Tag: John Buchan

Book #8 for 2024. Oof, we’re not doing terribly well, are we? Another time-consuming project on top of the classical music collection organising has kind of got in the way, but ANYWAY here we are again… Back to 1915 this time round; I’ve seen two film versions (Hitchcock’s famous one and Ralph Thomas’ less famous one) but it’s been so long that my memories of both are dim… on reading the book for the first time, though, I do notice certain differences between it and the films, most notably the lack of female love interest for Hannay which you could evidently get away with in a 1915 magazine serial but not in a 1935 film. Anyway, our hero Richard Hannay is newly returned home from the dark continent, and London life is boring him; yearning for excitement, a chance meeting provides just that, dropping him in among international intrigue, but he soon finds the true story is a lot bigger than he originally thought. The book is basically kind of a rewrite of the outbreak of a certain war that was going on when it was written, and I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that Hannay’s efforts don’t stop it from breaking out in the end; the story relies on a few too many coincidences in place of plot development, characterisation is somewhat negligible, and the literary style is kind of blunt. But that does work in the book’s favour; it compresses a surprising amount into a fairly small span and it keeps your attention all the way through, and you want to see how Hannay gets out of the various scrapes he gets into (and where he finds time to breathe in the course of one damn thing after another happening). Can’t exactly call it a literary masterpiece, and that’s fine; solid proto-pulp adventure has its own valid place too, and a bit of B-film vigour never hurts…