Stephen Gray
THE BUCHAN PAPERS by JDF Jones (Harvill, R79,95)
THE great pleasure of a literary hoax is external to the book itself. Did JDF Jones really recently discover the manuscript of this lost John Buchan novel, tied in a dusty pink ribbon, among the Lionel Phillips papers in the Barlow-Ra nd archives, and rig it up for print? With a suitable editor’s foreword and po stscript and footnotes, referring out to the huge corpus of Buchan shockers an d thriller s that were to come?
Or is this just a devilishly cunning rip-off of the master, a text truly to be interrogated for an odd lapse, a give-away? Those are hard to detect, because
Jones makes an exemplary job of his crib, if it is a crib. And, if not, does
some unfortunate die a truly gruesome death, the whole of the Imperial Factor fall? Con-men always do take the reader right to the chasm (of the Drakensberg escarpmen
t in the old eastern Transvaal in this case, for a lot of literal cliffhangers ). So, jump. Fiction is fantasy, anyway.
Buchan was that snooty northern Calvinist whom Lord Milner recruited from Oxfo rd for his Kindergarten (Cr_che rather, in this young lad’s case). Instead of going “reindeer-hunting in Norway with the Gathorne-Hardys”, he arrived in Joh annesburg seven months before the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War as Milner’s personal secretary.
Immediately he put everyone’s backs up by reporting to the Spectator that the concentration camps could not be that bad if Mrs Steyn and Mrs Kruger had volu ntarily taken shelter in them. He was then made to administer them and a long silence ensued. He was to become responsible for resettling no less than a qua rter of a million victims.
In Prester John (1910) he firmed up the formula to challenge bright Presbyteri an lads with a lot to learn. Native chiefs simmering into revolt (giving “eldr itch shrieks”); double-dealing Boer discontents (always “blue-eyed and canny”) ; a yellow-livered Portugoose or two (with the inevitable low touch of tar); a nd a Hunnish villainess (always “slim and lithe as a boy”, betraying the shock value of
confused sexuality) – these were his antagonists. Inevitably, a climax of thre atened homosexual rape (“filthy caresses by a mirthless rictus”) and premature emasculation.
In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1914), his first million-seller, Greenmantle (1916) and so on, he developed a cast of reliables very complimentary to South Africa . There was staunch Richard Hannay, the tough colonial who had “got his pile i n Matabeleland”, and his sidekick, girlish Piet Pienaar, who had once rustled cattle and still could “track a tsessebe in thick bush”. Both took to the tren ches witho ut demur. Jones is absolutely right to retrieve these wonderful genealogies fr om Buchan’s copybook, and redeploy them, as if they were real.
But whether anyone is still interested in these maturation rituals of the Empi re heyday is another matter. They were racist, sadistic, bloody and witless. T hat lodge in the wilderness, poised just this side of the glass barrier betwee n savagery and civilisation, may have had its rough-and-ready charms, validati ng the colonial enterprise. But too much torture, deceit and bloodletting … well, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to desert the cowboys, join the Indians.
Buchan redeemed himself to an extent by writing that while in South Africa “I ceased to be an individual and became a citizen. I acquired a political faith. ” That faith was about the benefits of the English-speaking fellowship world-w ide. For his old adversary, Jan Smuts, he wrote up the history of the South Af rican World War I effort. He married late and upwards, became governor general of Canada