Mr. Standfast
By . New York; George H Doran Company. 1919. 12mo, 374 pp. $1.60.
THERE are few tasks, in the field of literary work, more difficult than doing a popular thing well. Brought up on the novel of character, hungering and thirsting after nuances of the spirit, to-day’s trained reader is apt to leave the novel of action to the backstairs, and forget that a ‘shilling shocker' may, after all, be literature. It is a great pity that The Egoist has led us to neglect Roderick Random. In rescuing the novel of contemporary adventure from the railway news-stand, and in giving it life, plausibility, characters, and structure, Major Buchan has made a genuine contribution to good reading.
The present novel continues the adventures that engaging soul, Dick Hannay, the erstwhile hero o! The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. Once more a very realistic secret service pursues 'the most dangerous man in the world’ — an undertaking which involves the necessity of a dozen disguises, the stirring-up of pacifist intrigues, mysterious journeys to France and Switzerland, the rescue of a plucky English girl from a perilous plight, and a turn in the trenches during the great German offensive which crashed on Amiens somewhat more than a year ago.
The summary may appear conventional enough, but Major Buchan’s sound talent for telling a good story and the living individuals who act it surmount what there is of commonplace. Wake, the conscientious objector, who dies a brave death in the great retreat, is a study of real distinction. Moreover, the story, which is told in the first person, is told as Hannay, a man of action, would have told it. The plot gets swiftly under way, and the climaxes are effective.
The novel ends at the battle, and the reader closes the book, glad at last to have discovered war scenes in fiction actually written by a soldier, a nd not by those who have endured the horrors of the Berkshires and the agonies of Narragansett Bay H. B. B.