Adventure

The call of the wild

Biggles Flies North by Captain W. E. Johns, and The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle by John Buchan

Pity me, pity me for I didn’t, you might be amazed to hear, get to read many of what one might call traditional children’s classics. Not as a child. Instead, I had to read them all in adulthood. English has such a great catechism of children’s literature that, in this sub-literate age, it is so pitiable that no one reads it all. And yet, there are some advantages. I read (really read, I mean) Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in my teens. I re-read them in my twenties and loved them all the more. My pleasure at Tintin and Asterix is far greater in my late twenties even than it was when I was six.

It might have been John Sutherland who said that many books at the lighter end of popular fiction at the end of the Victorian age were effectively boys’ books. All of Stevenson, of course, Kipling, all Rider Haggard, all of Arthur Conan Doyle, all of the detective stories that began with hints in Bleak House that grew in Lady Audley’s Secret and eventually culminated (in English at least) with Poirot. All of them were really for children. Because no matter what we think of the people of the past, they were newly literate, many of them, and they wanted simple, exciting fables. Complexity, moral greyness, the kinds of things that win you Emmy awards, they did not count. No one read Dostoyevsky in English in those days. If John Sutherland did not say it, let him forgive me. I think it is not true, whoever did.

Biggles was first published by the Oxford University Press and only in later editions do they switch beer for bovril and everyone gets thumped rather than shot, and the planes stop crashing burning all within them alive or abandoning them so far away from civilisation that death from exposure is inevitable. And the books by Buchan, his Richard Hannay series, may read simply to us. But they were serious. He meant it. He meant every word.

Richard Hannay had the potential latent within him to become one of literature’s great characters. A man of resourcefulness, determination, he might have been a pulp hero like Doc Savage. He might have been a lantern-jawed commando emblazoned in a million comic books. Hannay is brave, stupidly brave. He is patriotic. He cares deeply about doing things for his fellows, for the men alongside him. He faces the prospect of death cheerfully, even if, on occasion, when the wait for a final assault drags on too long, he suffers from nagging second thoughts about whether it might be better in fact to go on living. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a beautifully compact little thriller. Hannay an apt hero of its tale.

What The Thirty-Nine Steps has, Greenmantle has half a dozen times over. The Thirty-Nine Steps almost suffers from its wonderful film adaptation, with Hitchcock throwing the kitchen sink into making Hannay seem isolated and alone, pursued across the Scottish highlands by autogyros pulled from their exhibition stands and workshops. And witty, too – almost too wittily played by Robert Donat, who gives the character of Hannay such amusing airs and so many good line readings that he becomes a more conventional hero. Fit to make a film, to gild the career of a fine actor, but not to immortalise a character. And of course, Mr Memory and the music hall, and the luminous Madeleine Carroll. Not the stuff of books, either of them.

Greenmantle has no classic adaptation and it is very well it does not. A devious story of spying and secret missions, it includes also immense battle sequences, travel across vast landscapes. Expensive to shoot, hard to choreograph. Whole cities, whole river systems, are in its compass. It takes in much of Europe; the German army; the Ottoman empire; secret plans; a caliphate resurrected; Turks and Russians. No one could film that.

And it is more exhilarating than its predecessor, significantly more. The phrase ‘world-building’ had not slithered from Hollywood lips in those days, but this is a built world. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a chamber piece, tight, constrictive, claustrophobic. Greenmantle is the whole world, the world game. The greatest game of all.