classics – Page 28 – What Cathy Read Next…

Buchan of the Month

About the Book

This modern fairy-tale is also the gripping adventure story about Dickson McCunn, a respectable, newly retired grocer who finds himself in the thick of a plot involving the kidnapping of a Russian princess held prisoner in the rambling mansion, Huntingtower. Here, Buchan introduces some of his best-loved characters and paints a remarkable picture of a man rejuvenated by joining much younger comrades in a fight against tyranny and fear.

Format: Paperback, ebook Publisher: Various
Published: Various [1922] Genre: Fiction, Adventure

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

Find Huntingtower on Goodreads

My Review

Huntingtower is the eighth 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 Huntingtower is an undated (but probably 1920’s) hardcover edition published by Thomas Nelson & Son.

Huntingtower introduces readers to Dickson McCunn, a middle-aged Glasgow grocer newly retired from his successful business. With his wife away at a health spa, he finds himself at somewhat of a loose end following his retirement. ‘It was the end of so old a song, and he knew no other tune to sing. He was comfortably off , healthy, free from any particular cares in life, but free too from any particular duties.’ He decides to take a walking tour of the Highlands. Early in his travels, he reaches a point in the road where two potential routes converge. Uncharacteristically, he rejects his intended route, drawn by some whim instead to take the other direction. The author sagely notes: ‘For he [McCunn] had come, all unwitting, to a turning of the ways, and his choice is the cause of this veracious history.’

Dickson McCunn’s decision results in him becoming involved in an adventure like something out of the romance novels he favours. There’s a damsel in distress (Princess Saskia) imprisoned in, if not quite a castle, a gloomy Scottish manor house, there’s a gang of bad guys some of whom may be foreigners (or even worse, Bolsheviks) and a lovelorn hero (modernist poet, John Heritage). But things turn distinctly hairy when it becomes clear that the bad guys will stop at nothing, are large in number and heavily armed. As Dickson reflects ruefully, ‘Romance, forsooth! This was not the mild goddess he had sought, but the awful harpy who battened on the souls of men.’ However, he faces down his doubts and fears, clinging steadfastly to the belief that there is a solution to most problems if one one applies a business mind to it (such as some sleight of hand involving a left luggage office) – and that there’s life in the old dog yet.

There’s a lot of humour in the book, chiefly contributed by the exploits of the gang of Glasgow street urchins who come to the aid of Dickson and Heritage in their attempts to rescue the Princess. The self-styled ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ are a bit like the militant wing of Sherlock Holmes’ trusty ‘Baker Street Irregulars’. Their appointed Chieftain is the feisty, courageous and resourceful Dougal.

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 the idea that only ‘a very thin crust’ separates civilization from anarchy (first explored in Buchan’s early novel, The Power-House). The book also finds a place in the story for Archie Roylance, the character first introduced in the Richard Hannay novel, Mr. Standfast.

I do need to mention some fine descriptions of food in the book, like that of the splendidly generous Scottish tea that follows. Those who are observing a strict diet should probably look away now. ‘There were white scones and barley scones, and oaten farles, and russet pancakes. There were three boiled eggs for each of them; there was a segment of an immense currant cake…; there was skim milk cheese; there were several kinds of jam, and there was a pot of dark-gold heather honey.’

As an adventure story, Huntingtower is great fun, with some exciting action scenes as the good guys go into battle against the bad guys. However, there are one or two elements to set against that. The first is that Buchan has chosen to render a lot of the dialogue in broad Scots, including liberal use of dialect words and phrases, which can at times be difficult to understand and could be off-putting for some readers. For example, ‘But if ye’re my nevoy ye’ll hae to keep up my credit, for we’re a bauld and siccar lot’. No, no idea either. However, I did like the description of one character as ‘as useless as a frostit tattie’.

Also distinctly off-putting to this reader was an ill-judged reference to Jews, the use of the word ‘cripple’ to describe someone with a disability and a general hostile and suspicious attitude to foreigners. However, one must perhaps bear in mind when this book was written (1922) and that language and attitudes we would find offensive today would have been considered less so at the time.

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is Castle Gay, the second novel in the Dickson McCunn trilogy. Look out for my introduction to the book next week and for my review of Castle Gay towards the end of September

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In three words: Adventure, humour, romance

Try something similar…The Island of Sheep by John Buchan

About 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.

About the Book

Heat and Dust is set in India, the story of Olivia, beautiful, spoilt, bored who outrages society in the tiny, suffocating town where her husband is a civil servant, by eloping with an Indian prince – and of her step-granddaughter who, 50 years later, goes back to the heat, the dust and the squalor of the Satipur bazaars to solve the enigma of Olivia’s scandal.

