Food in Books - The Island of Sheep

To join other literary meals I have enjoyed devouring - here and here and here and here and here - here is some lovely sounding - or perhaps, in the style of the narrative, I should say "some splendid" - food that I found described in John Buchan's final Richard Hannay novel The Island of Sheep. 

To being with, there is a lunch that takes place after shearing, (called "clipping" by Buchan) in Scotland:

"There was beer for all, but whisky only for the older men. There were crates of mutton-pies for which the Hangingshaw baker was famous, and baskets of buttered scones and oatcakes and skim-milk cheese. The company were mighty trenchermen, and I observed the herd of the Back Hill of the Cludden, to who this was a memorable occasion, put away six pies and enough cakes and cheese to last me for a week."

Towards the end of the book, when the action moves to a Scandinavian island, there is a description of the arrangements that his host makes to ensure his and his guests' nourishment:

"He had his own cows for milk, the mutton was about the best in the world, and he cured his own hams and bacon; he grew all the simpler vegetables, including superb potatoes: the sea yielded the fish he wanted, not to speak of lobsters, and there were sea-trout and brown trout to be had from the lochs. Indeed, I never ate better food in my life - simple food, but perfect basic material perfectly cooked. In two things only it deviated into luxury. There was a wonderful cellar in which the sherry and madeira in particular were things to dream of, and following the Northern fashion, our meals began with a preposterous variety of hors d'oeuvre."

Ah, memories of the hors d'oeuvre trollies that used to be a normal feature of English hotel dining rooms in my childhood dance briefly in my mind's eye.

Battered Penguins - The Three Hostages by John Buchan

I first read The Three Hostages when I was about 11 years old, during an Easter holiday at Trebetherick in Cornwall, beside a warm fire, while eating Cornish splits and jam and clotted cream. I think it must have been the trappings of the experience that made me recall the book with such fondness as, having just read it again, I cannot imagine that I can have followed the text with any real understanding at that age.

That being said, provided you are able to overlook the routine casual xenophobia - "I suppose he's some sort of a Dago", asks one character cheerfully, for example - and anti-semitism that seems to have been regarded as normal before World War Two, plus the unquestioned belief in British superiority that runs through the text - and I do realise that for many, many people none of these things can be overlooked - it is still a very enjoyable book.

The story is the third in the series Buchan wrote about Richard (Dick) Hannay. At the start, the reader is introduced to Hannay, happily retired, enjoying country life with his wife and young son, his social life peopled with men with names like Archie, whose idea of a good time is spending a fortnight in Scotland watching "a pair of nesting greenshanks". Before very long however poor Hannay is forced to leave his rural idyll and return to the fray, to defend the weak and the innocent from encroaching evil - and even to enlist Archie, among others, persuading him to abandon the pleasures of bird watching for a time.

The challenge Hannay and his friends face comes in the form of a man called Medina who, despite Hannay noticing, bizarrely, (presumably some kind of reference to phrenology?) that he has "the roundest head I have ever seen except in a Kaffir'', fascinates him "as a man is fascinated by a pretty woman" (make of this - and of the other homoerotic elements attached to the Hannay-Medina relationship - what you will).

I assume that Buchan chose his villain's name, which is also that of one of Islam's most important sites, very deliberately, with the intention of conjuring up an immediate hostility in his reader toward the Oriental "other". However, although East and West and their lack of shared vision are mentioned from time to time, the struggle that evolves seems more to be one of collective psychology. While Hannay's wife observes that she doesn't "believe that Dick has any subconscious self", his creator appears to have been reading a lot of Freud before writing this novel. An early chapter is even titled "Researches in the Subconscious", and the reader is left in very little doubt that the real danger facing British society at the start of the story arises from the psychological hangover of the First World War*. The balanced healthy communal psyche in existence before the war needs to be reestablished, replacing the unbalance of the psychologically concussed state of post-war society.

