Buchan’s Prester John challenges the modern reader

It is a moot point which never worried boys of my generation for whom Buchan was the supreme writer of adventure stories, the man who opened up worlds, not quite of fantasy but of a new reality which bordered on, but did not quite coincide with, life outside the windows.

No other author could construct a story with such expertise, or could equal his ability to build tension, create a sense of overbearing menace, and make exotic lands, like South American pampas, seem recognisable.  Later it was possible to detect this mastery as an instance of Buchan’s deep-rooted sense that civilisation itself was fragile, that the whole edifice of law and its restraints was liable to topple in the face of enemies who were omnipresent even if concealed by a patina of normality.

The Galloway of Thirty-nine Steps was in one sense familiar, but under Buchan’s guidance it was transformed into a place of over-arching threat. That was an important lesson.

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Prester John offered the chronicle of a different threat, an imminent revolt by African peoples in South Africa. To my younger self, all this seemed no more than a piece of derring-do, the standard stuff of the adventure novel, but what would it be like to revisit Buchan 60-odd years on? 

His reputation has been hauled this way and that in recent times, some critics awarding him a place almost equal to Robert Louis Stevenson among Scottish novelists, but others downright dismissive or hostile, branding him an anti-semite, a racist or rancid imperialist. I assume his work is now preceded by dire trigger warnings in some academic circles. 

Childhood works become part of the lumber of the mind and memory, startlingly so. They have a different emotional weight, but what of their intellectual or moral impact? Could they withstand the more probing, altered standards of our times?  From the first pages, the initial, disconcerting impression was of touring a museum, of reading over someone’s shoulder or of eavesdropping as some stranger read out a text for the benefit of some invisible third party.

Prester John (1910) was one of Buchan’s earliest novels. At the end of the Boer War, he was invited by Lord Milner to join him in South Africa in administering the pacified colony. He found in that land something which challenged the range of his imagination and capacity for wonder, and stimulated him into expanding his already considerable descriptive powers.

He had a rare talent for painting scenes in a few unfussy but vivid words, occasionally rising to another level with a subtle touch of poetry.  His narrative prose can be interrupted by an unexpected reference, for instance, to the “horns of elfland”. In a few words he sketches in the bush and the uplands through which David Crawfurd, his hero and alter ego in Prester John, travels and where the adventure unfolds.

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Buchan himself had had doubts, which he suppressed, about the justice of the recently ended Boer war itself, concluding that Britain had been “just” on the right side in the struggle with the Dutch settlers. The war had divided public opinion in Britain, with opposition led not just by pacifists but by another faction which was actively pro-Boer.  GK Chesterton wrote a poem lamenting the days of his youth when “the peace of a harmless folk was shattered/when I was twenty and odd years old”. 

Buchan, no pacifist, may well have been tempted by this viewpoint, but the harmless folk in question were the newly arrived Boers. What remains in retrospect jarring about both sides over this war was that neither gave any weight to the interests of the native peoples whose lands were being taken and lifestyles crushed by the invading incomers. The war was a European struggle fought in far-off lands.

Conversley, the Boers scarcely feature in the novel. The enemy is a resurgent African force, led by a modern-day Prester John, a re-incarnation of the semi-mythical being, Christian in outlook, who in the late Middle Ages had become a leader in the lands around Ethiopia. His legend lingered on as a once and future king, who would lead a freedom struggle in Africa against the colonists. 

Author John Buchan was of his time, writes Joseph Farrell

The original had, in Buchan’s fiction, left somewhere a treasure trove of jewels and a fabled snake belt which would enrich and legitimise his successor.  Prester John’s mantle is taken up by John Laputa, an African, a surprising minister of religion and a man of super-human strength of mind and body. When still a boy, Crawfurd first met Laputa in Kirkcaple where he had come to preach the gospel from the pulpit of the local kirk where Crawfurd’s father was minister.

However, that night David and his friends espied him on the beach, dancing naked round a fire, chanting to some primitive force. When he sees the boys he pursues them with murderous intent, but they make their escape.  This first encounter sets the scene and establishes the nature of the conflict, developed with passion and panache, but which also makes it clear that Laputa, for all his charismatic magnificence, is on the side of barbarism.

Buchan’s villains were never banal miscreants, but this one stands out as a superman, gifted with leadership qualities.  Physically and psychologically, Laputa towers over his contemporaries, wins their respect and assent to his claim to lead them to liberty.  “His word,” as recorded by Crawfurd, was “Africa for the Africans”, but that is not to say that two equal contending ethical forces are pitted one against the other. Buchan is not even ambiguous towards this new force, although he does afford it a fair hearing. When Crawfurd manages to make his way into a rally and hear Laputa address his followers, he is impressed in spite of himself. 

“My blood should have been boiling at this treason. I am ashamed to admit that it did nothing of the sort. My mind was mesmerised by this amazing man.”  Ultimately Crawfurd and the white man are on the side of right, making Laputa a representative of barbarism and an enemy to be overcome. He is enabled to give powerful voice to his beliefs and aspirations, but they are not given legitimacy. Buchan writes from an unquestioning imperialist stance. That never bothered my younger self.

It does challenge the modern reader. The fact that Buchan throughout uses the word Kaffir of Africans is not in itself sinister, since it was only in later times, under apartheid, that it acquired the vicious overtones it retains today.  However, Buchan’s view of African people, of white supremacy, as well as his anti-semitism is troubling. When John is dead and the uprising suppressed, David Crawfurd realises that he himself has developed from being “a rash boy into a serious man”. 

That phrase has a precise meaning, conveyed in the language of Kipling: “I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all the risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king: and so long as we remember this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but whenever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.”

How do we today approach values such as these which underlie Buchan’s fiction? What are the standards we are expected to apply in an age of “cancel culture”? Is it sufficient to assert that John Buchan was a man of his time who reflected the standards of his age however unacceptable they may seem to our supposedly hyper-sophisticated or over-sensitive culture? Can we tranquilly recognise negative facts and still relish his fiction?  For me, there is no reason to suppress Buchan in the name of the currently fashionable zeitgeist.

There was more to him than the racism, a word not yet coined in Buchan’s day, that rightly arouses contemporary spleen. It is the naivety of our age to demand standards of flawlessness that no human can meet, especially when moral standards change in history. What are our beliefs that will cause future generations discomfort?  John Buchan was a great teller of tales, with a generosity of vision even if it was not all-encompassing. His works throb with life, and he merits a high place in Scottish Literary history, whatever his occasional blindness.