Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 24 | Issue 1 Article 17 1989 The Rules of the aG me: Buchan's John Macnab Michael Young Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Young, Michael (1989) "The Rules of the Game: Buchan's John Macnab," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 24: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol24/iss1/17 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Michael Young The Rules of the Game: Buchan's John Macnab As a prolific and influential writer of prose romance, John Buchan oc­ cupies a key position in this genre. He is a major connecting figure be­ tween nineteenth-century romancers such as Rider Haggard and Kipling and twentieth-century writers who extend the scope of romance through such popular subgenres as the thriller and other, sometimes more radical attempts to adapt romance in the modern period. Almost fifty years after his death in 1940, Buchan still has a substan­ tial popular readership. Though literary criticism has been less attentive, there have been recent signs of a serious interest. Both kinds of recogni­ tion, however, tend to be one-sided, seeing Buchan primarily as a writer of thrillers. As with the work of Kipling, there is a need for analyses which derive their conclusions from close readings of actual texts, rather than from the author's general reputation. For such a close reading, I focus on Buchan's John Macnab. Published in 1925, when the social changes accelerated by World War I are insis­ tently visible, John Macnab is a romance adventure text produced in a pe­ riod when the easy certainty of the world view vaunted by nineteenth-cen­ tury romancers is no longer readily available. John Macnab demonstrates its author's awareness of social change and his attempt to interpret this through an application of the romance genre to postwar conditions. Thus the text not only addresses social problems but a literary one, too-that of Buchan's John Macnab 195 the viability of a genre which a dynamic history, literary as well as socio­ political, threatens to relegate to the status of an anachronism. John Macnab is a very interesting attempt to meet this double social and literary challenge, and its success as a mixture of comedy and adven­ ture is considerable. Yet it is most interesting for the limitations and fail­ ures of its content and form. John Macnab's representation of class rela­ tionships in postwar British society is backward-looking and ultimately even repellent; its proffered solutions to social problems such as unem­ ployment are similarly regressive, though at least some of the difficulties and their immediate causes are accurately identified. As a text which ex­ presses values recognizably similar to those of its classic romance prede­ cessors, John Macnab insists on retaining a highly conventional, mythical design, though it displays self-consciousness in its overt game structure'! Yet the subversive and thus investigative potential of such a structure re­ mains unrealized, for the stylization it imposes is never radically chal­ lenged. John Macnab must finally be identified as an enjoyable but lim­ ited revision of the classic romance, useful in a study of the genre's evolu­ tion and relationships to historical contexts for its illustration of the limits of the traditional romance adventure text in the modern period. The story of John Macnab is typical Buchan. Three of his recurrent heroes_Sir Edward Leithen, Lord Charles Lamancha and John Palliser­ Yeates_are suffering from depression and undertake a romantic adven­ ture as a cure. Their real identities protected by the pseudonym "John Macnab," they issue a challenge to three landowners in the Scottish High­ lands: Colonel Raden, a member of the older, landed aristocracy; the Bandicotts, rich American tenants; and the Claybodys, middle-class new rich. The heroes vow to poach game from these people's estates and at­ tempt this with varying success. The text closes with a happy ending ap­ propriate to a connc adventure through which depressioIL-social as well as individuaLhas been symbolically cured and harmony achieved. Yet, when examined closely, many aspects of the game expose the inadequacy of the text's mythologizing, both as a seriously meant representation of so­ cial problems and solutions, and as a means to contain the intrusion of 1By myth, I mean the concept which Frank Kermode distinguishes from fiction: "Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate expla­ nations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for fmding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fic­ tions for conditional assent" (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction [New York, 1967], p. 39). Presenting the dynamic of history as static, or as moving only within a prescribed patterD-progress towards the millennium of empire, for example-the classic romance is highly mythical, both formally and ideologically. 196 Michael Young contemporary social reality within a structure which attempts to preserve the credibility of the romance world. The choice of a game as a structural basis for a romance text is not surprising, for the concept of the game is deeply embedded in the genre and its ethos, as a metaphor for contests based on political, racial and class oppositions. Kipling's mythologizing of the "Great Game" of spying for the British Empire on the Northwest Frontier in Kim provides an ap­ propriate example, and the activities of Buchan's espionage-thriller heroes in texts like Greenmantle are a generic continuation of this. John Macnab develops the ludic metaphor to the point where the text explicitly pro­ claims the theatricality of the activities it represents, and embraces the melodramatic quite self-consciously. Yet this sophisticated awareness of its own properties does not lead to subversive play. Instead, John Macnab cleverly exploits self-consciousness in a reactionary way supportive of the mythical. Foregrounding the artificiality does not undermine the game but controls the kind of attention the reader gives to it. The deliberate highlighting of the melodramatic signals limits, reminding us that this is "only" a game, and thus attempting to anesthetize the reader to receive the text's ideological effect less critically. As a metaphor for the conflicts of imperial history, the classic ro­ mance game is territorial, representing invasions and defenses whose res­ olutions define possession. The game of John Macnab follows this model, but with significant differences. Writing in the 1920s, after the great age of imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, in a decade marked by the shattering effects of World War I, when domestic problems pull at­ tention back from the frontiers of empire, Buchan shifts the territory of the romance game to a nominally contemporary home space. He has al­ ready worked with this in thrillers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps, and now chooses it as the setting for a representation of a combined double con­ flict: a war game marked by the vocabulary of World War I, to be played by a cast whose participants express the oppositions which contemporary domestic history most readily presents-the problem of class relationships and identities which have dissolved rapidly from what seems, in the post­ war world, to have been the stability of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The bold incursions of an expanding imperialism firmly in the past, and the expeditions of World War I a recent and hideous reality, the romance game of invasion dwindles to a low-risk exercise fought between two home sides. Yet this repositioning of a romance game which appears to concen­ trate on a troubled present and the immediate past that has led to this is also a temporal shift into a nostalgic past based on Buchan's habitual vi­ sion of an ideal pastoral society, a social order which was already an Buchan's John Macnab 197 anachronism. The home territory which is the ground of the romance game represented in John Macnab is essentially the sacred space of ritual, culturally accepted as the land of no time where history can be transmogri­ fied to the shapes of our desiring. Thus the home territory of John Mac­ nab remains the space of mythical romance. Within this space, the war game takes the form of the duel, which, as Johan Huizinga remarks, is "essentially a play-form," fought on "a play­ ground.,,2 This choice, appropriate to a text overtly structured round a game acted out in a magical space, is reinforced by the conventionality of the duel as an element in romance genres, from the chivalric contests of medieval romance to the sword fights in Dumas and his successors, and the gunfights of the Western, which also feature in the espionage thriller, with suitable adaptations. Buchan exploits the duel's traditional charac­ teristics and function as a culturally familiar form used to structure and re­ solve romantically represented conflicts. This not only organizes the text but supplies laws which characters observe or transgress, thus defining themselves as insiders or outsiders in relation to the group of romance heroes and the values its actions express. In this way, Buchan uses the duel as an ideological touchstone which defines communal identities.