Format: Paperback (181 pp.) Publisher: Futura
Published: 1^st January 1983 [1975] Genre: Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Heat and Dust on Goodreads

My Review

Heat and Dust is the book selected from my Classics Club list as a result of the latest Classics Club Spin #18. I’d been looking forward to reading it, not least because Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplays for wonderful films such as A Room With A View and Howards End, and a personal favourite of mine, The Remains of the Day. I’m also drawn to books set in India. Lastly, because Heat and Dust won the Man Booker Prize in 1975, although admittedly that year there was only one other book on the shortlist – Thomas Keneally’s Gossip From the Forest. You can understand my disappointment then that I didn’t like Heat and Dust as much as I’d hoped.

Told in alternating story lines from the point of view of Olivia and her step-granddaughter (the narrator), the book moves between the 1920s and the 1970s as the narrator seeks to piece together the story of Olivia, supposedly from her letters and journals (but more of that later) and by retracing her steps, visiting the places Olivia lived in India. Throughout the book, there is a real sense of history repeating itself in the lives of the two women. Sometimes it’s a case of mistakes of the past being repeated, sometimes it’s the two women making different choices when faced with the same dilemma and sometimes it’s just the author’s clever inclusion of subtle echoes between the two timelines, such as visits to the same places.

The author evokes the atmosphere of the Indian cities and countryside through which both women travel. However, they each have quite different responses to the India they encounter. Olivia’s experience is one of boredom and isolation, of long days spent alone while her husband, Douglas, is at work, mixing just with other Europeans and then only at weekly dinner parties where very little of the culture of India is allowed to intrude. In a reference to the book’s title, ‘The rest of the time Olivia was alone in her big house with all the doors and windows shut to keep out the heat and dust.’

The narrator’s response is almost the complete opposite. She embraces the atmosphere of India and, rather than feeling closed in, feels freer than she did back in England, as she emulates her Indian neighbours by sleeping outside at night because of the heat. ‘I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space – though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my own walls to look at and my books to read.’

I suppose I should have felt sympathy for Olivia’s frustration but I’m afraid I couldn’t because she seemed so unprepared to do anything about it that didn’t involve destroying her marriage. I couldn’t decide if her professed devotion to her husband, Douglas, was actually that or in fact more reliance or dependence on him. Olivia also comes across as spoiled and self-centered. For example, when she first encounters the Nawab at a party in his palace and he appears to single her out for attention, her reaction is that ‘here at last was one person in India to be interested in her the way she was used to’. What? Similarly, Olivia professes to be ‘by no means a snob’ (she prefers to think of herself as ‘aesthetic’, as if that excuses what follows) but on a visit to the sick Mrs. Saunders, she describes that poor lady as ‘still the same unattractive woman lying in bed in a bleak, gloomy house’. Also, Olivia muses that Mrs. Saunders’ accent ‘was not that of a too highly educated person’. Right, so not a snob then.

I also really struggled to understand why Olivia (or anyone else, for that matter) should be attracted to the Nawab. He comes across as arrogant and manipulative – bordering on coercive – especially towards Harry, the young Englishman he has supposedly befriended. At one point, Harry says of the Nawab, ‘He’s a very strong person’, admitting ‘one does not say no to such a person’. The Nawab seems unashamed of his influence over Harry, to the point of self-righteousness, saying to Olivia and Douglas at one point, ‘But don’t you see, Mr. and Mrs. Rivers, he is like a child that doesn’t know what it wants! We others have to decide everything for him’. Olivia is so under the Nawab’s spell, however, that her reaction is – amazingly – to envy Harry ‘for having inspired such a depth of love and friendship’.

At the beginning of the book, the narrator comments that ‘India always changes people, and I have been no exception’. She goes on to say, ‘But this is not my story, it is Olivia’s as far as I can follow it’. My trouble was that I was never sure exactly by what means the narrator was telling Olivia’s story because the reader is often party to Olivia’s thoughts, and to Douglas’s on some occasions. Clearly, that insight couldn’t be derived purely from Olivia’s letters and journals. Furthermore, by the end of the book, how much more does the reader actually know about why Olivia acted the way she did and the consequences of her actions? Even the narrator admits ‘there is no record of what she [Olivia] became later, neither in our family nor anywhere else as far as I know. More and more I want to find out…’ You and me both, I thought.

Heat and Dust is interesting from the point of view of comparing the experiences of India by two women separated by fifty years and I liked the way the author created echoes of the earlier timeline in the later one. However, I found it difficult to engage with the key characters and some of their actions and attitudes.

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In three words: Descriptive, atmospheric, uneven

Try something similar…Staying On by Paul Scott (read my review here)

About the Author

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE was a Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She was perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards.

She fled Cologne with her family in 1939 and lived through the London Blitz. After university she moved to Delhi, India her home for 24 years (until 1975). She began to write fiction, exploring east-west encounters, and won the Booker prize. Based in New York until she died in 2013, she is best known for her Oscar-winning screenplays and her novel Heat and Dust.

Goodreads