for nothing – “nut in the husk, nor dawn in the dusk, nor life beyond death.” He had already much more than his deserts! and what Omnipotence proposed to do with him was the business of Omnipotence; he was too sick and weary to dream or hope. He lay passive in all-potent hands. (p.132)

All reunited at the cabin

Leithen regains consciousness in the cabin. Everyone is reunited. Here are sick old Leithen, Galliard, the reunited Frizel brothers Lew and Johnny, and the two Hares. There is enough to collect firewood and keep the fires burning, and go hunting and keep food supplied, for a few weeks anyway.

Lew has lost the mad craziness which drove him north and is now totally sane, but he has transferred his obsessive tendencies to making Leithen well again. When Leithen tells him that he, Leithen, is destined to die and asks Lew to make sure the message gets to New York that Galliard is still alive, Lew gets fierce.

‘Well, I’m going out, and it’s for you to finish the job. You must get him down country and back to his friends. I’ve written out the details and left them with Johnny. You must promise, so that I can die with an easy mind.’
For a little Lew did not speak.
‘You’re not going to die,’ he said fiercely.
‘The best authorities in the world have told me that I haven’t the ghost of a chance.’
‘They’re wrong, and by God we’ll prove them wrong!’ (p.134)

Part three

Part one covered the setup, the plane to New York, and Leithen’s interviews with Galliard’s friends and family. Part two covered the trek into Canada up to and including Lew in the fabled Sick Heart River. Part three is the final part and covers their return.

They are all stuck in the cabin through December, January and February. As Leithen comes out of his death-bed weakness and gains strength he realises that Galliard is no longer the shambling wreck he first met, but has fully healed and become a tall, strong lumberjack. Leithen remains very sick. The others take it in turns to fetch firewood or hunt game.

Galliard’s version

Over the course of several interviews Leithen gets the story of Galliard’s life which led him to chuck it all: he was born into an ancient French-Canadian family, fallen on hard times i.e. become hardscrabble farmers. He saw the life his father and brother were living and rebelled against it. He did well at school, went to college, decided to drop the law and study business. Had a big argument with his family who disapproved, then headed off to America, knowing his career would be limited as a Frenchman in Anglophone Canada. He had hard times in New York till he emerged as a successful businessman, got taken on at Ravelston’s bank, rose to become an important financier. Socially, he met Francis and his eyes were opened to society dinner parties, art galleries and so on. And yet deep down – as Buchan would put it, due to ties of ancestry and race – he felt guilty, felt like he had betrayed his father and his family.

‘I came to realise that I had forgotten God,’ he said simply… ‘What I had to recover was the proper touch with the world which I had grown out of and could no more reject than my own skin. Also I had to make restitution. I had betrayed something ancient and noble, and had to do penance for my sins.’ (p.153)

And this guilt ate away at him till one day he snapped, left the note for wife Francis and headed out for the North. Then follows confirmation of what Leithen had guessed about him heading to the ancestral lands, being bitterly disillusioned so heading North looking for some kind of redemption, coming under the influence of Lew’s quest for redemption, and eventually being left to die by the wayside (pages 148 to 153).

He is still not mentally recovered, he is still dazed, he still feels the weight of guilt and the need to atone:

‘I had been faithless to a trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find Him… We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.’ (p.147)

Religious convictions

In the snow bowl after they got out of the valley, Leithen has a religious epiphany of sorts:

At night in the pit in the snow with Lew and the Hare he had become suddenly conscious of the mercifulness of things. There was a purpose of pity and tenderness in the iron compulsion of fate. Now this thought was always with him – the mercy as well as the omnipotence of God. (p.139)

This theme of the deep mercy is to be repeated with greater and greater regularity and emphasis in the last 50 pages of the book.