The threat posed by post-war mental confusion is first articulated by Dick's friend Dr Greenslade:

"Have you ever realised, Dick, the amount of stark craziness that the War has left in the world?” … Greenslade's face had become serious. “I can speak about it frankly here, for you two are almost the only completely sane people I know. Well, as a pathologist, I'm fairly staggered. I hardly meet a soul who hasn't got some slight kink in his brain as a consequence of the last seven years. With most people it's rather a pleasant kink – they're less settled in their grooves, and they see the comic side of things quicker, and are readier for adventure. But with some it's pukka madness, and that means crime ... It's a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws. Oddly enough, in spite of parrot-talk about shell-shock, the men who fought suffer less from it on the whole than other people. The classes that shirked the War are the worst ... The barriers between the conscious and the subconscious have always been pretty stiff in the average man. But now with the general loosening of screws they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting mixed. It is like two separate tanks of fluid, where the containing wall has worn into holes, and one is percolating into the other. The result is confusion, and, if the fluids are of a certain character, explosions. That is why I say that you can't any longer take the clear psychology of most civilised human beings for granted. Something is welling up from primeval deeps to muddy it … The civilised is far simpler than the primeval”

This characterisation of the world is then reiterated by a figure called MacGillivray, who I think is the head of something like MI5: 

“He began by saying very much what Dr Greenslade had said the night before. A large part of the world had gone mad, and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All the old sanctities had become weakened, and men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command, and, if he were an able man, could mobilise a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral imbecile, he said, had been more or less a sport before the War; now he was a terribly common product, and throve in batches and battalions. Cruel, humourless, hard, utterly wanting in sense of proportion, but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric – a hideous, untameable breed had been engendered … moral imbeciles, who can be swept into any movement by those who understand them. They are the neophytes and hierophants of crime, and it is as criminals that I have to do with them. Well, all this desperate degenerate stuff is being used by a few clever men who are not degenerates or anything of the sort, but only evil. There has never been such a chance for a rogue since the world began.”

MacGillivray goes on to expound on Lenin:

:Take Lenin for instance … He appeals to the normal … to the perfectly sane. He offers reason, not visions – in any case his visions are reasonable. In ordinary times he will not be heard, because, as I say, his world is not our world. But let there come a time of great suffering or discontent, when the mind of the ordinary man is in desperation, and the rational fanatic will come into his own. When he appeals to the sane and the sane respond, revolutions begin.”

He also appears to be quite prescient in his prediction of a Hitler-esque leader rising up and taking charge of a nation's collective soul:

“Your fanatic of course must be a man of genius … And genius of that kind is happily rare. When it exists, its possessor is the modern wizard … the true wizard is the man who works by spirit on spirit. We are only beginning to realise the strange crannies of the human soul. The real magician, if he turned up today, would … dabble in … the compulsion of a fiery nature over the limp things that men call their minds … the great offensives of the future would be psychological … the most deadly weapon in the world is the power of mass-persuasion.”

There is something sadly absurd and comical, (I suppose some may say offensive) about MacGillivray's arrogant comments on developments in British foreign policy:

"Lord' he cried, 'how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world. That mean that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor. We take violent sides, and make pets, and of course, if you are -phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else. It is all wrong."

If these quotations create the impression that the book is unexciting and preachy, that is actually far from the truth.  Dick, having no subconscious, listens to all this theorising and then plunges into the excitement of a typical Hannay adventure. There is much dashing about. There are many close shaves in tight places. There is  general mystery and derring do. 

The result is very entertaining and not unenlightening, as Buchan sprinkles insights, original turns of phrase and aphorisms through the text:

"England ... demands wholeheartedness in her public men. She will folow blindly the second-rate, if he is in earnest, and reject the first-rate if he is not.”

"The civilised is far simpler than the primeval”

"the limp things that men call their minds 

"The most deadly weapon in the world is the power of mass persuasion" 

and, my favourite, 

"We are all, even the best of us, egotists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds"

If you doubt the depth of Medina's evil nature, I assume his wickedly sexist suggestion that female suffrage meant a rise in the number of right wing voters will persuade you:

"There is a might Tory revival in sight, and it will want leading. The newly enfranchised classes, especially the women, will bring it about. The suffragists didn't know what a tremendous force of conservatism they were releasing when they won the vote for their sex.”

And, should you wish for relevance then I present you with Hannay's words, near the end of the drama, when he finds himself in a very tight fix indeed:

"I had chosen to set the course, and the game must be played out here and now. But I confess I was pretty well in despair and could see no plan"

If that isn't an exact parallel for the position Britain finds herself in today with regard to Brexit, I don't know what is. 

