What Book to Read?

John Buchan (1875-1940) is perhaps best known for his book The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) which has been turned into several films and a recent TV movie starring Rupert Penry Jones. But the second Richard Hannay story, Greenmantle (1916), which hasn’t made it to the big screen, is just as good.

Greenmantle came to mind recently when I visited Turkey, because about half the action takes place there.  What a different place Turkey is today! And yet Buchan seems to have understood enough about the ailing Ottoman Empire of World War I to write convincingly about it.

Buchan wrote this ‘shocker’ for amusement during the war. He defined ‘a shocker’ as a ‘romance [ie an adventure story, not a love story] where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’.  However in his preface to the book, he defended it against charges of being unbelievable.  ‘Let no man or woman call its events improbable’ he wrote.  ‘The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism … Some day, when the full history is written – sober history with ample documents – the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage’. And while Hannay’s adventures do seem to defy the probabilities, there is an interesting layer of realism underneath.

Hannay, now a Major in the New Army, is recuperating from a shrapnel wound he sustained in the battle of Loos.  He is expecting promotion through the army ranks, but instead is asked by the Foreign Office to take on an undercover job in Germany.  Reading the story as I did first in the 1950s, its premise may have seemed very far fetched.  But in 1915 it had, and now has, a relevance that might have been overlooked then.  This is because while Germany is the enemy, the weapon she is using is resurgent Islam. 

In 1914, Enver Pasha, the leader of the Young Turks, brought Turkey into the war on Germany’s side.  Enver was trying, with the assistance of German technology, to rebuild Turkey’s military power from the ruins of the old Ottoman Empire.   ‘You will ask how … Enver … should have got control of a proud race’, says Hannay’s boss at the Foreign Office.  ‘The ordinary man will tell you that it was German organisation backed up with German money and German arms.  You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played such a small part in it all … The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods.  Yet – I don’t know.  I do not believe in Islam becoming a back number’.  He goes on: ‘we have laughed at the Holy War, the Jehad  … but … There is a Jehad preparing’.  It is Hannay’s task to find out what ‘revelation’ the East is waiting for to precipitate the Jehad, and how Germany is exploiting it.

Britain was keen to knock Turkey out of the war altogether. Her main objective was to open a warm water port for her failing ally Russia; hence the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, still underway when the book was written.  However fear of resurgent Islam may also have played a part, as it opened up the possibility that the war would spread to countries controlled by Britain with large Muslim populations such as India or Egypt.

The story has the form of a typical Buchan thriller. Hannay, with the assistance of Sandy Arbuthnot, John Blenkiron and Peter Pienaar, experience a series of episodic adventures which gradually bring them closer to the truth. As with other Buchan stories, there is a mixture of suspense and cleverness in the way Hannay solves the mystery. 

About half way through the story Hannay and Peter Pienaar arrive in Constantinople and make their way to Galata, the foreign district, where the four have arranged to meet. Hannay is not impressed.

“I don’t quite know what I had expected – a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water … I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere … I saw what I took to be mosques and minarets, and they were about as impressive as factory chimneys. By and by we crossed a bridge, and paid a penny for the privilege. If I had known it was the famous Golden Horn I would have looked at it with more interest, but I saw nothing save a lot of moth eaten barges…”

Hannay has of course managed to solve part of the riddle of how the resurgence will be inaugurated, but some of the main action belongs to Sandy Arbuthnot, whose past wanderings in the middle east have (fortunately) given him an entrée into a Turkish gypsy group, the Company of the Rosy Hours. This is a dervish-like group who ‘could dance the heart out of the ordinary Turk’. They are religiously orthodox and politically conservative, with no love for Enver, or the Germans who command the Turkish Army. Here again Buchan is using the very real Turkish tradition of esoteric mysticism expressed through dance that informed the Mevlevi  Order of whirling dervishes, and other dervish orders. He also writes with understanding of the message of those who would renew Islam, though of course their message is being perverted by the dastardly Germans.

 Blenkiron, the only one of the four who is a professional (if unconventional) spy, speaks highly of the capacity of British Intelligence; ‘If I had a big proposition to handle and could have my pick of helpers I’d plump for the Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty’ he says.  This was no doubt something of an ‘in’ joke, as Buchan became director of intelligence in the Ministry of Information at about this time. However there is little truth to the boast; the Gallipoli campaign, for example, was marked by the most appalling intelligence blunders.

Buchan has on the other hand got the military side of things pretty right. Hannay and his friends go east to Erzurum. Here the Islamic ‘revelation’ is to occur in order to boost the morale of the failing Turkish army in the face of a Russian attack. Naturally I’m not going to tell you what happens, but the Russian advance into Anatolia was one few successes of the Czarist army; they occupied Erzurum in 1915.  Buchan has taken a real political, religious and military situation, and injected into it a great adventure story. 

There are of course weaknesses; this is after all a ‘shocker’. There is some fairly wild coincidence, and some fairly stilted dialogue (‘You must, know, Madame, that I am a British officer’ or ‘You see she … she liked me’ – Buchan was never very good with women). 

It is not surprising that in Greenmantle, Hannay exhibits the prejudices of his time and class.  He, and Buchan, are highly patriotic; the story was after all written during the war.  Hannay refers to his desire to finish off ‘Brother Boche’, and is very supportive of the conflict.  However he also comes to realise ‘the crazy folly of war’.  Sheltering in a woodcutter’s cottage deep inside Germany, he reflects ‘I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine.  But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares … What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside?’  Though his chief German enemy is a caricature, he finds some Germans sympathetic. He may, however, alienate some modern readers by using phrases such as ‘he was a white man’ to signal this approbation. 

While essentially this story is just for fun, I think his grounding in reality gives it greater strength than Buchan himself ever claimed for it. And I couldn’t help but think of the four companions as we set out in their tracks across Anatolia towards Erzurum.

If you didn’t believe me when I talked about John Buchan’s Greenmantle having a strong element of reality, have a look at the review by Margaret MacMillan of a book called The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, by Sean McMeekin: I’m not the only one to notice the relevance of Buchan’s talk of holy war.