Review: Greenmantle

Greenmantle by John Buchan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm putting this one on my Best of the Year list for 2022 despite its issues, because it is a rousing good adventure story. Set (and also written) during World War I, and climaxing with the actual Battle of Erzurum, like the author's previous and better-known The 39 Steps it features Richard Hannay as the hero and narrator, making his way through numerous and varied perils. Here, however, he himself is the one involved in espionage in foreign nations, rather than opposing the espionage efforts of foreign agents in his own nation.

Like the previous book, the plot is rife with coincidences that enable it to progress (Buchan said of the first book that it was intended to fall into the genre of "shockers" that are only just barely believable). Some of those coincidences do get Hannay into trouble rather than out of it, and his choices do matter - for example, he makes unnecessary enemies of a German and a Turk, in both cases because they revolt his honest British soul, and both of them turn up again, largely by coincidence, as nemeses later.

As a book of its time, it does have elements that offend our sensibilities more than a hundred years later, particularly about colonialism and race. Several terms are used that are now considered highly racially offensive, and the author uses that unconscionable rhetorical trick of referring to ethnic groups as if they consist of only one person - "the Jew" or "the Turk" is like this or that. The implication is that these populations are monoliths, and their character can be summed up in a sentence. Ironically, he also makes the claim that British people, and especially Scots, are unusually good at getting inside the skins of people who aren't like them and understanding them - unlike, say, the Germans. If you can't set that aside and just enjoy the book for its action (and I don't blame you at all if you can't), this is not a book you should be reading. Having finished it, I understand why the person who recommended it to me said "Read it without reading about it; it's more than the sum of its parts."

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