Now there suddenly broke in on him like a sunrise a sense of God’s mercy – deeper than the fore-ordination of things, like a great mercifulness… Out of the cruel North most of the birds had flown south from ancient instinct, and would return to keep the wheel of life moving. Merciful! But some remained, snatching safety by cunning ways from the winter of death. Merciful! Under the fetters of ice and snow there were little animals lying snug in holes, and fish under the frozen streams, and bears asleep in their lie-ups, and moose stamping out their yards, and caribou rooting for their grey moss. Merciful! And human beings, men, women, and children, fending off winter and sustaining life by an instinct old as that of the migrating birds. Lew nursing like a child one whom he had known less than a week – the Hares stolidly doing their jobs, as well fitted as Lew for this harsh world – Johnny tormented by anxiety for his brother, but uncomplainingly sticking to the main road of his duty… Surely, surely, behind the reign of law and the coercion of power there was a deep purpose of mercy. (p.132)

I know what he means. There is something about just being alive which indicates a grand gesture against death. Why is there life anywhere in a universe of death? Someone, somewhere, has made and supports it. All you have to do is sit on a bench out in the spring sunshine and feel the sun warming through your body to feel the real, primal, basic wonderfulness of being alive, and this is a feeling conveyed again and again, as Leithen’s physical wellbeing dips and fails, and then revives in the sun.

Back to the Hares’ camp

Food was running short so Johnny undertakes a trek on snow shoes back to the Hares’ camp and returns a week later. He reports that the Hares have sunk into apathy and despair. Their necromancy tells them they will die out this winter and they’re acting accordingly. After a great deal of discussion over several days, the six men in the cabin decide to return to the Hares camp. During these debates Leithen begins to feel it more and more incumbent on him to do something for the dying Indians. Though physically recovered, Galliard is still mentally weak and is clinging to Leithen hoping for a cure. And Father Duplessis had mentioned him (Leithen).

So they strike camp (leaving provisions and firewood for anyone else who ever comes across the cabin) and set out on the trek back to the Hares’ camp (p.167). After a week they arrive at the Hares’ camp to discover two things. 1) The Hares are sunk deep in suicidal apathy, sitting in their snow-filled huts dying of starvation and despair. 2) Father Duplessis, the Catholic chaplain sent to minister to them, tells our guys that war has broken out in Europe. Its Germany and her allies against Britain and France, again.

On the Hare front, Duplessis tells them he’s done everything he can, services, Masses, but it doesn’t work, something more is needed, someone needs to take command – looking meaningfully at Leithen.

Leithen takes command

Leithen has the latest in his series of religious/spiritual/moral revelations. It’s tied up with the news about a war. He served in the First World War and saw the appalling waste, futility and death. Now he sees it kicking off all over again. He revolts against the dominion of Death and decides he is going to preserve Life, he is going to commit to life, he is going to save the Hares. This is the spirit in which he hears Father Duplessis ringing the bell in the snowbound chapel:

That tinny bell had an explosive effect on Leithen’s mind. This was a place of death, the whole world was full of death—and yet here was one man who stood stubbornly for life. He rang the bell which should have started his flock on their day’s work. Sunk in weakness and despair they would remain torpid, but he had sounded the challenge. Here was one man at any rate who was the champion of life against death. (p.180)

And so he throws himself into plans to revive the dying community. He charges Lew and the Hares with fetching firewood and hunting meat. He orders a big fire to be built in the centre of the camp and be kept roaring as a sign of Life and Spring and Hope. He calls the ancient old leader of the tribe (Zacharias) for an interview and consults how best to revive his people. He sets about visiting every hut and getting to know every Indian and motivating them to stand up against Death.

The bell still tinkled in his ears. The world was at war again. It might be the twilight of the gods, the end of all things. The globe might swim in blood. Death might resume his ancient reign. But, by Heaven, he would strike his blow for life, even a pitiful flicker of it. (p.181)

Lew warns him that he has only just recovered his strength. If he shepherds it he will live a while, maybe years, living carefully and frugally. But Leithen has determined to go out standing up, doing his duty, in one last flare of activity.

There was a plain task before him, to fight with Death. God for His own purpose had unloosed it in the world, ravening over places which had once been rich in innocent life. Here in the North life had always been on sufferance, its pale slender shoots fighting a hard battle against the Elder Ice. But it had maintained its brave defiance. And now one such pathetic slip was on the verge of extinction. This handful of Hares had for generations been a little enclave of life besieged by mortality. Now it was perishing, hurrying to share in the dissolution which was overtaking the world. By God’s help that should not happen – the God who was the God of the living. Through strange circuits he had come to that simple forthright duty for which he had always longed. In that duty he must make his soul. (p.185)

And Leithen inspires Galliard, tells Galliard that this is his Sick Heart River, this is his duty and his calling, and so begins the process of psychological healing which Galliard needs:

