Adventure Books

John Buchan (1875 - 1940) is most famous for The 39 Steps, which is one of the Richard Hannay quartet. Of the other three, Mr. Standfast is just okay, while The 3 Hostages is a skip. The remaining one is Greenmantle, which I read for the third time or so a couple years ago.

Also in the Haggard tradition is Lionel Davidson (born 1922). The Rose of Tibet is okay, but The Night of Wencelas is a rocker and so is The Menorah Men.

The Tragedy of the Korosko

The Tragedy of the Korosko - Arthur Conan Doyle

This action-adventure novel was written by the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle tackles the genre “foreigners in trouble,” a genre I relish since I spent ten years overseas teaching English. A group of tourists – English, Irish, American and French – are kidnapped in the Libyan Desert by fanatics. We post-moderns will give a nervous shudder at this tale torn from the headlines - “Taliban wipes out mountain climbing party in Pakistan.” 

The best point is that story always moves.  The white-man’s burden stuff is easy to make allowances for since the fanatics are so easy to despise, with their hatred of the other, easy to loathe for their contempt of human life. One fundamentalist says, “[N]one but a blaspheming dog and the son of a dog would say that all religions are one as good as the other.” So much for preaching individualism and pluralism to thems that ain't havin' 'em.

The negative point is sometimes the tone gets pompous. Readers who can still read John Buchan with only a few qualms will like this.

White Jacket

White Jacket, or The World on a Man-of-War – Herman Melville, 1598180703

This novel is not really a novel so it’s not helpful to judge it in terms of believable characters, heavy themes, appropriate drama, or scintillating dialogue. It’s a fictionalized memoir of Melville’s year on a man-of-war.

Micro-chapters of about three to five pages long describe various aspect of life and work in the world on a powerful warship. True, he calls out for reforms to ban flogging and damns the authoritarian military mind that protects members of a free republic. But mainly he describes ship’s duties, sleeping, theatricals, night watches, eating and various important and unimportant personages aboard. Readers into enthnographies of groups in closed and narrow institutions will surely enjoy analyzing Melville’s material in terms of (post-) modern theories.

I found the facetious tone grating at times but Melville is very funny in places. For example, the consultations of surgeons before an amputation is a brilliant send-up of professional conceits and courtesies and coverings on one’s hindquarters:

The assembled surgeons listened to this address with the most serious attention, and, in accordance with their superior's desire, now descended to the sick-bay, where the patient was languishing. The examination concluded, they returned to the half-deck, and the consultation was renewed.

"Gentlemen," began Cuticle, again seating himself, "you have now just inspected the limb; you have seen that there is no resource but amputation; and now, gentlemen, what do you say? Surgeon Bandage, of the Mohawk, will you express your opinion?"

"The wound is a very serious one," said Bandage—a corpulent man, with a high German forehead—shaking his head solemnly.

"Can anything save him but amputation?" demanded Cuticle.

"His constitutional debility is extreme," observed Bandage, "but I have seen more dangerous cases."

"Surgeon Wedge, of the Malay," said Cuticle, in a pet, "be pleased to give your opinion; and let it be definitive, I entreat:" this was said with a severe glance toward Bandage.

"If I thought," began Wedge, a very spare, tall man, elevating himself still higher on his toes, "that the ball had shattered and divided the whole femur, including the Greater and Lesser Trochanter the Linear aspera the Digital fossa, and the Intertrochanteric, I should certainly be in favour of amputation; but that, sir, permit me to observe, is not my opinion."

"Surgeon Sawyer, of the Buccaneer," said Cuticle, drawing in his thin lower lip with vexation, and turning to a round-faced, florid, frank, sensible-looking man, whose uniform coat very handsomely fitted him, and was adorned with an unusual quantity of gold lace; "Surgeon Sawyer, of the Buccaneer, let us now hear your opinion, if you please. Is not amputation the only resource, sir?"

"Excuse me," said Sawyer, "I am decidedly opposed to it; for if hitherto the patient has not been strong enough to undergo the extraction of the ball, I do not see how he can be expected to endure a far more severe operation. As there is no immediate danger of mortification, and you say the ball cannot be reached without making large incisions, I should support him, I think, for the present, with tonics, and gentle antiphlogistics, locally applied. On no account would I proceed to amputation until further symptoms are exhibited."

