I can remember the
first time I read The Thirty Nine Steps. I was thirteen and was immediately hooked. Over the course of a single weekend, I
devoured all five of the novels that featured Richard Hannay. As part of my Classics Club list, I’ve recently
re-read it to see if my views have changed.
Written in 1915 and set on the eve of the
First World War, The Thirty Nine Steps
was the first of John Buchan’s novels to feature Hannay, a Rhodesian mining
engineer who has returned to the old country having made some money. Having become somewhat bored with the London
scene, Hannay gets involved with a peculiar, self-professed spy, Scudder, who
claims to have secret information about a nefarious plot to assassinate a Greek
politician, Karolides, in London and cast Europe into war. Hannay gives Scudder shelter in his flat,
only to find him murdered there some days later. Driven both to avoid being arrested for
Scudder’s murder and to stymie the plot, Hannay escapes to the Highlands, pursued
by police and plotters.
There ensues a hectically paced series of
chases, captures and escapes, featuring stereotyped Scottish labourers,
politicians and one of the genre’s classic gang of villains, the Black Stone,
and its leader:
“As he spoke his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall
a little over his keen grey eyes. In a flash the phrase of Scudder's came back
to me, when he had described the man he most dreaded in the world. He had said
that he 'could hood his eyes like a hawk'.”
Of course, after a string of exciting
escapades, Hannay solves the mystery, thwarts the plot and saves the day,
enabling Great Britain to enter the First World War still in possession of its
military secrets.
On a re-reading, I could immediately see
why I loved it so much as a child. It’s incredibly
fast-paced with plenty of action and a series of mini-cliff-hangers. Hannay is drawn as an uncomplicated and
old-fashioned sort of hero, thoroughly decent, dashing and brave, with a stiff
upper lip and a willingness to “play the game”.
By contrast, the Black Stone are evil and deceitful, the worst kind of
baddies.
On top of all that, Buchan adds a liberal
dose of conspiracy theory and international intrigue. Scudder describes his discovery of the plot
in suitably melodramatic terms:
“I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in
Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in
the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little
bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days
ago in Paris. I can't tell you the details now, for it's something of a
history. When I was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business to
disappear, and I reached this city by a mighty queer circuit.
I left Paris a dandified young French-American, and I
sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant. In Norway I was an English student
of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures, but when I left Bergen I was a
cinema-man with special ski films. And I came here from Leith with a lot of
pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London newspapers. Till
yesterday I thought I had muddied my trail some, and was feeling pretty happy.
Then—“
Now it may be thirty years since I first
read it, but I haven’t really changed all that much. I still like a good adventure story, still
love the idea of the amateur spy lurking in dark and exotic corners of the world
and remain partial to the atmosphere and style of pre-WW1 Europe. So I should still have enjoyed The Thirty Nine Steps.
And I sort of did. But not totally. In fact, I felt quite uncomfortable at
times. Buchan was a product of the Victorian
age, an Establishment figure, having served as an MP in Great Britain and,
later, as Governor General of Canada. He
therefore was imbued with the attitudes and beliefs of Empire, including views
on racial issues that are, fortunately, totally unacceptable and reprehensible
today. By way of example, Scudder
describes the forces behind the political unrest in Europe thus:
“The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make
fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no
fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than
hell.
'Do you wonder?' he cried. 'For three hundred years
they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The
Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take
any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man
you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks
Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get
behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the
manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers
the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to
the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew
in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is
ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar,
because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location
on the Volga.’”
Now there are some commentators who claim
that Buchan is just reflecting the views of Scudder, who is pretty disreputable
and discredited figure. But the general
tone of contempt for other races and nationalities is continued elsewhere in
the book. Hannay comments upon the
planned assassination of the Greek Prime Minister:
“The
fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger destiny than
the killing of a Dago.”
And so on and so on.
I’ve commented in the past about seeing
distasteful and outdated views in literature in the context of the time the
relevant book was written but, for some reason, the appearance of overt and
casual racism in The Thirty Nine Steps
gave me a far stronger emotional reaction than equally abhorrent views in books
that I liked less. Maybe it is that
juxtaposition of an old favourite novel with views with which I disagree so
strongly.
In any event, The Thirty Nine Steps remains a classic adventure story that I
found still enjoyable but far less so than it was thirty years ago.