SPOILER ALERT: And, don't worry, there is hope, for Hannay emerges from his dangerous moment, (although, I have to admit, not entirely unscathed. 

*the book being written only in the 1920s, the First World War is referred to merely as the War, which adds a kind of poignance to things

Battered Penguins - Huntingtower by John Buchan

Huntingtower is a story whose central character is not Buchan's more famous creation, Richard Hannay, but the slightly more complex, far less dashing figure of Dickson McCunn.

The novel is set in Scotland just after the First World War. Dickson McCunn has just retired from thirty-five years in charge of a large shop in Glasgow and decides to set off on a walking holiday in the highlands of Scotland. Puzzlingly, Buchan provides him with a wife, who is not accompanying him, as she likes to holiday at something called a "hydropathic", a place McCunn loathes. A moment of regret allows the reader to discover that "Once he and his wife had had similar likings, but they had taken different roads since their child died." This unsettling fact remains entirely in the background, a faint hint of something rather sad, beneath what is essentially a highly romantic adventure story.

McCunn soon finds himself "pitchforked out of ... that old happy world ... the cosy inn, the Compleat Angler, the Chavender or Chub" and instead drawn into a complicated but exciting plot involving a Russian princess and some terrible baddies. He, together with the urchins known as the Gorbals Die-Hards and a couple of others, eventually saves the day, needless to say.

It is all very enjoyable escapism and wonderfully unselfconscious in the display of prejudices and attitudes that would probably not pass muster were the manuscript to appear in a publisher's office today - to pluck one example out, this piece of dialogue should suffice:"I think you are worse than a coward. I think you are a cad." There is evidence of insight into character - "Now it is an odd trait of certain mild people that a suspicion of threat, a hint of bullying will rouse some unsuspected obstinacy deep down in their souls" - and understanding of humanity in general - "civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust". There is quite a lot of good food, which I've recorded elsewhere on this blog. There are some rather good sayings - someone is described as a "Bit hairy about the heels" and on a stormy day someone observes, "the wind's enough to take the wings off a seagull".

The Gorbals Die Hards "those gallant little boys", are a wonderful invention, that "ring of small shockheads ... so tiny, so poor, so pitifully handicapped and yet so bold in their meagreness", The repudiation of the fear Dickson has that he is too old to act is very comforting for older readers and the verse he sustains himself with:

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labour, then only, we're too old - 
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?

is worth keeping in mind, at least the first two lines anyway.

Similarly the contention that what makes Dickson so terrific is that he is "what they call the middle class ... the stuff which above all others makes a great people ... [that] will endure when aristocracies and proletariats crumble" is very satisfying if you too are middle class - and few who read and enjoy Buchan will be anything else.

But perhaps what turns the book from merely enjoyable to great is this passage:

"...he glanced towards the just-vacated chair. 'Australian,' he said.
'How d'you know?'
'Can't mistake them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe today. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked like Phoebus Apollo.'

Such wisdom, such truth. Did I say this was a rollicking adventure story? I was wrong - it is a magnificent work of literature, natch.

But Is It Gluten Free

I am reading a novel by John Buchan called Huntingtower. In its pages, I have just come across a description of a meal that might be straight out of Enid Blyton's Famous Five fantasies.

The two protagonists of Buchan's novel have just persuaded a widow in a village to give them beds for the night and now they are sitting down to a really good tea. I love posting fictional meals, so here is the passage about what exactly the old lady gives them to eat:

"A quarter of an hour later the two travellers, having been introduced to two spotless beds in the loft and having washed luxuriously at the pump in the backyard, were seated in Mrs Morran's kitchen before a meal which fulfilled their wildest dreams. She had been baking that morning, so there were white scones and barley scones, and oaten farles, and russet pancakes. There were three boiled eggs for each of them; there was a segment of an immense currant cake ('a present from my guid brither last Hogmanay'); there was a skim-milk cheese; there were several kinds of jam, and there was a pot of dark-gold heather honey. 'Try hinny and aitcake,' said their hostess. 'My man used to say he never fund onything as guid in a' his days.'"

(We are in Scotland, I should add, for those baffled by the rendering of the widow's accent.)