Reading: Mr Standfast
Apr. 17th, 2016 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartA couple of years ago, I was working for a section of my current organisation which had decided to name all its meeting rooms after Oxford authors, one of whom was John Buchan. (Of the, I think, eight meeting rooms, it was somewhat notable that only one was named after a woman, or at least I assume that 'Murdoch' was after Iris and not Rupert. Or, indeed, the Dwight Schultz character in The A-Team, though as working there certainly drove me howling mad it would have been appropriate.) One of my more obnoxious colleagues once enquired "Who even reads John Buchan any more?". He wasn't someone who liked being contradicted, so he probably wasn't all that impressed when I said that actually, I did. But I've liked Buchan ever since my mother suggested I try The Three Hostages when I was about ten, and a recent digression onto Buchan in the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
renaultx North Face discussion reminded me that having re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle a few years ago I ought to move on to Mr Standfast some time.
I think I'd only read the book once before, when I was eleven, but there were two bits in particular which had left a lasting enough impression that thirty years later I felt as though I could have read them just yesterday. One was the moment, right at the beginning, where Hannay, pulled out of the trenches and sent off to go undercover among pacifists, suddenly realises that the war isn't just a game and that he's fighting for something greater, namely peace:
The other bit that stuck with me was the end, which made such an impression that I can remember exactly where I was when I read it (sitting in a geography lesson, as it happens; I think our teacher was away so we'd been told to do "private study" while another teacher watched to make sure we didn't start a riot). I think it made me cry, which was unusual for me in those days as I wasn't a child with a great deal of empathy and I didn't tend to cry over books. It certainly made me cry this time, even though I knew it was coming.
Between the memorable beginning and end, it's business as usual, with desperate chases across Scotland (much as in The Thirty-Nine Steps) and stalking sinister villains across the Continent. It's fun, even if some of the desperate chasing seems a bit pointless; Hannay's cover had already been so thoroughly blown there was no need for him to try to get from Skye to London while remaining incognito, but surely he could have got on to his London contacts and got things sorted out quietly in any case? And trying to make sure that someone else was waiting in for Ivery in St Anton might have been more sensible than climbing over the Alps in winter, though that was clearly motivated by love more than common sense.
Obviously, the book is chock-full of period-typical attitudes to race, class and gender; on race, Hannay's tendency to use the phrase "a white man" as meaning, as far as I can see, "a jolly good fellow" is particular cringe-making to a modern reader, though on the gender front Mary is impressively brave and resourceful and quite happy to point out to Hannay that she may be young and female but that she has spent the last few years working just as hard in the war effort as he has. Re-reading it now, I think that both Launcelot Wake and Peter Pienaar are intended to be gay (and both are at least a bit in love with Hannay), and both are sympathetically portrayed.
renaultx North Face discussion reminded me that having re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle a few years ago I ought to move on to Mr Standfast some time.I think I'd only read the book once before, when I was eleven, but there were two bits in particular which had left a lasting enough impression that thirty years later I felt as though I could have read them just yesterday. One was the moment, right at the beginning, where Hannay, pulled out of the trenches and sent off to go undercover among pacifists, suddenly realises that the war isn't just a game and that he's fighting for something greater, namely peace:
In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spacces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg. But now I realized that I had a new home. I understood what a precious thing England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I saw not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and wrap myself in it till the end of my days.
The other bit that stuck with me was the end, which made such an impression that I can remember exactly where I was when I read it (sitting in a geography lesson, as it happens; I think our teacher was away so we'd been told to do "private study" while another teacher watched to make sure we didn't start a riot). I think it made me cry, which was unusual for me in those days as I wasn't a child with a great deal of empathy and I didn't tend to cry over books. It certainly made me cry this time, even though I knew it was coming.
Between the memorable beginning and end, it's business as usual, with desperate chases across Scotland (much as in The Thirty-Nine Steps) and stalking sinister villains across the Continent. It's fun, even if some of the desperate chasing seems a bit pointless; Hannay's cover had already been so thoroughly blown there was no need for him to try to get from Skye to London while remaining incognito, but surely he could have got on to his London contacts and got things sorted out quietly in any case? And trying to make sure that someone else was waiting in for Ivery in St Anton might have been more sensible than climbing over the Alps in winter, though that was clearly motivated by love more than common sense.
Obviously, the book is chock-full of period-typical attitudes to race, class and gender; on race, Hannay's tendency to use the phrase "a white man" as meaning, as far as I can see, "a jolly good fellow" is particular cringe-making to a modern reader, though on the gender front Mary is impressively brave and resourceful and quite happy to point out to Hannay that she may be young and female but that she has spent the last few years working just as hard in the war effort as he has. Re-reading it now, I think that both Launcelot Wake and Peter Pienaar are intended to be gay (and both are at least a bit in love with Hannay), and both are sympathetically portrayed.
