‘There’s a dry wind blowing through the East and the parched grasses wait and spark.’ This is not the sort of language we associate with a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, but things were different in 1916. Not altogether different, however. ‘Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then?’ ‘Then there will be hell let loose in these parts pretty soon.’
Happily, for this is fiction, that hell will be arrested, the dry wind calmed, thanks to the efforts of our four heroes: a South African mining engineer of Scots extraction, the Eton- and Oxford-educated younger son of a Scottish peer, a dyspeptic American whose eyes have previously ‘seen nothing gorier than a Presidential election’, and an Afrikaner hunter with a dubious past: ‘He had been in Swaziland with Bob Macnab,
and you know what that means.’ Actually this is the only mention of Bob Mcnab in Greenmantle, but the throwaway line is typical of John Buchan’s cavalier way. It is indeed one of my favourite lines in the canon, even if it doesn’t quite match Sandy Arbuthnott’s sublime observation in The Three Hostages: ‘Nothing wastes time like dodging assassins.’ How true, how very true. Those who endured the recent chaos at our airports will nod their heads in agreement.
The plot of Greenmantle is, even by Buchan’s standards, absurd. Richard Hannay is commissioned, despite his ignorance of the East — ‘I never saw a Turk in my life except a chap who did wrestling turns in a show in Kimberley’ — to prevent the Germans from stirring up a Holy War or Jihad. (Buchan spells it Jehad.) Time is short. He meets that evening the American, John S. Blenkiron, and Sandy Arbuthnott (modelled on Aubrey Herbert, grandfather, among other claims to fame, of Auberon Waugh.) It is 17 Nov- ember. ‘If we can’t find out what we want in two months we may chuck the job. On 17 January we should foregather in Constan- tinople.’ Considering that all have to get there by devious routes, this is a tight itinerary. Hannay himself, posing as an Afrikaner eager to resume fighting the British, must go first to Lisbon, there attract the interest of Geman agents, then be shipped to Germany as a useful man, win the confidence of the authorities and persuade them to send him to Constantinople. Tough going.
Coincidences abound. No writer of what Buchan called ‘shockers’ disdains coincidence. It is a way of keeping the story moving and of getting your hero out of difficulties or, alternatively, into them. But Buchan’s use of coincidence is splendidly shameless. Hannay, for instance, meets his old friend the Boer hunter Peter Pienaar just by chance in Lisbon; later, after they have been separated by the Germans, he encounters him again sitting on the banks of the Danube hoping to thumb a lift to the Bosphorus. Hannay, Blenkiron and Peter all do their bit, but the key man is Sandy who, fortunately, ‘can pass anywhere as a Turk’. He is the sort of chap you hear about ‘at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains meet the Adriatic, and if you struck a Mecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy’s friends in it.’ Sandy can even assume the role of the prophet ‘Greenmantle’, the novel’s Osama bin Laden figure, when the real Greenmantle dies, conveniently, of cancer.
When Buchan wrote Greenmantle and for decades afterwards, his nightmare vision of a resurgent Islam and a new Jihad seemed out of date, mere romantic melodrama. Arab nationalism, not Islam, was the idea on the march: Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. Nasser and the various Ba’athist leaders like Saddam Hussein had little time for Islam. It was backward, and they were all for modernity. Sandy, naturally, was wiser:
The West knows nothing of the true Oriental. The Kâf he yearns for is an austere thing. It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror. The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones … They want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the noble bareness of the desert.
Maybe Greenmantle should be a set book for our security services. It might help them understand what we are up against. It may indeed help us all to understand why middle-class Muslim boys reared in this country turn against it and all our ways, in thrall to ‘the prophet of this great simplicity’.
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