The Villain in the Spy Novels of John Buchan

81 THE VILLAIN IN THE SPY NOVELS OF JOHN BUCHAN By Philip E. Ray (Connecticut College) Unlike the heroes, about whom everyone agrees, the villains in John Buchan's spy novels have aroused considerable critical discussion . In his "existential-phenomenological" study of the thriller genre, Ralph Harper observes that "in John Buchan's world, evil is represented in a rather adolescent form" and that "the awareness of evil is sentimental, vague, telling more about the boy's sense 2 of duty to kill the dragon than about the character of the dragon." Gertrude Himmelfarb, on the other hand, finds the dragon to be impressive in its own right. Her essay on the Victorianism of John Buchan contains the following account of the typical Buchan villain: He is not a fallen gentleman but a fallen man, the personification of evil. He dabbles in black magic rather than sex, seeks not money but power, and trafficks in the secrets of the soul as much as those of the nation. Compared with him, even the sadist of the contemporary thriller is frivolous, for instead of private sexual perversions, Buchan*s villains are satisfied with nothing less than the subversion of society. Far from embodying a "sentimental romanticism," Buchan's evil-doers reflect "a Gothic, almost apocalyptic vision of the dark, destructive forces contained in human beings and society."-' The issue here is the villain's power to harm: Himmelfarb finds it to be credible, Harper does not. For example, when in The Three Hnatagss (1924) Sandy Arbuthnot tells Richard Hannay that their arch-foe, Dominick Medina, "'aims at conquering the very heart, the very soundest part of our society"' and "'wants to conquer in order to destroy, for destruction is the finest meat for his vanity,'" the reader may reasonably take either side. He may feel that Medina does indeed represent a threat to soul and society or that this sort of talk is just Buchan's way of getting, his boys, who are normally reticent, to talk about the dragon. Occupying the middle ground in this discussion is Francis Russell Hart, who, while dismissing the villain as a menace to society, believes in his capacity to work his evil upon the hero. In his comprehensive study of Scottish novelists from Tobias Smollett to Muriel Spark, Hart argues that, when Buchan has a Dominick Medina encounter a Richard Hannay, "the combat has vitalistic roots deeper than those of conventional morality." This is why the moral and cultural stereotypes that give Buchan's adversaries their surface of melodrama and reactionary cliche matter little, and why the combat at its deepest level is against death or spiritual torpor. 82 . . . The antagonist - beneath the nay-saying fanaticisms, the "incarnate devils" of history - is a spiritual torpor that is death, the sick heart.5 This torpor, being a mere state of mind, threatens no one except the hero, and the villain himself begins to seem a projection of the hero's dark, unhealthy side. The danger to society meanwhile fades entirely away. But the reader can arrive at this view of things only by probing deeply; by ignoring the villain's "surface of melodrama and reactionary cliche" to seek out "the combat at its deepest level," by detecting "beneath the nay-saying fanaticisms" the figure of Death. Hart thus recommends that we discard the surface of a Dominick Medina before taking him seriously. Hart has some of Harper's skepticism but finally holds that the dragon matters just as much as the boy. Of course he differs more with Himmelfarb since she sees Medina's personality as a unified whole, without surface or depth. She suggests that the reader take him seriously, from the start. The question this essay attempts to answer now emerges: is there anything to be gained by reading Buchan's spy novels as Harper and Hart read them? This essay will argue that there is something very substantial to be lost; that, when the reader interprets Hannay's analysis of the foe as mere talk about duty or plunges beneath Medina 's moral and cultural stereotypes to get at certain vitalistic roots, he loses sight of both the aesthetic value and the historical...