1936 thriller, inter-war thud-and-blunder, last novel dealing with
Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot. Hannay is feeling old and stale,
not helped by seeing an old firebrand friend settled in suburban
domesticity, when an old promise leads to adventure one more time.
The moment-to-moment action, the car chase, the stalk across
rough country, the removal of a hostage from a school before she can
be kidnapped, the various shenanigans on not-the-Faroes… these all
work well. Buchan is still good at this stuff. And the sense of
discontent at getting old and over-comfortable is probably from the
heart (he'd recently been appointed Governor-General of Canada). But
the overall plot, never a strong point, is weak in the extreme, and
all too many people have to behave like idiots to make it work.
("We're on an isolated island waiting to be attacked. Oh, the
telegraph line's down. And the motor-boat has been damaged. That's
interesting.
Are these things under warranty?")
There's too much foreshadowing that isn't borne out: there's the
promise of a struggle of titans between Sandy and d'Ingraville, last
survivor of the villains of the previous book, because such men are on
a completely different level from ordinary mortals and only one of
them can survive… and it doesn't happen. Hannay's son Peter John has
got into falconry, and plenty of time is spent in developing this and
the particular bird that he insists on bringing on the adventure with
him… and then all she does is carry a message. The triumph is pure
deus ex machina (or possibly whale-hunt ex machina).
So when the action flags, as it does from time to time, there's not
much pull from the plot to keep one going. And one notices how silly
people are being, and that physiognomy is destiny, and just why is it
the bad guys are attacking this island anyway, given their actual
goals? And how was that disguise so totally successful against a
supremely suspicious person?
Eh. The small stuff still works. It's rather the same problem as in
some modern television, in fact, when it concentrates on the
individual nifty moments while failing to string them together
convincingly. There's too much coincidence and too little earning of
the victories.
Still good, but far from the best.
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