Greenmantle by John Buchan
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Scottish Fiction at 12:00 on 27 January 2025
Hodder and Stoughton, 1918, 309 p.
This is Buchan’s second book to feature Richard Hannay as its protagonist (the first being The Thirty-Nine Steps) and it is very much of its time, displaying all the attitudes we might expect of a novel written when the British Empire was at its height – before the Imperial overstretch resulting from the treaties ending the Great War – and more especially of a man (Hannay) whose formative experiences took place in South Africa.
It is what must be called an adventure novel, ranging over Europe from Britain through Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Balkans and finally Turkey, within which Hannay gets into all sorts of scrapes and situations and somehow manages to come through them all barely scathed.
It starts when he is convalescing after the Battle of Loos and is tasked by his old acquaintance Walter Bullivant with trying to prevent the Germans from using a prophecy of a Muslim religious leader who will bring prominence back to Islam to overthrow British control of Egypt, a point at which Buchan has Bullivant say presciently “‘I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.’” Intelligence of this plan – conveyed to Britain via Bullivant’s son who died in the effort – has only three clues; the words Kasredin, cancer, and the cryptic v I.
A team composed of Hannay’s friend Sandy, a US citizen called John Blenkiron, an old Boer Pieter Pienaar and Hannay himself make their separate ways to Constantinople, as it then was. Hannay’s lies through Germany, posing as a discontented Boer. There he meets the almost cartoonish German Colonel Ulrich von Stumm so stereotypical a German it’s possible he was the prototype.
The text has several observations about such men. The German “has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men …. He may have plenty of brains … but he has the poorest notion of psychology of any of God’s creatures.” This is followed by “In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises,” a notion that is strikingly misguided in the light of latter events.
By the time they get to Constantinople the group has between them unravelled the clues. Kasredin refers to an old Islamic story of a leader called Greenmantle, whose modern avatar it turns out has cancer. v I is a woman called Hilda von Einem. Ater more adventures they finally end up in eastern Turkey in time to play a crucial part in the Erzurum offensive.
As well as unthinking references to Jews as if that designation told us anything about the person referred to, the text has some now antiquated spellings; Moslems, Jehad, Bosporus, Bedowin, Bagdad, Windhuk, uses ‘England’ for Great Britain, plus the phrase ‘a white man’ as a term of approbation, the casual aside that a ‘negro’ brought coffee, not to mention Hannay as narrator saying he had been a nigger-driver.
File in “of its time.”
Pedant’s corner:- motnhs (months,) General Smuts’ (Smuts’s; which appeared a few pages later,) “terribly honest in some ings” (some things,) a missing full stop (x 4,) “I wondered if I had woke up his suspicions” (woken up,) nicknacks (knick-knacks,) “for people to disappear in ;” (‘to disappear in;’) “scarcley begun” (scarcely,) “uncommon like inspiration” (uncommonlike?) “more rot to the second that any man ever achieved” (than any man,) “must have woke the dead” (woken.)
Tags: Erzrurm offensive, Greenmantle, John Buchan, Richard Hannay
San
29 January 2025 at 19:02
Of its time, yes, but a great read.
I don’t think it fair to complain of antiquated spellings: in another universe, Buchan’s spellings may have stood.
Hate England beng used as a synonym for Britain.
jackdeighton
29 January 2025 at 20:06
San,
I certainly rattled through it.
I hoped I was noting the now superseded spellings rather than complaining about them.
England for Britain was annoying, though, especially since Buchan was Scottish.