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Richard Hannay #2
Greenmantle [Illustrated edition]
Greenmantle by John Buchan
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Summary
During the past year, in the intervals of an active life, I have amused myself with constructing this tale. It has been scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment—in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half-hours between graver tasks; and it bears, I fear, the mark of its gipsy begetting. But it has amused me to write, and I shall be well repaid if it amuses you—and a few others—to read.
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Hannay is, in my opinion, a far more interesting literary creation than James Bond. The
book is nearly a hundred years old, yet holds up very well.“
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147 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1916
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About the author
John Buchan
1,734 books471 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
John Buchan was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which the best known is The Thirty-Nine Steps. After attending Glasgow and Oxford universities, he practised as a barrister. In 1901, he served as a private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa towards the end of the Boer War. He returned to England in 1903, continued as a barrister and journalist. He left the Bar when he joined Thomas Nelson and Sons publishers in 1907. During the First World War, he was, among other activities, Director of Information in 1917 and later Head of Intelligence at the newly-formed Ministry of Information. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927.
In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to succeed the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada and two months later raised him to the peerage as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He occupied the post until his death in 1940. Buchan promoted Canadian unity and helped strengthen the sovereignty of Canada constitutionally and culturally. He received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.
John Buchan was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which the best known is The Thirty-Nine Steps. After attending Glasgow and Oxford universities, he practised as a barrister. In 1901, he served as a private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa towards the end of the Boer War. He returned to England in 1903, continued as a barrister and journalist. He left the Bar when he joined Thomas Nelson and Sons publishers in 1907. During the First World War, he was, among other activities, Director of Information in 1917 and later Head of Intelligence at the newly-formed Ministry of Information. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927.
In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to succeed the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada and two months later raised him to the peerage as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He occupied the post until his death in 1940. Buchan promoted Canadian unity and helped strengthen the sovereignty of Canada constitutionally and culturally. He received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 545 reviews
February 21, 2012
I first read this book when I was 10 or 11. It was a library copy, borrowed from the Kodaikanal Club in Kodaikanal, a hill station in south India. It used to be the local English club and the contents of the library still include a large number of old hardbound editions of authors who were popular in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Early on in this novel, Hannay remarks on the ability of the English for 'getting inside the skin' of distant races. He goes on to say: 'Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else.' Someone had underlined this sentiment and jotted down in the margin: 'Oh, really?'. The rejoinder, in a different hand, was: 'Yes, really, my dear anonymous!' This was followed by a phrase, apparently in Dutch, that I cannot recall.
As we contemplate the death of print, it strikes me that little exchanges like these are going the way of the dinosaur, and the loss isn't necessarily a great step forward for civilization.
But reading these books tends to put me in that kind of frame of mind. They are so much a product of their age, all Empire and honour and robust manly values pitted against all sorts of 'nastiness'. Hannay faces immense dangers, but in a way he never ventures very far from home, with the whole of the world seeming to be a sort of backyard to Europe, where you may encounter an old boy from the old school around the next hill or valley. It was a world in which countries like mine figured as little more than pawns in the machinations of the Western empires and the phrase 'white man' could be meant as a compliment without necessarily entailing any specific degree of racism apart from the generic assumption that one's own type are superior which, truth be told, is probably as prevalent today, behind the eye-wash of politically correct phraseology.
Meanwhile, what we have here is a remarkably exciting adventure, full of broad generalisations about national character, memorable characters and daring exploits. Buchan's old-fashioned beliefs don't hinder the novel - I'd say they help it along by giving the narrative a real sense of vitality because the writer believes in the stakes being fought for. Wildly improbable and thoroughly enjoyable, all in all.
As we contemplate the death of print, it strikes me that little exchanges like these are going the way of the dinosaur, and the loss isn't necessarily a great step forward for civilization.
But reading these books tends to put me in that kind of frame of mind. They are so much a product of their age, all Empire and honour and robust manly values pitted against all sorts of 'nastiness'. Hannay faces immense dangers, but in a way he never ventures very far from home, with the whole of the world seeming to be a sort of backyard to Europe, where you may encounter an old boy from the old school around the next hill or valley. It was a world in which countries like mine figured as little more than pawns in the machinations of the Western empires and the phrase 'white man' could be meant as a compliment without necessarily entailing any specific degree of racism apart from the generic assumption that one's own type are superior which, truth be told, is probably as prevalent today, behind the eye-wash of politically correct phraseology.
Meanwhile, what we have here is a remarkably exciting adventure, full of broad generalisations about national character, memorable characters and daring exploits. Buchan's old-fashioned beliefs don't hinder the novel - I'd say they help it along by giving the narrative a real sense of vitality because the writer believes in the stakes being fought for. Wildly improbable and thoroughly enjoyable, all in all.
November 13, 2023
John Buchan's follow-up book in the classic espionage series featuring Richard Hannay takes up when Hannay has recently returned to London following the Battle of Loos, and is called to meet with Sir Walter.
