“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.

Disguises, Cowardice and Androgyny: Buchan’s Mr. Standfast (1919)

John Buchan is now best remembered as the author of The Thirty-nine Steps, memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939. I have already written about Steps’ sequel, Greenmantle, a great adventure novel which Hitchcock had wanted to film, but decided not to:

Buchan was a strong influence a long time before I undertook The Thirty-nine Steps, and some of it is reflected in The Man Who Knew Too Much. He had written Greenmantle, a novel that was probably inspired by the strange personality of Laurence of Arabia… I considered this book, but on second thought I chose The Thirty-nine Steps, which was a smaller subject. Probably for the very reason we mentioned in connection with Dostoevsky — my respect for a literary masterpiece.

(Hitchcock Truffaut, Faber, 2017, p. 95)

Ironically, Hitchcock’s decision to film Steps instead, based on his admiration for Greenmantle, has contributed significantly to the situation where the former is remembered as a classic, while the latter – and Buchan’s other works – have fallen by the wayside.

Still, Greenmantle is a really excellent work, and so is its sequel, the third in the Richard Hannay series, Mr. Standfast. Both are more substantial works than The 39 Steps, which is shorter and has a rushed feel to it, though it has some wonderful suspense scenes set amongst the moors and hills of Scotland. It was not only adapted by Hitchcock but it also inspired the famous crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest. All in all, they comprise a great wartime trilogy centred on the rivalry between England and Germany: still in the pre-war stage in the first book, then being subsumed in the wartime milieu. Like its two predecessors, there is a significant propaganda element in Standfast. Published in 1919, it is set during WWI. With respect to Greenmantle, I argued that Buchan had had to remove Hannay from the trenches to make the war seem fun and exciting, rather than an exercise in industrial slaughter. He performs the same trick in Standfast, but does return Hannay to the western front for the closing chapters of the book.

The book opens with a journey:

I spent one-third of my journey looking out of the window of a first-class carriage, the next in a local motor-car following the course of a trout stream in a shallow valley, and the last tramping over a ridge of downland through great beech-woods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite and a quiet mind.

Mr. Standfast, Polygon, 2018, to p. 1

This is very characteristic of the Hannay novels: a journey in space, specifically from the city in the countryside, is also a journey in mind, from anxiety and unhappiness to freedom and well-being.

Of course, this freedom of the countryside is invariably attended by physical danger. Hannay’s adventures tend to take him from the city to the country. Once in the wilds, he uses his understanding of complicated terrain, his ability to walk tirelessly, climb the tallest hills and scramble up rock-faces to best those people – whether English or foreign they are always ultimately agents of the Boche – who pursue him relentlessly.

Polygon 2018 edition of Mr. Standfast

By the bottom of the first page of Standfast, Hannay has revealed that he is travelling under a false name and persona: a South African mining engineer named Cornelis Brand. This is a name he also used in Greenmantle. Not only can Hannay pass himself off as a South African, but also as a Dutch, a German or a Turk. Hannay remarks of the English in Greenmantle, in a moment of particular arrogance: “We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples.” (23) Hannay spends more time being other people than he does being himself. similarly, his German nemesis in Steps who reappears in Standfast, is described as “the superbest actor that ever walked the earth” (44), able to appear unrecognised even to those who have seen him many times. The mania for disguise and adopting personae may point to an anxiety about the hyper-masculinity Hannay is always trying to live up to. It is not easy conforming of the ideal of imperial manhood.

Given the gung-ho mood that often pervades the story, Hannay as narrator is surprisingly open about his difficulty meeting expectations of masculinity, especially regarding courage. Most remarkably, he says of himself: “I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards”. (85). And, later: “I’ve given a good deal of thought to this courage business, for I haven’t got a great deal of it myself … I’ve got heaps of soft places in me. I’m afraid of being drowned for one thing, or of getting my eyes shot out.” (166). This is a motif of both Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast, demonstrating that Buchan, as he juggled his role in British Intelligence with his novel-writing career, was a propagandist of a nuanced and insightful sort. His hero acts like a model of bravery, but his narration lays bare a near-constant fear and (Hannay’s favourite word) “funk” that he has to overcome repeatedly but that he does not try to hide nor does he express shame about.

In a departure from Steps and Greenmantle, the opening pages of Standfast introduce nothing less than a love interest for Mr. Hannay, the first of his life, apparently, though he is 40 years old:

“I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a V.A.D. and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.”

