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Stories

Worldly and otherworldly

John Buchan, selected and introduced by Giles Foden
The Folio Society, 384pp, £22.50,

James Buchan

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Stories by John Buchan, selected and introduced by Giles Foden

In ‘Ship to Tarshish’, Buchan creates a sort of a phantasmagoric or nightmare Canada, a country he was soon to govern for the King. ‘He hated Canada like poison.’ One can only pray that the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, never saw this story. In ‘The Last Crusade’, there is a dirty clubman’s joke all the more disgraceful for being in Latin. ‘Tendebant Manus’ is a fine story but relies for its closing effect on a misreading of Virgil. ‘The Wind in the Portico’ is a reworking of ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ without the sex. Foden also prints an 18th-century pastiche, ‘The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn’, not half so good as the brilliant Jacobite might-have-been ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’, but welcome because all but unknown.

How good was John Buchan at short fiction? Among the writers who domesticated the American and Continental short story, Buchan is not even in shouting distance of Joyce (‘The Dead’) or Kipling, but holds his own with Stevenson, James and Conrad. Foden’s judgment of these stories, because unpartisan, is even more flattering:

One only needs to begin reading them to be either taken into a separate world of the imagination or returned with a necessary bump to harsh physical reality. Many writers perform one or other of these services. Few are capable of doing both. Even rarer are those who, like John Buchan, can do both at the same time.

James Buchan’s latest novel, The Gate of Air, will be published by the MacLehose Press next week.