Reading: Mr Standfast

[white_hart]

A 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 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.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

I agree about Peter, or at least it's a plausible reading (I could also see him as asexual). I'm not sure about Wake - what about his rant to Hannay about how he'll ruin Mary's life?

Mind you, I mostly ship Wake/angst!

[white_hart]

There is that, but then there's also a bit later on where he tells Hannay that he was never his rival for Mary: he says "My type of man is not meant for marriage" and describes himself as "left-handed", which seemed Significant to me.

[legionseagle]

Well, given how often the Hannay novels involve "The bit where a man - usually an antagonist - makes a heavy pass at Hannay" (see, for example, the boudoir bit in Greenmantle and the whole Sandy-Medna-Hannay set up in The Three Hostages, it would be surprising if neither of them were.

[white_hart]

True. Perhaps what's particularly remarkable here is that neither of them is an antagonist.

[tree_and_leaf]

Point, although on the other hand Wake is pretty bad at human interaction, getting on with people, and fitting in in general (and is well aware of it).

[caulkhead]

I've been avoiding reading your post till now as I was in the middle of reading it and didn't want spoilers... but I couldn't agree more about all the dashing about, particularly the driving over the Alps and climbing back in a blizzard bit, when he knew Ivery was coming back anyway... It was very enjoyable, though.

[caulkhead]

I can't help noticing that one of the adjectives most frequently applied to Mary is 'boyish', or similar... I think this is misogyny* (of a generalised rather than specialised sort**) rather than homoerotica, but it's quite telling all the same.

**That's not quite the word I want, but I can't think of what is. It's not that he dislikes women, it's just that the highest praise of a woman is that she's like a man... Actually, perhaps that *is* the word.
*see also 'The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy'

[white_hart]

Yes, Hannay is very much a man's man, and doesn't appear to have had any time for women in the past - he doesn't *dislike* them, but I think I agree that it is still a kind of misogyny.

[white_hart]

I think the plots of the Hannay books don't bear too much thinking about, as there's a lot of pointless dashing around Scotland in The Thirty-Nine Steps too, and I was never entirely convinced by Greenmantle's "Let's all go to Istanbul by different routes!" idea.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I can't even *think* about the ending without crying.

Which I have always felt will come in useful if I ever feel the need to convince someone that I'm more upset than I actually am!

[white_hart]

It is incredibly moving. But then, Buchan may have churned out adventure stories fairly quickly, but the man could *write*.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

He was about the only person I went away from a literature degree actually wanting to read more of! (Scottish literature rather than English - the other one I can think of at the moment was Muriel Spark.)

That other quote is fascinating, too, because Buchan himself seems to have fallen for England in just that romantic fashion, whereas his sister (whose books are undeniably 'cosy', but fascinating in their details) stayed firmly rooted in the Scottish borders all her life.

[glittertigger]

I also enjoy John Buchan, for both characterisation and narrative tension (and in spite of the occasionally cringe-making attitudes)