Category: Buchan of the Month

Buchan of the Month: Introducing…Huntingtower

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Buchan of the MonthHuntingtower is the eighth book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month. To find out more about the project and my reading list for 2018, click here.  If you would like to read along with me you will be very welcome – leave a comment on this post or on my original challenge post.  I’ll be sharing my review later this month.  What follows is an introduction to the book (no spoilers!).

HuntingtowerHuntingtower was published in the UK in August 1922 by Hodder & Stoughton and in the US in November 1922 by George H Doran Company.  Like many of Buchan’s early novels, it had first appeared in serial form, in this case in Street & Smith’s The Popular Magazine in the editions published on 20th August and 7th September 1921.

David Daniell, author of The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan, describes Huntingtower as ‘a stirring adventure’ and notes that it was the first novel Buchan wrote at Elsfield, the house in Oxfordshire that became his family home.  Buchan scholar Kate MacDonald, describes Huntingtower as an ‘ostensibly gentle thriller’ with ‘elements of classic Stevensonian romance’, a comparison Buchan would no doubt have been happy with given that Robert Louis Stevenson, along with Sir Walter Scott, was one of his literary heroes.

Huntingtower introduces readers to Dickson McCunn, retired middle-aged Glasgow grocer.  He is based on Scottish literary professor, William Paton Ker, to whom the book is dedicated.  In the book, along with modernist English poet, John Heritage, and Scottish landowner, Archie Roylance, Dickson McCunn becomes involved in the rescue of Princess Saskia who has been captured by a group of dastardly Bolsheviks.   The book also introduces the reader to the gang of street urchins known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ – a sort of equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ trusty ‘Baker Street Irregulars’.  Kate MacDonald sees the Gorbals Die-Hards as Buchan’s response to the overly sentimental treatment of children (and of rural life in general) in the so-called ‘Kailyard School’ of Scottish fiction that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Dickson McCunn was to feature in two further Buchan novels – Castle Gay (1930) and The House of the Four Winds (1935) – although MacDonald describes these as ‘continuations’ rather than sequels.   Hodder & Stoughton published a compendium of the stories in 1937 under the title Adventures of Dickson McCunn. A film version of Huntingtower was released in 1927 starring the well-known Scottish music-hall artist of the time, Harry Lauder, as Dickson McCunn.  A six-part BBC TV series was broadcast in 1957 and there was a second adaptation in 1978.

Huntingtower was a reasonable commercial success, selling 18,000 copies in its first year of publication.  Buchan’s biographer, Janet Adam Smith, reports that by 1960 it had combined sales of 230,000.  Huntingtower was published by Penguin in 1956 and this edition had sold 104,000 copies by June 1964.

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])

 

Buchan of the Month/Book Review: The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

The Watcher by the ThresholdAbout the Book

The Watcher by the Threshold is a collection of five stories from John Buchan, author of ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’. The pagan themes and classic adventures are set in the Scottish countryside.

Format: Paperback (224 pp.)    Publisher: Aegypan
Published: 1st December 2006 [1900]        Genre: Short Stories, Ghost Stories

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Watcher by the Threshold on Goodreads

My Review

The Watcher by the Threshold is the seventh book in my Buchan of the Month reading project.  You can find out more about the project plus my reading list for 2018 here.  You can also read a spoiler-free introduction to the book here.  My copy of The Watcher by the Threshold is part of a hardback compendium entitled Four Tales, published by Blackwood in 1944 (first edition February 1936) which also contains The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Power-House and The Moon Endureth (another short story collection).

The collection is made up of five stories, all set in the Scottish Highlands and with an element of the supernatural.

In ‘No Man’s Land’, superstition turns to reality in a frightening encounter with a legacy of the past.
In ‘The Far Islands’, a small boy, the last in a family that goes back generations, is transfixed by visions of an island beyond the horizon always just out of reach.  Only in the final pages of the story does he attain his dream, but at what costs?
In ‘The Watcher of the Threshold’, a man’s friend becomes convinced that a devilish presence is constantly at his side, plunging him into melancholy and driving him to ultimately desperate acts.
In ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’, a battle between good and evil, love and hate, is played out at a place and on a night of the year when evil forces abound.
Finally, in Fountainblue’, a return to the place of his boyhood brings about a moral and emotional crisis as a man realises that success in the modern world is not enough for true fulfilment.

In the stories that make up The Watcher by the Threshold, Buchan explores many of the themes that he would revisit in later books: self-sacrifice, the virtues of the outdoor life and physical activity and, most notably, the thin line between civilisation and chaos.  For example, in an oft-quoted line from ‘Fountainblue’, the narrator Maitland remarks, ‘There is a very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors’, describing the division as ‘a line, a thread, a sheet of glass’.

The stories in The Watcher by the Threshold have an eerie feel reminiscent of the ghost stories of M. R. James but played out in the wilds of Scotland where the physical perils of bog and mountainside await alongside more metaphysical dangers.   The Watcher by the Threshold is one of my 20 Books of Summer and my book for July’s theme of the BookBum Club on Goodreads – That Is So Last Year.

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In three words: Eerie, unsettling, supernatural

Try something similar…Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James

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.