‘This is a war and I obey orders. I’ve got my orders. In a world where Death is king we’re going to defy him and save life. The North has closed down on us and we’re going to beat the North. That is to your address, Galliard.’
Galliard was staring at him with bright comprehending eyes.
‘In this fight we have each got his special job. I’m in command, and I hand them out. I’ve taken the one for myself that I believe I can do best. We’re going to win, remember. What does my death matter if we defeat Death?’
Lew sat down again with his head in his hands. He raised it like a frightened animal at Leithen’s next words.
‘This is my Sick Heart River. Galliard’s too, I think. Maybe yours, Lew. Each of us has got to find his river for himself, and it may flow where he least expects it.’ (p.187)

I found all this very moving. The nobility of it transcends all its weakness as literature. Suddenly, in time of war, saving only a few people from a universe of Death, becomes an inspirational moral duty.

He was facing the challenge of Death. Elsewhere in the world the ancient enemy was victorious. If here, against all odds, he could save the tiny germ of life from its maw he would have met that challenge, and done God’s work. (p.190)

This reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Unconditional Surrender whose protagonist, Guy Crouchback, tries to restore meaning and honour to his little part of the world at the end of the Second World War by saving against the odds a community of Jews threatened by antisemitic Partisans in Yugoslavia. At some point his hero quotes the ancient Talmudic saying: ‘Whoever saves one life saves the world entire’… and, the wise man might have added, saves himself, as Leithen saves not only the Hares, but also restores Galliard’s sense of purpose and will to live, and, finally, saves himself.

As Father Duplessis puts it, in his last weeks, Leithen comes to love the Hares, not as a faceless mass, as a project, as an abstract duty, but for who they are. He becomes, at last, fully humanised.

He had come to love those poor childish folk. Hitherto a lonely man, he had found a clan and a family. (p.203)

And we have seen how family is the most basic unit of meaning in Buchan’s worldview.

The Mounty’s report

The text abruptly cuts away from being by the third-person narrator to give an excerpt from a report by a Mounty i.e. a trooper in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

From a report by Corporal S——, R.C.M.P., Fort Bannerman, to Inspector N——, R.C.M.P., Fort Macleod.

In objective, official terms the corporal describes how Leithen established a hold over the entire tribe and nursed it back to health, so that the entire community was ready to live again as spring arrived, detailing specific such as encouraging them to fish through holes in the ice on the lakes again, to catch fish to feed up their starving dogs who, once restored to health, could pull the sledges required to bring in large amounts of firewood, and so on. But how in organising this and many other activities, Leithen exhausted what little strength he had, passed into a coma and died

Father Duplessis’s diary

A religious take on Leithen’s devotion to duty. How Leithen started out considering the Hares as a faceless mass, as simply a project to be addressed. But how he slowly mastered the details of their culture and beliefs and slowly began to humanise them, in the process I noted above whereby strangers slowly entered Leithen’s set of values to become full human. It meshes perfectly with the increasing number of religious reflections in the final part of the text about the humanising of Leithen’s soul.

He had been abject but without true humility. When had the change begun? At Sick Heart River, when he had a vision of the beauty which might be concealed in the desert? Then, that evening in the snow-pit had come the realisation of the tenderness behind the iron front of Nature, and after that had come thankfulness for plain human affection. The North had not frozen him, but had melted the ice in his heart. God was not only all-mighty but all-loving.

Duplessis devotes several pages to describing how Leithen’s example inspired Galliard to overcome his fear of the North, to face it and master it, to redeem himself in service to the poor Hares.

In L.’s grim fortitude Galliard found something that steadied his nerves. More, he learned from L. the only remedy for his malaise. He must fight the North and not submit to it; once fought and beaten, he could win from it not a curse but a blessing. Therefore he eagerly accepted the task of grappling with the Hares’ problem. Here was a test case. They were defying the North; they were resisting a madness akin to his own. If they won, the North had no more terrors for him – or life either. He would have conquered his ancestral fear. (p.201)

Then Duplessis briefly describes how Leithen attended High Mass at Easter then went steadily downhill until he died in his sleep. But by then his work was done, the Hares restored to life as spring began to warm the earth, and Galliard returned to his former balance and sanity.

