“Not attractive – seductive”: Good versus Evil in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages

The Three Hostages (1924) is the fourth of John Buchan’s five novels centred on Richard Hannay. The first three entries in the series, The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919), are often considered a wartime trilogy. Hostages, coming several years later, is a departure in that the immediate threat of the world war has receded. Hannay, however, is no less anxious, his beloved England no less threatened by foreign contamination. Contamination seems the right word here, because the physical threat of the war years has been replaced with what Hannay considers a moral threat.

The threat facing Hannay and his vision of England in the 1920s is more diffuse and indefinable than what came before. It manifests itself in a bewildering variety of ways. There is “this chatter about psychoanalysis”, which is “half-baked”. There is the revolutionary disturbance in Ireland (made a “Free State” in 1921), which is evidence of “a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws”. There are all those places in central Asia which are “run by seedy little gangs of communist Jews”. “The facts”, in short, “are no longer sober.” (Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth, 2010, p. 578).

In the fantasy scape of this novel there must be a single thread holding it all together, an embodiment of all this chaos and degeneration. It is found, a few chapters in, to be located in the person of Dominic Medina, a charismatic politician and poet in London. Medina is very much in the tradition of Carlyle’s Great Man: he is great not at one thing, but at seemingly all things. He is surrounded by an aura of greatness. He is charming, preternaturally handsome and many things besides.

I’ll tell you what he is beyond doubt – he’s rather a great man. Hang it, Dick, you must have heard of him. He’s one of the finest shots living, and he’s done some tall things in the exploration way, and he was the devil of a fellow as a partisan leader in South Russia. Also – though it may not interest you – he’s an uncommon fine poet.

(603)

Just as Arthur Conan Doyle gave voice to a distrust of the Great Man in The Stark Munro Letters, so Buchan sees universal talent as having a somewhat diabolical quality. Hannay is certainly impressed by Medina, and in a rather surprising way: “He fascinated me as a man is fascinated by a pretty woman” (611). However, he comes to see him as not just a threat to national security, but an embodiment of evil. This novel thus becomes more Manichean than its predecessors as evil attains a purity hitherto unknown. Hannay has a sneaking admiration for his German wartime opponents, but here he grows fevered as he tries to articulate his strength of aversion to Medina:

I know no word to describe how he impressed me except “wickedness.” He seemed to annihilate the world of ordinary moral standards, all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space. His consuming egotism made life a bare cosmos in which his spirit scorched like a flame. […] Medina made an atmosphere which was like a cold bright air in which nothing can live. He was utterly and consumedly wicked, with no standard which could be remotely related to ordinary life.

(739)

It is all rather vague but serves to ratchet up the jeopardy. We know we are in the face of evil, albeit it is more a case of telling than showing.

So while the wartime trilogy involve two great powers fighting to be top dog, in The Three Hostages, it is good, represented by the English status quo, against evil. This evil comes in the form of Medina, with his links to bolshevism, Irish nationalism and various troubles in central Asia. We know little of his background, but he is described as “mainly Irish” and has spent considerable time on “the great valleys and the windy tablelands of Central Asia”(741). Thus he is a dangerous and terrifying amalgam of East and West. That, indeed, is central to the not very precise plan he has for world domination: “There has never, as I have said, been a true marriage of East and West, but when there is, its seed will rule the world” (663).

Medina’s favourite tool is hypnosis, which Buchan’s early readers would have associated both with the aforementioned “chatter about psychoanalysis” (Freud was an advocate of hypnosis in his early days) and with transcendental consciousness techniques associated broadly with the East. Hannay’s “intractable bedrock of commonplaceness” (624) prevents him from ever being fully hypnotised, though, and this resistance to Medina’s techniques proves key to the development of the novel. Hannay is nevertheless deeply impressed by Medina and repeatedly notes an urge to submit to the masterful temper of the Great Man.

Similarly, the notably un-Buchanian locale of the dancing club that plays a large part in the plot is a place of moral degradation but, still, seduction. Hannay’s wife Mary dances here, and does so very well, apparently, heavily made up and scantily dressed, in close embrace with another man. Here is a form of expression otherwise entirely denied to the Hannays, whose relationship we can only presume to be physical and affectionate (they have a son after all), but insofar as we are shown it, is respectful, productive and very similar to Hannay’s relationships with his friends. She is more physically intimate with her fellow dancer (who is, like her, in the club on a spying mission) than we ever read of her being with her husband.

In the dancing club things get blurred, perhaps even fall apart. (This is the era of Yeats’ “Second Coming” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, after all.) Hannay’s centre holds, ultimately, but when he, believed to be hypnotised, is being massaged by Medina’s aged mother, and the “long soft strokes” of her fingers induce “a pleasant langour beginning to creep down my neck and spine”, we note that Hannay is being afforded a form of physical pleasure hitherto undocumented in the series. In these scenes, the implication appears to be that a miasma of danger and evil surrounds any sort of physical intimacy and the pleasure derived therefrom. Hannay’s ambivalence is clear in his description of Mrs Medina’s appearance:

I realised that it was the most wonderful face of a woman I had ever looked on. And I realised in the same moment that I hated it, that the beauty of it was devilish, and the soul within was on fire with all the hatred of Hell.

(655)

The vertiginous leaps in Hannay’s reaction disorientate the reader, and it is similar with his reaction to Medina: beautiful yet hateful; great and terrible; or “not attractive, – seductive” (721), as Mary puts it. We know Hannay must defeat the interloper, but this is not wartime and for the first time his austere character is tested by the attraction of a side of life inexpressible within his ideology. Ultimately, that unease is channelled into his disgust for Medina and his associates, and Hannay hates like he has never done before. But though the prose threatens to overheat at times, that does not detract from the compelling quality of this book, and Hannay’s return to duty was worth it not only from the point of view of national security and morality, but from that of an immensely ripping yarn.