Category: Buchan of the Month

Buchan of the Month: Sick Heart River by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

SickHeartRiver2About the Book

Lawyer and MP Sir Edward Leithen is given a year to live. Fearing he will die unfulfilled, he devotes his last months to seeking out and restoring to health Galliard, a young Canadian banker. Galliard is in remotest Canada searching for the ‘River of the Sick Heart’. Braving an Arctic winter, Leithen finds the banker and then his own health returns, yet only one of the men will return to civilization ….

Format: Hardcover (318 pp.)    Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: March 1941      Genre: Fiction

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My Review

Sick Heart River is the final book in my Buchan of the Month reading project (for 2018).  (Buchan of the Month will return in 2019 with a new selection of books by John Buchan, both fiction and non-fiction.) It happens to be one of my favourite of his novels (along with Mr. Standfast).

Sick Heart River was Buchan’s last novel.  In fact, he finished it only a fortnight before his death and it was published posthumously.  Although Buchan cannot have known his own death was so close, there is definitely an elegiac quality to the book.  Whilst writing Sick Heart River, Buchan had been completing his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door.  Perhaps the process of recalling the experiences of earlier days, the loss of old friends and taking stock contributed to the reflective, meditative sense the reader gets from  Sick Heart River.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, a legacy of his experiences in the First World War, and with no prospect of recovery, Sir Edward Leithen seeks a way to give purpose to the last few months of his life.  When the task of finding Francis Galliard comes his way, via a mutual friend, initially he has no particular interest on a personal level in the object of his search.  Leithen undertakes the task purely to prevent himself lapsing into self-pity or suffering the slow demise he fears.  As he tells Galliard later: ‘I wasn’t interested in you – I didn’t want to do a kindness to anybody – I wanted something that would keep me on my feet until I died.  It wouldn’t have mattered if I had never heard the name of any of the people concerned.  I was thinking only of myself, and the job suited me.’

Buchan is always good at descriptions of landscape and in the book he captures the harsh beauty of the landscape of northern Canada.  However, he shows that what seems beautiful can also be deadly: ‘Leithen brooded over that mysterious thing, the North.  A part of the globe which had no care for human life, which was not built to man’s scale, a remnant of that Ice Age which long ago had withered the earth.’  The reader witnesses Leithen’s desperate struggle to survive a Canadian winter alongside his companions – the Frizel brothers, Johnny and Lew, and their Hare Indian guides.

One of Buchan’s favourite texts, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, makes an appearance in the book, as it did in Mr. Standfast. However, in this case, The Pilgrim’s Progress is not the benign instrument that assists Richard Hannay to achieve his mission, help him uncover mysteries and reveal insights, as it does in Mr Standfast. In Sick Heart River, it leads to a journey that risks the lives of Leithen and his companions.  Lew Frizel, casting himself in the role of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress,  initially believes the Sick Heart River to be ‘the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation’ where all his sins will be washed away.  However, Lew’s quest to find the Sick Heart River is shown to be a false pilgrimage, a chimera. The Sick Heart River is not, as he imagined, the equivalent of the Land of Beulah or a gateway to Heaven but, as he tells Leithen, ‘the Byroad-to Hell, same as in Bunyan’.

The book explores some familiar themes of Buchan’s novels: fortitude, self-sacrifice, the link between bodily and spiritual health, the spirit of place, and the importance of being in touch with and true to your roots.  As Sick Heart River reaches its conclusion, the world has once more been plunged into the calamity of another war. Remembering his experiences in the First World War, Leithen reflects, ‘It had been waste, futile waste, and death, illimitable, futile death.  Now the same devilment was unloosed again’.  (One of Buchan’s final acts as Governor General of Canada had been to authorise Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in September 1939.)

At the end of Sick Heart River, in an act of epic self-sacrifice and knowing the likely outcome, Leithen takes command of a task that will prove to be his final battle.  As always, the book’s ending leaves me slightly teary.

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In three words: Elegaic, moving, uplifting

Try something similar…A Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan

John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man.  He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada.  In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  However, in his lifetime he published over 100 books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.

Buchan of the Month: Introducing Sick Heart River by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

Sick Heart River is the final book (for 2018) in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month.  Appropriately perhaps, it was also Buchan’s last novel.  In fact, he finished it only a fortnight before his death and it was published posthumously.  It also happens to be one of my favourite of his novels.  The ending always leaves me slightly teary.

To find out more about the project and my reading list for 2018, click here.  Buchan of the Month will return in 2019 with a new selection of books by John Buchan, both fiction and non-fiction.  If you would like to read along with me you will be very welcome.  Just leave a comment on the challenge post when it’s published in the New Year.

SickHeartRiver2What follows is an introduction to Sick Heart River.  It is also an excuse to show a picture of my lovely edition of the book complete with dust jacket.  I will be posting my review of the book later in the month.

John Buchan (by then Lord Tweedsmuir) started writing Sick Heart River in the Autumn of 1939.  His private secretary, Mrs. Killick, wrote to Susan, Lady Tweedsmuir, “His Excellency is writing a very odd book…so unlike him, so introspective.” As Kate Macdonald has remarked, ‘Sick Heart River was Buchan’s farewell to his writing career, written at the end of his life’.  David Daniell, who has written extensively on John Buchan’s life and work, describes Sick Heart River as ‘a moving novel…deeply meditative’.

On 5th February 1940, Buchan told his sister Anna, ‘I have finished my novel [Sick Heart River] and my autobiography [Memory Hold-the-Door]’. The following day, Buchan suffered the cerebral thrombosis that ultimately proved fatal and he died on 12th February.  Sick Heart River was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1941.  In the US it was published under the title, Mountain Meadow.

Sick and fearing he has not long to live, Sir Edward Leithen embarks on what he believes may be his last mission: tracking down and restoring to health Francis Galliard, a young Canadian banker who has gone missing in the wilds of northern Canada.  Leithen’s quest takes him – and the reader – on a journey from New York, to a farmhouse in Quebec, by air across the Barrens to the Arctic shore of Canada and to the country west of the Mackenzie River in a search for the mysterious Sick Heart River.

The latter parts of Leithen’s journey mirror that taken by Buchan to the north of Canada in 1937 whilst he was Governor General of that country.  During this trip, in scenes reminiscent of the book, Buchan met French missionaries working with the Hare Indians, a tribe ravaged by tuberculosis.   Buchan’s first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, notes, ‘It is plain how much Buchan put into the novel of his experience in Canada, particularly Quebec and the North’.  Adam Smith also argues that in Sick Heart River, Buchan makes Leithen more like himself than in any of the earlier books in which he’d featured, such as The Power House and John Macnab.  She notes: ‘Leithen’s body – lean and getting leaner, needing sleep and waking tired, active in spite of pain – is Buchan’s.’

Janet Adam Smith reports that by 1960 the Hodder & Stoughton edition of Sick Heart River had sold around 96,000 copies.  In the US, it sold over 20,000 copies in hardback and a further 300,000 copies when published in paperback.

Sources:

David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)
Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland, 2009)
Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])