(7)

Starting with this reference to “the free grace of an athletic boy”, most references to Mary refer to a boylike quality. Androgyny is a particular motif for Buchan. Not only is Mary like a boy, but Hannay’s two closest friends are, in one aspect, girlish. Sandy Arbuthnot has “a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl’s” (Greenmantle, 14) and Peter Pienaar, still more pointedly, has eyes “like Mary’s” (Standfast, 227, 228). There is a thin line between the male friendship Buchan extols and the romantic love Hannay eventually begins to explore with Mary. Androgyny is clearly a characteristic Hannay values highly in his companions, notwithstanding the famously male-dominated world Buchan creates.

These are some of the various complicating factors in Buchan’s novels which help them rise above competitors, all while remaining a fast-paced and exciting read. For all the love of country Buchan professed, he brought a level of perception and insight to Mr. Standfast which demonstrates that propaganda and art are not mutually exclusive.

Terror from the Skies in John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock worked on the script of most of the films he directed but he almost always adapted pre-existing stories, rather than creating from scratch.  At the same time, his adaptations were always loose.  As he said himself:

What I do is the read a story once, and if I like the basic idea I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. (Hitchcock Truffaut, Faber 2017, p. 71)

Yet there are some books he read with more attention.  The novels of John Buchan are a case in point, specifically the series of novels featuring Richard Hannay.  It becomes clear in Hitchcock Truffaut that one of the pivotal authors for Hitchcock was Buchan.  He only adapted a Buchan novel once.  This was a massive hit and many consider it the first truly classic Hitchcock film: The 39 Steps (1935), based on Buchan’s 1915 novel, The Thirty-nine Steps.

Hitchcock had initially planned to film Greenmantle (1916), Buchan’s sequel to Steps, but changed his mind:

In fact, Buchan was a strong influence a long time before I undertook The Thirty-nine Steps, and some of it is reflected in The Man Who Knew Too Much.  He had written Greenmantle, a novel that was probably inspired by the strange personality of Laurence of Arabia.  Korda bought this novel, but he never made the picture.  At first I considered this book, but on second thought I chose The Thirty-nine Steps, which was a smaller subject.  Probably for the very reason we mentioned in connection with Dostoevsky — my respect for a literary masterpiece. (Hitchcock Truffaut, p. 95)

Interestingly, Hitchcock not only notes that Buchan was a strong influence, he even goes so far as to call Greenmantle ¨a literary masterpiece¨.  It is a book I have written on before, and I agree with Hitchcock that it is superior to the (nowadays) better known Steps.  Ironically, Hitchcock´s decision to leave the ¨literary masterpiece” aside in favour of  filming the smaller work has contributed greatly to the current state of affairs where Buchan is remembered for Steps, and Greenmantle is rarely read or discussed.

Not only that, but Hitchcock much later tried to adapt yet another Hannay novel (there are 5 in total), The Three Hostages (1924), dropping it after much deliberation when he realized that the importance of hypnosis in the plot, as well as a central episode where Hannay is pretending to be hypnotised, made the book unfilmable (Hitchcock Truffaut, p. 307).

Hitchcock’s quote above signals that The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; remade by Hitchcock himself in 1955) had a strong element of Buchan.  Another film that has a strong element of Buchan is one of Hitchcock’s most popular and influential, North by Northwest (1959).  In particular, the majorly iconic scene where Roger O Thornhill (Cary Grant) is waiting on a roadside on a massive midwestern plain when an airplane appears out of the sky and attacks him has its genesis in a couple of episodes in The Thirty-nine Steps:

From my vantage-ground I could scan the whole moor right away to the railway line and to the south of it where green fields took the place of heather.  I have eyes like a hawk, but I could see nothing moving in the whole countryside.  Then I looked east beyond the ridge and saw a new kind of landscape—shallow green valleys with plentiful fir plantations and the faint lines of dust which spoke of highroads. Last of all I looked into the blue May sky, and there I saw that which set my pulses racing….

Low down in the south a monoplane was climbing into the heavens.  I was as certain as if I had been told that that aeroplane was looking for me, and that it did not belong to the police.  For an hour or two I watched it from a pit of heather.  It flew low along the hill-tops, and then in narrow circles over the valley up which I had come.  Then it seemed to change its mind, rose to a great height, and flew away back to the south.

