Tag: classics

Buchan of the Month: Introducing… The Long Traverse by John Buchan #ReadJB2020

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My final Buchan of the Month for 2020 is The Long Traverse. It was published posthumously on 12th August 1941 in the US by The Riverside Press and on 10th November 1941 in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton with an epilogue written by Buchan’s wife, Susan. Both the US edition and the Canadian edition (published in September 1941 by The Musson Book Company) carried the alternative title Lake of Gold.

20201202_142426-1My own copy (pictured right) is a first edition although without dust jacket sadly. However on the plus side, it contains illustrations by John Morton-Sale, whose work appeared in books by J. M. Barrie, Beverley Nicholls and others.

John Buchan started work on The Long Traverse in 1938, at which time he was Governor General of Canada. (He had been appointed to that post in 1935 and at the same time given a peerage, becoming Lord Tweedsmuir.) Janet Adam Smith, Buchan’s first biographer, quotes from a letter to his sister Anna (the novelist O. Douglas), in which he reports, “I am trying to write a Canadian Puck of Pook’s Hill. You see Canadian history is obligatory for the schools, but the books are perfectly deadly, and there is really nothing to engage the imagination of a child, and yet there are few more romantic stories in the world”.

On 5th February 1940, Buchan reported to Anna, “I have finished my novel [Sick Heart River] and my autobiography [Memory Hold-The-Door], and am almost at the end of my children’s book about Canada. This will leave me with a clear field for farewells this summer.” Sadly he never got time to finish The Long Traverse or make those farewells to a country he’d grown to love, as he died suddenly on 11th February.

In The Long Traverse, the role of Puck in Rudyard Kipling’s original is taken by an Indian (or, as we would say today, a member of the First People) through whose magic Donald, a young Canadian boy, is given visions of various visitors to Canada’s shores over the centuries: “the Norsemen, the voyageurs, the Highland explorers, the fur-traders and the Eskimos”.

Unfortunately, the book was not a commercial success. It had sold only 15,000 of the 25,000 print run by the following spring, at which point its price was reduced. However, as Andrew Lownie reports, in 1964 part of it was adapted and set to music as an ‘orchestral-choral fantasia’.

Look out for my review of The Long Traverse later this month.

Sources
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)
Andrew Lownie, John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (Constable, 1995)

#BookReview The Free Fishers by John Buchan #ReadJB2020

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The Free FishersAbout the Book

When Anthony Lammas, minister of the Kirk and Professor of Logic at St Andrews University, leaves his home town for London on business, he little imagines that within two days he will be deeply entangled in a web of mystery and intrigue.

But he’s no ordinary professor. His boyhood allegiance to a brotherhood of deep-sea fishermen is to involve him and handsome ex-pupil, Lord Belses, with a beautiful but dangerous woman. Set in the bleak Yorkshire hamlet of Hungrygrain during the Napoleonic Wars, this is a stirring tale of treason and romance.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)              Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date: January 1936 [1934] Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Free Fishers on Goodreads

My Review

My Buchan of the Month for October is The Free Fishers which was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton on 24th October 1932. You can read my earlier blog post introducing the book here.

The Free Fishers of the title is a secret brotherhood of the sea-folk of Fife akin to a masonic order, of which the book’s hero, Anthony Lammas, is an honorary member. As he explains, its full name was the Free Fishers of Forth ‘but its name was not often spoken. To be a member was to have behind one, so long as one obeyed its rules, a posse of stalwart allies’. Like the secret groups in other Buchan novels, The Free Fishers have means of covert and rapid communication.

The plot of The Free Fishers follows a familiar Buchan theme, that of the ordinary man taken out of his normal sphere and catapulted into a world of adventure.  Nanty (as he is known to his friends) finds himself pitted against a villain described as ‘the most dangerous man now alive on earth’ whose evil intention is eventually revealed as murder and the ruining of the reputation of an innocent lady.

As Nanty notes, “In two days he had stepped out of order and routine into a world of preposterous chances. He had been hunted by those who sought to do him a mischief; he was endeavoring to wrest a malign secret from a moorland fortress; he was trying to save a friend from death; and now in the dark of the moon he was tramping the high hills with an unknown lady.”

Along with some companions he encounters along the way, Nanty sets out to try to foil the dastardly plot involving breakneck journeys by His Majesty’s Mail and by carriage across England. These are thrillingly described and really conjure up the experience – and perils – of travel by highspeed coach in the Regency period.

The villain himself is more spoken about than seen until he and Nanty finally confront each other during the book’s dramatic climax.  Anthony Lammas, the man of letters proves himself a man of deeds as well and gets a glimpse of the romance his life has so far missed.

As those familiar with Buchan’s writing might expect, there are some great descriptions of landscape.

“The rooks were wheeling over the plough-lands and snipe were calling in every meadow. The hawthorn bushes were a young green, every hedge-root had its celandines and primaries, and there were thickets of sloe, white as if with linen laid out to bleach.” (Fife, Scotland).

“The reedy watercourses were ablaze with marsh marigolds, the wayside banks were white with marguerites, the fat pastures between the dykes were gay with daisies and butterflies… At the turn of the road the sails of a huge old windmill were slowly turning, and he heard the chack-chack of the pump.” (Norfolk Fens)

I can’t say if Ursula Buchan’s likening of The Free Fishers to ‘a Georgette Heyer novel, but written by a man’ is a fair one as I have never read a book by Georgette Heyer.  However, I can completely agree with her description of The Free Fishers as ‘a rollicking, exuberant story’ that I really enjoyed.

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is his portrait of Britain during the reign of King George V, The King’s Grace, published to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the King’s accession to the throne.

In three words: Fast-paced, dramatic, adventure

Try something similar: Huntingtower by John Buchan

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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 one hundred 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 2020