Let’s not call time on these unfashionable classic books
MY PENGUIN paperback copy of John Buchan’s novel Prester John still sits on the shelves. We read it at school when I was about eight. After The Thirty-nine Steps, it’s Buchan’s best-known book. Written in 1910 it’s a fast and furious adventure story which begins when a boy called David Crawfurd encounters the charismatic black preacher John Laputa in his hometown of Kirkcaple.
They meet again when Crawfurd, now 19, travels to South Africa to make his way in the world and finds that Laputa is the leader of a Zulu rebellion which calls for “Africa for the Africans” and has taken on the mantle of the legendary 15th century Ethiopian leader Prester John. There’s treasure, espionage, chases and villains. It’s a book for all agegroups. Flicking through it, one can see there are passages which read awkwardly today, redolent of the racial stereotyping of the day.
Yet all I took from the book when I first read it was the adventure and sense that Laputa – though he become’s Crawfurd’s adversary – is a remarkable man.
Frankly I’m surprised that Buchan hasn’t been cancelled yet, for the list of books with “harmful content” continues to grow.
Today Charles Kingsley’s The Waterbabies, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House On The Prairie and Frank Baum’s The Wizard Of Oz are among many classic children’s books which are considered to need “trigger warnings” because they contain content “relating to slavery, colonialism and racism”.
All these and many others are part of Cambridge’s Homerton College archive.
It’s a wonderful resource of more than 10,000 books and 900 rare children’s books. Now (with a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) researchers are scouring the digital archive in a bid to make it “less harmful in the context of a canonical literary heritage that is shaped by and continues a history of oppression”.
With this in mind I was surprised that another of John Buchan’s many novels
The Gap In The Curtain, first published in 1932, is actually being reissued by the Handheld Press. Brave!
Yet Buchan continues to sell well and the Richard Hannay novels, one of which is The Thirty-nine Steps (written in 1915) have never been out of print.
Viewers of Talking Pictures TV will almost certainly have discovered reruns of the Thames TV series Hannay starring Robert Powell as the gentleman spy/war hero/ engineer.and there are several film versions of The Thirty-nine Steps too.
Kate Macdonald, a literary historian, has written many books on Buchan. I asked her about the “problem” of republishing Buchan and she made the entirely sensible point that, “if we rejected novels because of the views expressed in them by unsympathetic characters there’d be barely anything left to read”.
She said: “ThethirtyNine Steps has a sensationally offensive remark about Jews made by Scudder, an American spy.
“Buchan makes it very clear that this remark is made by an American character (who at that period were expected to use wilder and more lurid language than British characters), a fantasist and an obsessive, and two of the most authoritative characters in the novel reject the remark.
“However, because the novel is so well-known that quotation is often cited as evidence that Buchan was antisemitic, which he wasn’t...what most people forget is Scudder dies in the first chapter, as if Buchan was saying that his terrible opinions ought to as well.”
The Gap in the Curtain is a novel about the supernatural. If you were able to see
one year into the future, what would that foreknowledge do to you?
Sally Flambard, a society hostess, introduces five countryhouse guests to a distinguished but distinctly odd Einsteinian mathematician Professor August Moe, who claims to have devised a way of seeing into the future.
What seems like a parlour game quickly becomes creepily intense as the guests go through a gruelling programme of training which finally enables them to envision a page in a copy of The Times printed a year hence.
Inevitably the glimpses of the future are indeed truly prophetic. Reggie, who is
like a character escaped from a PG Wodehouse novel, is alarmed to read in The Times that he is setting off on an expedition to the wilds of the Yucutan.
Why would he do that for he loves England and hates foreign travel?
THEN he becomes involved with the terrifyingly business-like Verona Cortal and all becomes clear.whileverona is the name of an Italian city, the word is also close to “veronal”, a popular barbiturate of the time used to inhibit brain function and sometimes as a poison. Any man would want escape her clutches.
That’s one of the funnier stories. Another involves a character taking advantage of a change of Prime Minister which he sees during his glimpse of the future. Another thinks he sees a business opportunity but gets his fingers badly burnt.
The world of politics and the City were well known to John Buchan. Born in 1875 he did classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, read for the Bar (though he did not practise as a lawyer) and during the First World War he joined the British Army’s General Headquarters Intelligence Section, writing press communiques from the
Western Front. He married Susan Grosvenor in 1907 (she was a cousin of the Duke of Westminster) and had become a Conservative Unionist MP in 1911.
He supported free trade, votes for women, the introduction of national insurance and limiting the powers of the House of Lords. In 1935 he was appointed as Governor General of Canada and died five years later after suffering a stroke and a bad fall at the age of 64.
The comfortable world of the gentleman of private means and broad interests was familiar to Buchan.
The lawyer Edward Leithen who is the narrator of The Gap In The Curtain and attends the fateful house party is also at home in this world.
He always “dines” with someone or other in houses where the Prime Minister or captains of industry might be attending, and where there’s a strong chance of seeing a “superb
Vermeer” above a dining-room mantelpiece. He’s amusingly snobbish about food and drink, favouring decent wines above the “monotonous champagne of today”.
One man is described as the sort of chap you’d like to go fishing with. I think we understand that.
But Leithen’s (Buchan’s) observations of public figures are sometimes brilliantly acute. One Conservative politician who gets a glimpse of the future is described at length.“he seemed to have the knack of getting just what he wanted with nothing to spare”, says Leithen, “but, since the things that he wanted were numerous and important, he presented a brilliant record to the world”.
I can think of one or two career politicians of today who would fit that description. Another character reads his own obituary when the page in The Times is revealed.
This is the serious core of the book. How much do we want to know about our futures? Isn’t it better to live in hope and ignorance? Buchan’s interest in time and foreknowledge was very
much of the period. Albert Einstein had predicted a fourth dimension called space/time which proved irresistible to writers in the 1930s.
JB Priestley wrote a series of dramas known as The Time Plays in the 1930s and 1940s which examine the concepts of time and foreknowledge, the most famous of which is the old school-syllabus favourite An Inspector Calls.
Both Priestley and Buchan were, like many at that time, influenced by a 1927 book called An Experiment with Time by a philosopher/engineer called JW Dunne.
Dunne was obsessed with both precognitive dreams and the idea that there is no way of describing “now” in science.
Don’t try brooding about this at home. It’ll do your head in.
Or as one of the characters in The Gap In The Curtain says with the benefit of hindsight: “Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he’ll assuredly land in the soup”.
The Gap In The Curtain by John Buchan (Handheld Press) out on Tuesday, £12.99