I did not like this espionage from the air, and I began to think less well of the countryside I had chosen for a refuge.  These heather hills were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky, and I must find a different kind of sanctuary.  I looked with more satisfaction to the green country beyond the ridge, for there I should find woods and stone houses.  (Chapter II)

This passage places our hero in a desolate moor in Scotland, nothing moving in the whole countryside.  Into this silence and stillness comes the unexpected sight of a distant airplane.  This brings Hannay to the realization that the uninhabited moors are not such a perfect hiding place as he supposed, for the heather hills are no sort of cover.  The beautiful and peaceful natural setting becomes threatening once the airplane enters the scene.  And it comes back to look for Hannay in a later chapter:

It was now about seven o’clock, and as I waited I heard once again that ominous beat in the air. Then I realized that my vantage-ground might be in reality a trap. There was no cover for a tomtit in those bald green places.

I sat quite still and hopeless while the beat grew louder. Then I saw an aeroplane coming up from the east. It was flying high, but as I looked it dropped several hundred feet and began to circle round the knot of hill in narrowing circles, just as a hawk wheels before it pounces. Now it was flying very low, and now the observer on board caught sight of me. I could see one of the two occupants examining me through glasses. (Chapter V)

The circling airplane, wheeling like a hawk, is another powerful image transmitting the agorophobia of the situation.  The plane is now so low that he can see one of the occupants examining him through glasses. (As mentioned in the previous excerpt and at other points in the book, Hannay has excellent eyesight.)

Suddenly it began to rise in swift whorls, and the next I knew it was speeding eastward again till it became a speck in the blue morning.

[…]

I have said there was not cover in the whole place to hide a rat.  As the day advanced it was flooded with soft fresh light till it had the fragrant sunniness of the South African veld.  At other times I would have liked the place, but now it seemed to suffocate me.  The free moorlands were prison walls, and the keen hill air was the breath of a dungeon.

(Chapter V)

Later, having spotted him, the watchers from the plane bring word back to their accomplices and they set out to capture Hannay from the ground.  Hannay´s encounter with the airplane does not find its way into Hitchcock´s The 39 Steps, but it seems clear that he kept it in mind.  In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill is menaced by an airplane in much the same way.

The Scottish moor gives way to an even flatter and more expansive land, the prairie of the US Midwest.  The harsh sun adds another element to the anxious discomfort of the scene.  Thornhill gets off a bus on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere, no houses around.  He looks around him and a plane appears in the distance, slowly resolving into an object of terror as it approaches and then  swoops down on Thornhill, and one of the occupants shoots at him.  The rest is the stuff of cinematic legend, a scene that has been copied incessantly ever since.

The genesis of this piece of cinematic history is Buchan’s scene, which was gestating in the back of Hitchcock’s mind until it came out in this film.  Perhaps Hitchcock had forgotten Buchan’s scene, as far as conscious memory goes.  Certainly he does not mention it in Hitchcock Truffaut, despite several references to Buchan.  But the sense of mounting unease and finally terror that comes with being exposed in an unpeopled and unsheltered landscape while dark forces threaten from above is one that is easily recognised as having migrated across decades and media from Buchan’s novel to Hitchcock’s film.

Hitchcock under Mount Rushmore during the filming of North by Northwest.

Wartime Propaganda in Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916)

John Buchan is best known today for his spy novel (in terms of length more of a novella) The 39 Steps (1915), or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he is remembered for authoring the source novel to Hitchcock’s famous film The 39 Steps (1939). He also wrote several other popular novels, one of the most popular being Greenmantle (1916), which was the sequel to Steps, featuring the same protagonist, Richard Hannay. Hitchcock wanted to direct Greenmantle, too, but couldn’t agree terms with the copyright holders. Thus it has become far less known and less read than its predecessor, though it is certainly a fine read in itself.

Greenmantle was published during World War I, and is set in that conflict. Buchan saw the writing of the book as part of his contribution to the war effort. It was, in short, intended partially as propaganda. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps. No less a work than the film Casablanca (1942), for example, was conceived as propaganda.

At the beginning of Greenmantle, Hannay has returned from a stint as an officer in the trenches, where he took his soldiers over the top on a “glorious and bloody 25^th day of September” (Buchan, Greenmantle, Penguin, 2008, 1). Hannay reflects with pride and enthusiasm on the Western Front, reminding us that this book was written relatively early in the war, just before the glorification of the wartime experience became very difficult. Indeed, shortly afterwards Hannay does give some voice to the disillusionment with war that had begun to set in: “[T]his isn’t just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It’s a comfortless, bloody business” (3). In other parts of the book, too, it is clear that the old jingoistic love of war is becoming frayed at the edges.

“Follow that mountain!”