Asked to take on a mission to neutralise a potentially devastating plot by the Germans in the Ottoman Empire to inflame the Islamic Near East to jihad. Hannay is accompanied by American John Blenkiron and his compatriot from Loos Sandy Arbuthnot. In this story all three are 'masters of disguise' and possess plenty of other skills necessary for such an unlikely undertaking. Along the way Hannay meets up with old friend Peter Pienaar, the South African Boer Scout.
The first third of the story follows Hannay and Pienaar as they make their way through Europe initially to Germany, then on to Turkey, where the original trio are to meet up. As we come to expect with Hannay (and Buchan) there are tremendous coincidences, great luck and lots of bravado en route, as long as some fantastical disguises!
Once in Turkey, the action really hots up and the story moves fast through various evolutions of turning all in sundry into enemies. The story culminates at the battle for Erzerum, at the Turkish/German and Russian front line.
The story is framed in the actual war setting, and the reality contrasting with the ridiculous is a nice touch. There are many references (some I understood, many went over my head) to battles and events of World War I - Gallipoli features heavily in mentions, there is plenty of British stiff upper lip ethos, and the larger than life characters. Given that when this book was published it was set in the current time, the audience would have had a more intimate knowledge of the setting and goings on, so there was perhaps less need to explain to the reader. While there is much that goes unexplained, and Greenmantle is somewhat of an enigma until near the end, it is without doubt a lot of fun.
For me this was a step up from #1 in the series, as it brought to it a complexity missing in the earlier book (and another 100 pages).
4 stars
-----
Book #1 The Thirty-Nine Steps
Asked to take on a mission to neutralise a potentially devastating plot by the Germans in the Ottoman Empire to inflame the Islamic Near East to jihad. Hannay is accompanied by American John Blenkiron and his compatriot from Loos Sandy Arbuthnot. In this story all three are 'masters of disguise' and possess plenty of other skills necessary for such an unlikely undertaking. Along the way Hannay meets up with old friend Peter Pienaar, the South African Boer Scout.
The first third of the story follows Hannay and Pienaar as they make their way through Europe initially to Germany, then on to Turkey, where the original trio are to meet up. As we come to expect with Hannay (and Buchan) there are tremendous coincidences, great luck and lots of bravado en route, as long as some fantastical disguises!
Once in Turkey, the action really hots up and the story moves fast through various evolutions of turning all in sundry into enemies. The story culminates at the battle for Erzerum, at the Turkish/German and Russian front line.
The story is framed in the actual war setting, and the reality contrasting with the ridiculous is a nice touch. There are many references (some I understood, many went over my head) to battles and events of World War I - Gallipoli features heavily in mentions, there is plenty of British stiff upper lip ethos, and the larger than life characters. Given that when this book was published it was set in the current time, the audience would have had a more intimate knowledge of the setting and goings on, so there was perhaps less need to explain to the reader. While there is much that goes unexplained, and Greenmantle is somewhat of an enigma until near the end, it is without doubt a lot of fun.
For me this was a step up from #1 in the series, as it brought to it a complexity missing in the earlier book (and another 100 pages).
4 stars
-----
Book #1 The Thirty-Nine Steps
October 11, 2024
Hannay does it again: did you expect any less?
Called upon, and with no notice, he's off to foreign parts. Another adventure where he sees to those Germans. All, I'm told, wrapped around the true happenings of that time. Not based on a true story but, based upon the actual geo-political manoeuvrings Britain faced back then. What more could I want?
None of that James Bond drivel: girls and bedroom gymnastics, snakes under the bed-covers, cars that climb mountains in reverse and mental anguish over past recriminations. Just a decent fellow doing what is asked of him.
Page turning, gripping adventure and the man of the hour sees to it the 'wrong-uns' are dealt with.
An exciting read.
Called upon, and with no notice, he's off to foreign parts. Another adventure where he sees to those Germans. All, I'm told, wrapped around the true happenings of that time. Not based on a true story but, based upon the actual geo-political manoeuvrings Britain faced back then. What more could I want?
None of that James Bond drivel: girls and bedroom gymnastics, snakes under the bed-covers, cars that climb mountains in reverse and mental anguish over past recriminations. Just a decent fellow doing what is asked of him.
Page turning, gripping adventure and the man of the hour sees to it the 'wrong-uns' are dealt with.
An exciting read.
August 20, 2024
An excellent action adventure novel. The Taliban took over Afghanistan while I was reading this. At the center of Greenmantle is a British mission to unearth and destroy a Jihadi movement propped up by the Germans during the First World War. More than a hundred years later, the powers that be are still playing their games, propping up all sorts of maniacs to win their wars against each other.
The language is heavy with obscure and exotic references as well as words from different languages. The narration is deliberately confusing. There are vague and uneasy alliances between various parties and nationalities. Missions are undertaken based on the flimsiest of clues and leads. Mysterious sinister dangers lurk at every corner. They strike and retreat with equal measures of alacrity and lunacy. Dark indecipherable alien landscapes are the playground of the men on this mission. It struck me that the soldiers involved in the mission often relied on pure luck to win battles or escape dangerous situations. They did not know what they were doing half of the time. There is a mist that hangs over the whole landscape during the final battle and it could well be metaphor for the state of mind of the soldiers who took part in the war. Nobody knew what the hell was going on.
