John Buchan's Greenmantle

John Buchan's Greenmantle

It's a novel about spies who are out to dismantle a plot involving Islamic fundamentalists who are a threat to Western civilization...before it's too late. And it was published in 1916. The hero, Richard Hannay, appears in several of Buchan's novels, and this one is quite startling not just in the timelessness of the problem of Islam as threat, but in how tremendously unpropagandistic it is, considering when it appeared, in the middle of World War I. Buchan (who later became Governor-General of Canada) repeatedly reminds us that Germans aren't monsters; indeed, he even manages to create a sympathetic portrait of the Kaiser as someone caught up in events beyond his control. And this came out smack dab in the middle of World War I, when British propaganda was at a fever pitch in its denunciations of "The Hun."

It is an espionage adventure, with an American struggling with a stomach ulcer, a British Army colonel (from South Africa) pretending to be a Dutchman, and a complex plot involving figuring out who is doing what, where, and can they get there in time to stop it from happening?

I've read some other novels by Buchan before, but never one such a page turner. Another of Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps, was turned into an early Alfred Hitchcock film. Oddly enough, Greenmantle seems not to have enjoyed a similar film version--I can't imagine why. It would make for a rollicking adventure.