18. John Buchan:

 

The Thirty-Nine Steps

written: 1915

(105 pages)

 

read in February 2014

verdict: *** LIKE

 

The last two books had been rather disappointing, but we were determined to break our unlucky streak with the next volume. This relatively short story by John Buchan (1875-1940) sounded interesting enough. Derring do, mystery and chases in a World War One setting. Can you really go wrong with that? The internet informed us that it has even been made into a movie by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, whose movies we quite like though we had not seen this particular one yet. It is generally considered to be a classic and probably the author's most famous book. Buchan himself calls the novel a shocker in his foreword, conjuring up high expectations of suspense and action from the start. A quick perusal of the first page reassured us that the style was witty and engaging and thus we were set to enjoy our next surprise book.

 

So what was to be expected from a shocker? And would the book live up to its promise? We were eager to find out for ourselves.

 

The protagonist Richard Hannay, who is mightily bored with his life at the beginning of the story, gets entangled into a web of political spy activities and quickly finds himself on the run from both the police and the bad guys who want to silence him. Hannay's escape through the Scottish landscape, constantly persecuted by hired killers but always outsmarting them, has an overall Indiana-Jones-feeling to it. Sometimes it stretches the credibility a bit, thinking that those kick-ass professionals would be unable to catch a cocky, but otherwise ordinary man, but this is not marring the fun of the read. And the author states quite clearly that the novel was written to entertain his readers and in this he certainly achieves his goal.

 

Hannay is a very likeable person and he went on to become the hero of several more of Buchan's books. The novel is split into ten small chapters, many of which have a Sherlock-Holmesian title (e.g. The aventure of the radical candidate or The adventure of the bald archaeologist, to name only two of them) Even though every one of the people Hannay meets along the way only gets this one small chapter for himself, Buchan manages to imbue them all with an interesting life and character of their own. Also, the book is written in a beautiful and easy language with lots of dialogue, which is fun to read aloud, although the broad Scottish accent of some of the locals was quite challenging for us.

 

John Buchan was a politically active man. The novel was written right before the outbreak of World War I, which is a major topic in the book, and at times, we marvelled at Buchan's insight and almost prophetic ideas. For someone who is unfamiliar with the political intricacies of the time, some of the hints and motivations of the characters can at times be hard to follow, but then, that's an opportunity to learn more about this era. Overall, we are more than happy to declare that this book was a definite LIKE.