RogerBW's Blog: The Courts of the Morning, John Buchan

1929 thriller, inter-war thud-and-blunder. In South America, Sandy Arbuthnot and Archie Roylance find themselves involved in fomenting a revolution, but not in the usual way.

This is sometimes regarded as one of the Richard Hannay books, but his involvement is limited to a prologue getting some of the actors in place. The country of Olifa, on the western coast of South America and perhaps very loosely cognate with Peru, is in an odd position: it has peace and prosperity, but it all seems to stem from the copper mines of the Gran Seco, which are under autocratic rule by a mysterious outsider known as Castor. Clearly he's up to something, but even getting to the place to take a look is a challenge when he controls not only railway access but the government too.

The solution, as it turns out, is to start a revolution in the name of Castor, and to kidnap him so that he can't disavow it; and then to work on "saving his soul" while trying to win the guerrilla war against the government forces (with irregular mounted infantry against a modern semi-mechanised army).

This is an oddly schizophrenic book. There's a certain amount of the stalks over rough ground where Buchan is at his best (particularly when Archie's wife Janet is escaping from some of Castor's bodyguard); there's also alternate-world military history, both large scale (troop movements and battles) and small (an account of an attack up supposedly un-climbable cliffs would be at home in a book about commando raids in the Second World War). Aircraft are important, though largely for scouting and transport. Frequent reference to the maps will be necessary if one wishes to keep track of what's going on where. And there's the overall cunning plan, which is to get Castor to care about something, rather than leave him doing things simply because he can.

This leaves the pace frankly glacial; the military history would perhaps have gone over better without the occasional exciting moments, and certainly vice versa. There's remarkably little of Sandy, who is off having excitement away from the narrative's eye; Archie and Janet are the closest we get to viewpoint characters. There's a romance, hinted at earlier but actually conducted entirely within the space of the short epilogue when one of the principals isn't even present.

It's a story of Great White Saviours, of course: while there are good Olifans who are more than merely cannon-fodder, there's no suggestion that they could have brought the thing off without help from the Good Guys. All the natives ("Indians") are noble and competent, and all the minions of Castor are foreign and/or misshapen (which comes to the same thing really).

It's… well, all right, I suppose. It certainly doesn't spur me to go on and read more Buchan. Which is odd, because the next year's Castle Gay (which I've previously reviewed) is very much better.

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