This is the second of John Buchan's WWI spy thrillers featuring British colonial hero supreme Richard Hannay (he's South African, but possesses all the Empire's virtues). Unlike The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is placed in the run-up to the war, this story throws Hannay and his various associates right into the war itself, though not as regular soldiers but again as spies. The climactic scene, however, is very much a battlefield (an actual battle between the Turks and the Russians, near Erzurum).

 

Whereas Hannay was essentially a sole actor for most of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan chose to give him a team of misfit genius comrades in this one (an American spy taking cover under American stereotypes, and pretending to US neutrality; a half-mad Englishman integrated into the Arab/Muslim world who might well be a sort of Lawrence of Arabia - or at least that's who I thought of when I read the description - and a Dutch/Boer sidekick with a genius for melting into a role and undertaking direly dangerous message deliveries). I think this was an improvement, allowing as it did for a lot more colour in the characterizations.

 

Unlike The Thirty-Nine Steps, too, this novel has a major female presence in the form of a villain named Hilda von Einem, a mysterious German whose mission, it appears, is to stir up Germany's Muslim allies to jihad against the English (and, I suppose, the Russians, who were the more direct foe to the Ottoman empire in this part of the conflict). I didn't much care for Hilda, who seemed to be less of a strategist than a quasi-divine force of cool sexuality - in other words, she was the kind of woman only a man could imagine. It did seem rather odd that she proved to be mortal just like the men in the face of artillery bombardments at the end (pardon the spoiler).

 

However, like its predecessor, this was a tale full of incident. Also like its predecessor, it contained a fair bit of hard-to-swallow racism (made more obvious because of the setting in foreign lands). I marked for myself this little gem, where Hannay is talking about his ability to lead a riverboat crew (in Germany, if I recall correctly): "I could see that I was becoming rather a figure in the captain's eyes. He liked the way I kept the men up to their work. I hadn't been a nigger-driver for nothing." Ouch.

 

Finally, even though I wasn't much of a fan of Hilda, I found the American's musings about her, and about American women and how they were perceived, somewhat interesting: "I guess we Americans haven't got the right poise for dealing with that kind of female. We've exalted our womenfolk into little tin gods, and at the same time left them out of the real business of life. Consequently, when we strike one playing the biggest kind of man's game we can't place her. We aren't used to regarding them as anything except angels and children." This is in 1915; it makes an interesting contrast to the view of American women only a few years later, in Sinclair Lewis' Free Air.

This is another entry in the "classics I never read" category. I resist the temptation to add the "Canadian" tag to it just because John Buchan went on later (much later) to become the Governor General of Canada. Nothing could be less connected to Canada than this early spy thriller.

 

I found this lighter than I had expected and, not surprisingly a little too macho for my tastes, though I enjoyed the rough-and-tumble journey (by foot and various appropriated vehicles) through the Scottish countryside. The grim shadow of WWI, well under way by the 1915 publication of the novel, hangs over the political events of the plot (no contemporary reader would have any trouble recognizing the assassination of a foreign leader as the trigger for hostilities).

 

Like the James Bond books/movies, half the fun of this book is that the events completely strain credulity; unlike the James Bond books/movies, so does the sterling character of the protagonist! There's no gambling or womanizing for Richard Hannay. In fact, I am hard-pressed to think of any woman character at all, however minor, in the novel. (Apparently the movie versions, including Hitchcock's, introduced a love interest, which in my view is entirely extraneous, if predictable for the movies).

 

I found the repeated threat of aeroplane pursuit and detection, which pervades Hannay's flight from the bad guys, to be interesting, mainly because of the date of the novel. This book takes place during roughly the same time period as "Lawrence of Arabia", where the dread induced by flight as a tool of war is similarly touched upon. Since the majority of this novel is "man fleeing his enemies" (think The Fugitive, except that the motives for the flight are political rather than personal), that aeroplane actually hovers a fair bit.

The 39 steps of the title are in relatively unimportant, except in the last chapter or two of the plot, helping our hero figure out where the opposing spies are about to take their leave with their disastrous information about Britain's war plans.

 

Apparently this novel was a great hit with the men in the trenches, presumably serving as a distraction from rather than a reminder of their real-life peril.

Well, this is one of those old thrillers from the British Empire that is also set during World War I, and is a kind of propaganda piece about the greatness of the British, and the fallibility of the Boche (a pejorative term for German soldiers).

John Buchan wrote a series of adventures featuring Richard Hannay. Hannay was a mining engineer who made a pile in South Africa and finds living in idleness in England rather a bore. So, fortunately for him, he has adventures. This is the second of the Hannay adventures.

The time is 1916 and the British are fighting back the Boche in Europe. Hannay is looking forward to going back into the fray, but is induced instead into helping with a spy mission. The spy agencies are certain that the Germans have plans to take over the Middle East, a place where the British have some interests, e.g. Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq).

So, Hannay is to be sent off to Constantinople to straighten things out. He's given a small team to help: an American, John S. Blenkiron, Ludovick Arbuthnot, who is known as Sandy, and another bloke, whose name I've forgotten (Peter?), but who knows how to get around in tight places. He can singlehandedly defeat hoards of marauding Bantus...or something. Sandy's expertise is in the Middle East. He can easily pass as a Turk, or Arab, or whatever is needed.

So, by various, improbably methods, sometimes pretending to be turncoats who are trying to join up with the Germans, they make their improbable journeys, each in his own separate way, to Constantinople to meet up. They find that the Turks, who are nominally German allies, can be manipulated by a "holy man", known as Greenmantle. It appears that Greenmantle is on his death bed, so that raises problems as well.

Well, I'll stop. What we have is lots of British posturing about their being a superior "race", superior even to the Germanic "race", lots of improbable, last-minute escapes from disaster, and so forth. Naturally, in the end it all comes out well for the good guys. Great literature, this is not. But for idling away a few hours with an amusing yarn, this isn't half bad.

I originally came across The 39 Steps when it was listed in the BBC's The Big Read in 2003 as one of Britain's favourite books. Buchan's book came in 138th place.

 

Having now read the book, I'd like to know how this book even made the list. Just HOW???

 

Sure this book (published in 1915) was one of the pre-Bond early spy thrillers, sure the story was turned into a Hitchcock classic, but the only reason I can see that the book has made the list is that people who nominated it might have remembered the film better than the book itself. 

 

The book was seriously one of the silliest, nonsensical farces of a spy thriller I have ever come across - and I am saying this as someone who likes a spy thriller that doesn't take itself too serious. 

 

Anyway, I am not going to write a full rant review of all of the issues I had with the book, but instead am just going to list my previous reading vents updates.

 

Reading progress update: I've read 20%.

Reading progress update: I've read 35%.

Reading progress update: I've read 54%.

Reading progress update: I've read 65%.

Reading progress update: I've read 82%.

'Nonsense!' said the official from the Admiralty. Sir Walter got up and left the room while we looked blankly at the table. He came back in ten minutes with a long face. 'I have spoken to Alloa,' he said. 'Had him out of bed—very grumpy. He went straight home after Mulross's dinner.'

I can only assume that this book may have inspired Agatha Christie's spy thrillers. It certainly would explain the unexplainable - that is, The Big Four and Passenger to Frankfurt.