Tag: Buchan of the Month

Buchan of the Month/Book Review: Castle Gay (Dickson McCunn #2) by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

Castle GayAbout the Book

Retired Glasgow provisions merchant and adventurer, Dickson McCunn, first seen in Huntingtower, features for a second time in Castle Gay.

His group of boys known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ have gone on to Cambridge University. Now Dougal and Jaikie embark on ‘seeing the world’.

Their escapades involve Castle Gay, its occupant Mr Craw, and all manner of interesting characters.

Format: ebook (237 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: [1930]  Genre: Fiction, Adventure

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

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My Review

Castle Gay is the ninth 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.   Castle Gay is also one of the books on my Classics Club list.

Retired middle-aged Glasgow grocer, Dickson McCunn, first introduced in Huntingtower, returns for a second adventure in Castle Gay.  This time he plays a less prominent role in proceedings (but ultimately no less significant, as it turns out).  Instead, two of the group of boys known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ – Dougal and Jaikie –  now young men making their way in the world, find themselves in the midst of an adventure involving a reclusive press baron and the political machinations of rival factions in the fictional central European country of Evallonia.

Unlike Huntingtower, there’s no damsel in distress but there is a besieged Scottish manor house and a gang of baddies who are not only foreigners but – even worse – possibly Bolsheviks.   Throw in a few cases of mistaken identity (accidental and deliberate), some makeshift disguises, the laying of false trails and a few fortunate escapes on bicycle or on foot and you have a lighthearted entertaining adventure.   Buchan also finds an opportunity to introduce a scene involving an impromptu political speech like that first seen in The Thirty-Nine Steps.  As in Huntingtower,  Buchan has chosen to render some of the dialogue in broad Scots, but, thankfully, in Castle Gay, this is confined to just one or two characters.

The book includes two recurring features of Buchan’s adventure stories: a villain who has a great brain but no scruples to go with it; and a female character whose attractions, along with her beauty, include tomboyish tendencies, courage, the ability to move through the countryside undetected and skills as a horsewoman.   Once again Dickson McCunn plays a part in proceedings that demonstrates his calm, sensible and business-like approach to problems and that appeals to his sense of history and romance: ‘At last – at long last  – his dream had come true.  He was not pondering romance, he was living it…’.

Along the way, the previously mentioned reclusive press baron undergoes a sort of conversion.  Shorn of the luxuries of life and the protective carapace he has built around himself, not to mention a few days’ experience of ‘roughing it’ in the Scottish countryside,  he becomes a man of action rather than just populist rhetoric. ‘There were unexpected depths in him.  He was a greater man than he had dreamt, and the time had come to show it.’

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is Witch Wood.  Look out for my introduction to the book at the beginning of October and my review of Witch Wood towards the end of that month.

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In three words: Adventure, action, romance

Try something similar…The Island of Sheep  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…Castle Gay

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Buchan of the Month

Castle Gay is the ninth 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.

According to his first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, Buchan seldom read reviews of his novels.  She reports him telling his wife, “If writers mind bad reviews, they shouldn’t write books.”   I’ll be sharing my review later this month.  What follows is an introduction to the book (no spoilers!).

Castle GayCastle Gay was published in the UK in July 1930 by Hodder & Stoughton and in the US in August 1930 by Houghton Mifflin.  Unlike many of Buchan’s earlier novels, it had not first appeared in serial form.

Its protagonist is Dickson McCunn, the retired middle-aged Glasgow grocer first introduced to readers in Huntingtower (last month’s Buchan of the Month).  Janet Adam Smith notes that, as Buchan’s wrote his books to make money, he often kept on characters who had ‘won the public’s affection’.  Thus Castle Gay also sees the return of two members of the gang of street urchins known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ who, thanks to the support of Dickson McCunn, are now going up in the world.   There are other cross-references as well. Tombs, the left-wing politician, who first appeared in Mr. Standfast pops up in Castle Gay,  just as Archie Roylance, also from Mr. Standfast, had a minor role in Huntingtower.

David Daniell, author of The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan, feels Castle Gay is ‘not Buchan at his best’ but admits the book does contain some ‘striking images and scenes’ especially once the rival factions from the fictional central European country of Evallonia arrive on the scene.  Buchan scholar, Kate MacDonald, is a little more generous noting that the novel marks a departure for Buchan: ‘It is not a thriller, although it contains thriller elements.’  However, she admits it achieves only ‘a few moments of true tension’.   Nevertheless she commends it as ‘a delightful read, with a gentle and entertaining plot, rather than an action-packed adventure’. 

Dickson McCunn was to feature in one final Buchan novel –The House of the Four Winds (1935).  Hodder & Stoughton published a compendium of the three McCunn novels in 1937 under the title The Adventures of Dickson McCunn.  Castle Gay was a reasonable commercial success but did not perform as well as Huntingtower.   Janet Adam Smith reports that by 1960 Castle Gay had combined sales of 151,000 (compared with 230,000 for Huntingtower) .  The paperback edition of Castle Gay published later by Penguin had sold 53,000  copies by June 1964, again falling short of the 104,000 copies achieved by Huntingtower.

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])