This is one of THE great adventure stories! I first read it about forty years ago and I have reread it numerous times since.
John Buchan seems to epitomise the great Victorian work ethic - now best known as a writer of cracking adventure stories featuring upright, "decent" heroes, he was a prolific worker. In addition to his thirty novels and various volumes of short stories, he also produced a multi-volume history of India and biographies of Sir Walter Scott and the Earl of Montrose. Writing was, however, really only his second career. His primary vocation was the law, and he built up an extensive practice as a tax barrister. From the Bar, like his fictional avatar Sir Edward Leithen, he progressed into politics (as a Unionist though one espousing both free trade and women's suffrage), eventually entering Parliament on the Unionist ticket in 1927. He was subsequently appointed Governor-General of Canada shortly after his elevation to the House of Lords as Baron Tweedsmuir. Where did he find the time?
While the plots and subject matter of his novels have recently fallen prey to satire for their idealised evocation of a Corinthian age that probably never really existed, his prose is always beautifully constructed and flows with inner cadences. This short novel introduces Richard Hannay, recently returned to Britain from Rhodesia where he has secured his fortune as a mining engineer. Bored out of his skull by the trivial interests of the other members of his social circle he is on the brink of returning to South Africa when he encounters Franklin Scudder, a frightened man with a scary secret.
Scudder starts to give Hannay all sorts of frightening insights to the prevailing European political situation and the inevitability of war against an over-powerful Germany, the catalyst for which will be the imminent assassination of Karolides, the last hope for sustained stability in the Balkans. However, Scudder himself is murdered and Hannay is put in the frame as his killer. He decides to flee to South West Scotland where he hopes to be able to lie low until he can muster sufficient evidence of the plot against Karolides.
Buchan is always at his finest when describing Scottish landscapes, and the Galloway wilderness almost becomes a character in its own right. Hannay is hunted relentlessly through the varied Galloway terrain, both by the police and by pursuers of an altogether more deadly provenance.
What has always amazed me most about "the Thirty Nine Steps" is the recurrent failure of film makers to bring it to the screen with any success, given that its plot-driven nature would seem to lend itself so readily to cinematic treatment. Hitchcock completely eviscerated the plot in his 1935 film, introducing a bizarre music-hall scene which was retained in the 1959 version directed by Ralph Thomas and starring Kenneth More. Meanwhile the 1970s version had Robert Powell hanging off the hands of Big Ben. Even the recent BBC version, though truer to the book than all of the others, felt the need to introduce a spurious romance element. Certainly Buchan did not do female characters well, a failing that he acknowledged - I don't think there is a single line of dialogue delivered by a woman in the whole novel.
It would also be easy to pick holes in the plot. [CAUTION - possible spoilers] There is, for example, an overwhelming dependence upon bizarre coincidence; while fleeing in a stolen car Hannay has a crash with someone whose godfather happens to be Permanent Secretary at the Home Office; fleeing from his pursuers he takes refuge in a private house only to find that it is owned by the leader of the pack from whom he is trying to escape; at one point he is locked in a storeroom only to find that it is full of explosives and fuses; and coming upon a solitary driver in the wilds of Galloway it turns out to be someone whom he knew from London, even though we have previously been told of the paucity of his social life during his brief stint in the capital.
Does any of this matter? Absolutely not! The story was written as a gripping adventure story, and it still succeeds in holding the reader's (and re-reader's) attention. One hundred years since its first publication it still works perfectly well.
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Great 👍
Took some getting used to in the first chapter. But once Hannay is on the run, excellent.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 August 2015
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 December 2013
Top reviews from other countries
- Ms. L. Lynne Irwin - VernonReviewed in Canada on 1 October 2015
Take The Thirty-Nine Steps to Intrigue and Mayhem.
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