Galliard and Francis reunited

The final scene reverts to the third-person narrator to describe Galliard, now utterly restored to health who had returned to New York, been reunited with his wife and colleagues, completely rehabilitated but has now flown back to the idyllic meadow which Leithen remembered right back at the start of the novel, for a three page envoi. He briefly summarise the fight-the-north theme:

‘You see, I have made my peace with the North, faced up to it, defied it, and so won its blessing.’

On a practical front a world war is raging and he knows he is to leave soon to join the army and who knows what his fate will be. Then this sometimes rackety novel ends on some of the most moving words I’ve ever read. We have, in effect, accompanied Leithen on his long journey to religious enlightenment and Galliard caps it beautifully.

The two by a common impulse turned their eyes to the wooden cross on the lawn of turf. Galliard rose.

‘We must hurry, my dear. The road back is none too good.’
She seemed unwilling to go.
‘I feel rather sad, don’t you? You’re leaving your captain behind.’
Galliard turned to his wife, and she saw that in his eyes which made her smile.
‘I can’t feel sad,’ he said. ‘When I think of Leithen I feel triumphant. He fought a good fight, but he hasn’t finished his course. I remember what Father Duplessis said – he knew that he would die; but he knew also that he would live.’ (p.208)

In its simplicity but its profound conviction I think that’s one of the most moving statements of faith I have ever read. It is a really beautiful ending to a book which way before the end had transcended Buchan’s limitations as a writer of popular shockers to morph into something much more deep and profound. It feels, by the end, like a really great book.

The concept of race in the fiction of John Buchan

It’s a central concept. People he meets are defined by family i.e. their place in the matrix of the British upper classes, or by ‘race’.

It doesn’t mean what it does today. Today ‘race’ is a negative word associated with racism. Just the word carries connotations of the colonial era when ‘lesser’ races deserved to be ruled by the white races etc.

It’s interesting to see how, for Buchan, the word is not particularly negative, and is also flexible. Sometimes it refers to the entire French people or Irish people etc, who are thought of as having definable characteristics. Other times it much more specifically refers to a family.

Here’s examples of it describing an entire people:

‘Well, they [the French Canadians] are a remarkable race there. They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have. Here’s a fine European stock planted out in a new country and toughened by two centuries of hardship and war. They keep their close family life and their religion intact and don’t give a cent for what we call progress. Yet all the time they have a pretty serious fight with nature, so there is nothing soft in them. You would say that boys would come out of those farms of theirs with a real kick in them, for they have always been a race of pioneers.’ (Bronson Jane)

‘I expect he has family in his blood like all his race.’ [of French Canadians]

But Augustin had the fine manners of his race. [French Canadians]

Then you have generalisations about the cross-breeding of these ‘races’:

‘That’s probably due to his race,’ said Leithen. ‘Whenever you get a borderland where Latin and Northman meet, you get this uncanny sensitiveness.’

And then you have something which is closer to ‘family’, such as when Leithen arrives at Galliard’s ancestral homeland:

Only now, when he was entering the cradle of Galliard’s race, did he realise how intricate was the task to which he had set himself.

‘You must know, monsieur, that once the Gaillards were a stirring race. They fought with Frontenac against the Iroquois, and very fiercely against the English. Then, when peace came, they exercised their hardihood in distant ventures.’

As you can see, none of these usages have any reference to the modern concern with ethnicity which has resulted from a mixture of very contemporary obsessions, with mass immigration to formerly white European countries, with the racism that so many of these immigrants face, and with evergrowing embarrassment about the behaviour of the European colonial powers and the rewriting of history to give black and other ethnic groups their rightful history and position.

Buchan was writing before all that was dreamed of and meant something very different, something more teasing and interesting.

Interesting words

• callant – a young lad, a stripling, a boy
• couloir – a seam, scar, or fissure, or vertical crevasse in an otherwise solid mountain mass
• dunnage – the durable padding material used to protect goods during shipping
• muskeg – a swamp or bog in northern North America
• selvedge – a zone of altered rock, especially volcanic glass, at the edge of a rock mass

Credit

Sick Heart River by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1941. References are to the 2018 Polygon Authorised John Buchan edition.

Related links

• Sick Heart River online
• The John Buchan Society

John Buchan reviews

• John Buchan reviews