For both commercial and the aforementioned propagandistic purposes, war has to be portrayed as fun in Greenmantle. Buchan recognised  that WWI-style trench warfare wasn’t fun and even his narrative gifts couldn’t convincingly make it so. So at the outset, Hannay has just left the trenches and is about to engage in wartime espionage. In the James Bondian opening (the comparison is inevitable), Hannay is told that his mission is to head for the Middle East and find out what the Germans (or Boche, as they’re often known in the novel) are up to. Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office (also seen in Steps) calls Hannay in: he knows that the Germans are cooking up some secret plan involving the Middle East, but he doesn’t know what it is or where to look for information. It’s all very vague, and the detail seems very much in the tradition of what Hitchcock would call the McGuffin – the device whose content is less important than the fact that it allows the plot to move forward. In Greenmantle this means opening the way for travel in farflung and wartorn lands, for brushes with the enemy/death, and for adopting disguises.

Perhaps it is this latter that is the most potentially interesting motif in Greenmantle: the joy and freedom the characters experience when in disguise may point to a certain ontological insecurity hiding behind the mask of pure identification with English manhood that Hannay exhibits. Brave, modest, self-denying, self-regulating, devotedly patriotic, it’s not an easy ideal to live up to. No wonder Hannay and his friends enjoy make-believe so much. Of course the propensity to become other people is given a somewhat crass ideological justification:

We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. (23)

At this early point in the book, the whole Middle Eastern operation is rather delicate, propagandistically, as Buchan wouldn’t want to suggest that Hannay is escaping the trenches in undertaking his mission. So Hannay first demurs. He wants to stay on the front line and has to be talked round to the idea that he can best serve his country far from the tanks and the trenches. But talked round he is, and once the protagonist’s unimpeachable wartime patriotism is firmly established, the narrative can begin in earnest.

Hannay establishes his band of brothers: a Scot, a Boer, and a loquacious and slightly blustering American. This bond between British and American was particularly important at the time, as American entry into the war was still hoped for, and did eventually transpire. On the other side are, of course, the Germans, and later the Turks. Buchan’s treatment of the enemy is quite nuanced. One recalls Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903), wherein an evident admiration for the German national character exists alongside an insistence on seeing them as an intolerable threat to British security and dominance. Buchan has a similar admiration, but at the same time a commitment to locating a decisive flaw in the German character. When he first meets the villain von Stumm, Hannay confusedly notes:

 Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against. (57)

Paradoxically, the caricature is equated with the real, with the implication that Germans who do not correspond to the caricature are not real Germans. Kaiser Wilhelm II appears briefly and is portrayed with overt sympathy. Along with Hannay’s semi-sympathetic stance towards the Germans is a perhaps more surprising sympathy with the Turks: “I took a fancy to the Turkish fighting man: I remembered the testimonial our fellows gave him as a clear fighter, and I felt very bitter that Germany should have lugged him into this dirty business.” (240) Hannay is not a xenophobe, though he is a racist (as shown in the quote above about “the only race who etc.”). He doesn’t hate the enemies of his country, and that element of generous-mindedness is a positive in Greenmantle.

So Buchan does not aim at the easy targets in this book. Nevertheless, he does ultimately make some approaches to the standard propagandist aim of presenting an embodiment of evil in the political enemies of the protagonists. Here is where national politics and gender politics become merged, for Buchan here introduces a female character, one of only two female characters in the book, and by far the most important (none of the protagonists’ are married, it seems). It is because women are so far removed from the everyday milieu of the characters that Buchan is able to ascribe to the one who does play a notable role a metaphysical significance:

She’s a she-devil. It isn’t madness that’s wrong with her. She’s as sane as you and as cool as Blenkiron. Her life is an infernal game of chess, and she plays with souls for pawns. She’s evil – evil- evil… (282)

The overheated prose here contrasts with most of the rest of the book, and recalls the feminized evil of fin de siècle works like Machen’s The Great God Pan. It’s a trope that jars somewhat in the context of Buchan’s espionage thriller with its realistic detail and understated emotional landscape. On the other hand, the evil of the enemy has to be embodied to create effective propaganda, and Buchan evidently found in easier to ascribe evil to a feminine figure.

There’s much more to Greenmantle than this, though. I mentioned earlier that there is one other female figure: that is the sympathetic German woman whose house the fleeing Hannay stumbles upon and who gives him shelter and sustenance. She prompts him to reflect as follows:

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmare. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. (121)

Sure, Hannay doesn’t by any means go so far as to question the righteousness of his country’s cause, but there is still a humanity that permeates the book and that gives it a value beyond the propagandistic. Thus, Greenmantle remains a good read, one whose ulterior motives are counterbalanced by a breezy and straightforward narrative style and an outlook without the insularity or dogmatism one might associate with British imperial literature.