"Surgeon Patella, of the Algerine," said Cuticle, in an ill-suppressed passion, abruptly turning round on the person addressed, "will you have the kindness to say whether you do not think that amputation is the only resource?"

Now Patella was the youngest of the company, a modest man, filled with a profound reverence for the science of Cuticle, and desirous of gaining his good opinion, yet not wishing to commit himself altogether by a decided reply, though, like Surgeon Sawyer, in his own mind he might have been clearly against the operation.

One wonders in how many hospitals this scene is played out in our year 2014.

Obviously, this is not a classic for everyone, but readers of the Aubrey Maturin series will like this as will those who have braved Typee and Omoo and Mardi and Pierre.

Ghostly Christmas

Merry Christmas. The Victorians loved to tell ghost stories at Christmas time.


Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (0192829998)

The 1993 anthology is introduced by the editors. As their academic training taught them to do, Cox and Gilbert in their introduction assert that the Victorian ghost stories reveal ambivalent nostalgia for the looser rowdier 17^th and 18^th centuries and latent anxieties about the future of their industrializing society. They also give props to women who had to write to provide for their families such Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret) and Charlotte Riddell (The Haunted House at Latchford).

Surprising us post-modern readers by writing in a less serious genre than usual are Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R.L. Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Also included are writers known primarily for ghost stories, such as J.S. Le Fanu, M.R. James, and Algernon Blackwood. The tone of the stories varies. The somber tale “John Charrington's Wedding” is made all the more horrible because it occurs on a wedding day, a day that ought to the happiest for bride and groom. However, the humorist Jerome K. Jerome gives a lighter touch in “The Man of Science.”

The stories range in time, from 1852 for "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South; Cranford) to 1908 for “Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon. The stories , therefore, , represent a range of period styles. Here’s a sample of light, from Mrs. Molesworth’s "The Story of the Rippling Train:"

"'Smoke,' was my first idea. 'Can there be anything on fire?' But I dismissed the notion almost as soon as it suggested itself. The something, faint and shadowy, that came slowly rippling itself in as it were beyond the dark wood of the open door, was yet too material for 'smoke.' My next idea was a curious one. 'It looks like soapy water,' I said to myself; 'can one of the housemaids have been scrubbing, and upset a pail on the stairs?' For the stair to the next floor almost faced the library door. But—no; I rubbed my eyes and looked again; the soapy water theory gave way. The wavy something that kept gliding, rippling in, gradually assumed a more substantial appearance. It was—yes, I suddenly became convinced of it—it was ripples of soft silken stuff, creeping in as if in some mysterious way unfolded or unrolled, not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly, like little wavelets on the sea-shore.

Only a couple of the stories are so ornate as to be unreadable. Readers in the market for a variety of haints, spirits, and specters that dog unwary families that rent weird houses and travelers in lonely districts should check out this anthology.

Greenmantle

Greenmantle - John Buchan

Our hero Richard Hannay, recovering from a wound taken in the trenches, volunteers for an espionage assignment. His must find out more information about a suspected German plot to stir up the Middle East and break lines of communication and transportation between Great Britain and its eastern empire.

The American eccentric John Blenkiron (a master if dyspeptic spy) and school-mate Sandy Arbuthnot (a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy) add their unique talents to the mission. Making his way to Turkey, Hannay meets his South African pard Peter, the archetypal faithful retainer and pale noble savage.

The action rocks in the old-fashioned way of an adventure story for boys from the early part of the twentieth century. Written in 1916, it suffers from both wartime xenophobia of The Enemy and misogynistic, homophobic, jinigoistic, racist asides that have become breath-taking in our year 2013. In the Sixties, I grew up in white working class suburb where the N-word was flung about freely, but even I had to roll my eyes when the hero finished a work-out and observed, “I felt like a white man again.”

Making allowances for unfortunate attitudes of the past, I would say that of the five Hannay novels, Greenmantle is the best one, slightly edging the better-known The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is certainly better than Mr. Standfast, which is flawed in execution, and way better than the nearly worthless The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep.