Tag: Buchan of the Month

#BookReview The House of the Four Winds by John Buchan #ReadJB2019

whatcathyreadnext

buchan of the month 2019 poster
20191015_134401_resizedAbout the Book

A sequel to Huntingtower and Castle Gay, The House of the Four Winds is set in Central Europe in the 1930’s. Scottish grocer Dickson McCunn features in his most exciting role.

‘Gorbals Die-hards’ Jaikie and his pals are now dabbling in politics. On his trek across Europe, Jaikie is warned to avoid Evallonia. It is in danger of being overthrown by the cruel Mastrovin. However Jaikie cannot resist taking a look and ends up needing to be rescued. Evallonia’s fate hangs in the balance until Dickson McCunn appears on the scene.

Format: Hardcover (339 pages)    Publisher: Nelson
Publication date:  1942 [1935]     Genre: Adventure

Find The House of the Four Winds on Goodreads

My Review

The House of the Four Winds is the tenth book in my Buchan of the Month reading project. (Yes, that’s right it was my Buchan of the Month for October and it’s now November. Oops!) You can find out more about the project and my reading list for 2019 here and read my (spoiler-free) introduction to The House of the Four Winds here.

The oft-quoted line from the classic film Casablanca – “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine” – comes to mind when considering the situation that sees numerous characters from previous Buchan novels find themselves, through one route or another, caught up in the politics of the fictional European country of Evallonia.  Or, as Buchan scholar Kate MacDonald notes, the book’s ‘crossover tendencies between the separate Buchan worlds’.

I’ll confess it was hard work at times trying to keep up with (or maintain much interest in) the different political factions challenging for control of Evallonia, and which characters belonged to which faction. As well as the elements you might expect from a Buchan adventure – kidnapping, miraculous escapes, cunning disguises – there are some lighthearted moments, such as a fortuitous rescue involving a circus elephant – at which point a character remarks, “Had this been an episode in a novel, it would have been condemned for its manifest improbability”.

The formidable woman who features on the dust jacket of my copy (see image above) and is much talked about by other characters – the splendidly named Countess Araminta Troyos – makes a relatively late entrance to the story in person. When she does, she has a rather disappointing role to my mind. It doesn’t help that she’s pretty much a painting by numbers femme fatale along the lines of Hilda von Einem in Buchan’s Greenmantle. (Kate MacDonald places her alongside Hilda in the ‘exotica’ category of Buchan’s female characters.)

As most critics have said The House of the Four Winds is not Buchan at his best. The book is entertaining but no more than that and, even though I’m not a particular fan of the Dickson McCunn series, I have to say the first two books, Huntingtower and Castle Gay, are better if only because they’re set in a location more familiar to Buchan.

Suitably for Nonfiction November, this month’s Buchan of the Month is Augustus, his biography of the Roman Emperor. Look out for my introduction to the book and my review later this month.

In three words: Entertaining, action, adventure

Try something similar: Huntingtower by John Buchan

Follow my blog via Bloglovin

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 2019

Buchan of the Month: Introducing The House of the Four Winds by John Buchan #ReadJB2019

whatcathyreadnext

buchan of the month 2019 poster

The House of the Four Winds is the tenth book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month 2019.   You can find out more about the project and the books I read in 2018 here and view my reading list for 2019 with links to my reviews of the books I’ve read so far here.

20191015_134401_resizedWhat follows is a (spoiler-free) introduction to The House of the Four Winds.  It is also an excuse to show off my 1942 Nelson edition of the book with its striking dust-jacket.    I will be publishing my review of the book later this month.

The House of the Four Winds was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton on 23rd July 1935 and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States on 25th July 1935.  It is the third book to feature retired Glasgow grocer, Dickson McCunn, and continues his adventures that started in Huntingtower and later Castle Gay.

The setting for The House of the Four Winds is the fictional country of Evallonia.  Buchan’s first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, ruefully notes that ‘Buchan is not at his best in the Anthony Hope [author of The Prisoner of Zenda] terrain of imaginary European states with princes, pretenders and disguises’.  In fact, she goes on to describe the story as ‘on the feeble side’, regretting the absence of the ‘sharp little scenes and characters between the moments of melodrama’ that feature in other Buchan novels.

However, she does point out that 1934 was a year of intense industry for Buchan.  As well as completing The House of the Four Winds, he wrote two works of non-fiction – Gordon at Khartoum and Cromwell – began the last Richard Hannay novel, The Island of Sheep, and started work on his book about George V, The King’s Grace.  This at the same time as preparing for the move to Canada to take up the post of Governor-General. It was perhaps useful then, that he received a higher than usual advance for the book of £1,250.

Unfortunately, Janet Adam Smith is not the only critic to be less than impressed with The House of the Four Winds.  David Daniell concedes it is not Buchan at his best although he does feel there ‘are striking images and scenes’.  He notes that it features a parade of characters from previous books.  This is a point taken up by Kate MacDonald who describes the book’s ‘crossover tendencies between the separate Buchan worlds’. She gives as examples the Lamanchas (from the Leithen novels), Jaikie Gait and Alison Westwater (from the previous Dickson McCunn books) and the Roylances, Janet and Archie (from, amongst others, The Courts of the Morning).

MacDonald also contends that Buchan was trying to make a serious point in the book about the dangers of amateurs dabbling in foreign affairs.  [I believe we can all think of some contemporary examples of that.] She makes the case that, in extending the idea of the amateur hero of the thriller into the realities of 1930s politics, Buchan is ‘looking in the direction that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene would go’.

Whilst describing The House of the Four Winds as ‘probably JB’s worst novel’ and as ‘Ruritania without the charm’, Ursula Buchan, author of the recent biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (and also Buchan’s granddaughter), does acknowledge the book’s ‘masterly dissection of 1930s angst about the growing menace of authoritarian regimes’ in Italy and Germany.  She also provides the fascinating nugget of information that the book contains the first mention of ‘mole’, meaning an undercover agent, forty years before John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Go JB!

The House of the Four Winds Floor enjoyed reasonable but hardly outstanding commercial success.  Janet Adam Smith reports that combined sales up to 1960 for the Hodder & Stoughton edition and later Nelson edition totalled 101,000 copies.  The Penguin paperback edition contributed a further 84,000 sales up to June 1964.

To find out what I thought, look out for my review later this month.

Sources:

Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (Bloomsbury, 2019)
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])
Kenneth Hillier and Michael Ross, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Illustrated Biography (Avonworld, 2008)

buchan of the month 2019