Category: Reading Challenges

February’s Buchan of the Month is John Buchan’s first full-length novel, John Burnet of Barns. (His first published novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors, was reviewed last month.) You can find out more about the project and my reading list for 2020 here.

John Burnet of Barns was published by John Lane on 3rd June 1898, although it had first appeared in serial form in Chamber’s Journal between December 1897 and August 1898.

Buchan’s first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, reports Buchan had begun to collect notes for this ‘novel of Tweeddale’ in 1894 with the intention of starting to write it the following summer. By the time he was at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1895, the novel was nearly finished, he had taken on a literary agent and had three publishers interested in it: Blackwood, Fisher Unwin and John Lane. He received a £100 advance from John Lane, the book’s eventual publisher in the UK.

Like Sir Quixote of the Moors, John Burnet of Barns is written in the first person and set in 17th century Scotland at a time of political and religious turmoil. However, its hero is not a French knight (as in Sir Quixote) but a boy from Tweeddale with, as Janet Adam Smith notes, interests and experiences very similar to Buchan’s own, namely ‘a taste for fishing and philosophy and long excursions into the hills’. She also points to characteristics that would feature in later Buchan novels, such as the hero being a ‘passionate moderate’ and his hatred for his enemy being tempered by a degree of admiration (see John Laputa in Prester John or Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages).

However, Janet Adam Smith notes that Buchan himself was rather ashamed of the book, later describing it as a ‘hotch-potch’ and ‘very immature and boyish’. Although conceding the book has some of the same faults as Sir Quixote of the Moors, David Daniell is rather more generous describing it as ‘a fine book for a first long novel’ and commenting that if it is a ‘hotch-potch’ it is at least a fascinating one.

No sales figures are available for the original edition of the book or the shilling edition published by John Lane in 1916 but, by the time Janet Adam Smith’s biography of John Buchan was published in 1965, the paperback edition published by Pan in 1952 had sold 30,000 copies.

David Daniell sums up John Burnet of Barns as ‘a clever, searching analysis of non-commitment done with a good deal of novelistic skill’. Look out for my review later this month to see if I agree.

Sources:

Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])
David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)
Kenneth Hillier and Michael Ross, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Illustrated Biography (Avonworld, 2008)