Richard Hannay from The 39 Steps is the narrator. A sinister looking femme fatale in charge of the Jihad and Stumm, a Nazi strongman who would make Colonel Hans Landa look like a Magsaysay award winner are the main villains. Some of the more interesting parts like the affair between Sandy (an American adventurer who is part of the mission) and the femme fatale were not a part of the main plot. A novel like this probably deserved 500 pages. But even though it is only 200 pages long, I still felt like I had read a big book. I really liked the reflections (intellectual mumbo jumbo) on the Teutonic and Muslim mindsets.
The language is heavy with obscure and exotic references as well as words from different languages. The narration is deliberately confusing. There are vague and uneasy alliances between various parties and nationalities. Missions are undertaken based on the flimsiest of clues and leads. Mysterious sinister dangers lurk at every corner. They strike and retreat with equal measures of alacrity and lunacy. Dark indecipherable alien landscapes are the playground of the men on this mission. It struck me that the soldiers involved in the mission often relied on pure luck to win battles or escape dangerous situations. They did not know what they were doing half of the time. There is a mist that hangs over the whole landscape during the final battle and it could well be metaphor for the state of mind of the soldiers who took part in the war. Nobody knew what the hell was going on.
Richard Hannay from The 39 Steps is the narrator. A sinister looking femme fatale in charge of the Jihad and Stumm, a Nazi strongman who would make Colonel Hans Landa look like a Magsaysay award winner are the main villains. Some of the more interesting parts like the affair between Sandy (an American adventurer who is part of the mission) and the femme fatale were not a part of the main plot. A novel like this probably deserved 500 pages. But even though it is only 200 pages long, I still felt like I had read a big book. I really liked the reflections (intellectual mumbo jumbo) on the Teutonic and Muslim mindsets.
November 15, 2011
The Ripping-est of Ripping Yarns
I've got a special shelf, "Ripping Yarns," set up here at Goodreads devoted to this sort of tale. The salient feature of a ripping yarn is that once you're well into the book, despite whatever flaws there might be in plot, plausibility, or characterization, it's damn near impossible to put down.
John Buchan's four tales featuring hero Richard Hannay fall squarely in the ripping yarn tradition, and they're particularly remarkable as examples of early spy novels. Here are the badder than bad villains and resourceful, patriotic, man's man of a hero that we encounter later in the novels of Ian Fleming, for example. Then there's the perennial theme that pits one worldview against another, with the fate of civilization hanging in the balance. The exotic settings (in Germany, Hungary, and Turkey) add another layer of intrigue. The plot is too convoluted -- and, to be honest, a little too hocus-pocus -- to recap, but it doesn't really matter. Once the reader has gotten by some of the initial artifice of the premise, it's a sleigh ride.
One thing that I found slightly difficult was the dated parlance of the WWI-era soldier. Germans, for example, are almost always referred to by Hannay as "the Boche," while frequent references to the Boer War, the Turkish campaign, and other contemporary events make the book at times heavy going. I have a fairly good grounding in the history of this period, but still at times I found passages such as this opaque:
"I watched the figures in khaki passing on the pavement, and thought what a nice safe prospect they had compared to mine. Yes, even if next week, they were in the Hohenzollern, or the Hairpin trench at the Quarries, or that ugly angle at the Hooge."
Well, clearly those refer to places of heavy fighting during WWI, but I've no idea where they were. The point is, these sort of references pepper the narrative and the reader is advised to just sail on by and not too worry too much about it.
Another thing that is more worrisome, though, are the frequent lucky chance encounters. Hannay is forever running across one or another of his fellow adventurers at opportune moments -- in an obscure town on the banks of the Danube, for example. It seems more than a little contrived to the modern reader.
Finally, there's one more hurdle for contemporary audiences: the "stiff-upper-lip," "jolly-good-show" British warrior ethos that pervades the book. Here's a representative passage from near the end of the book, when Hannay and two of his companions are trapped and face almost certain death:
"We're the lucky fellows," said Sandy; "we've all had our whack. When I remember the good times I've had I could sing a hymn of praise. We've lived long enough to know ourselves, and to shape ourselves into some kind of decency. But think of those boys who have given their lives freely when they scarcely knew what life meant. They were just at the beginning of the road, and they didn't know what dreary bits lay before them."
I won't give away what happens next, but let's just say the phrase deus ex machina springs to mind.
The remarkable thing is that in spite of all these shortcomings, I could scarcely put this book down. Buchan's prose, however laden with WWI jargon, sings. His heroes bound larger than life from the pages. And those villains... oh those villains! Rosa Klebb and Ernst Blofield have nothing on them. Heady stuff indeed.
I've got a special shelf, "Ripping Yarns," set up here at Goodreads devoted to this sort of tale. The salient feature of a ripping yarn is that once you're well into the book, despite whatever flaws there might be in plot, plausibility, or characterization, it's damn near impossible to put down.
John Buchan's four tales featuring hero Richard Hannay fall squarely in the ripping yarn tradition, and they're particularly remarkable as examples of early spy novels. Here are the badder than bad villains and resourceful, patriotic, man's man of a hero that we encounter later in the novels of Ian Fleming, for example. Then there's the perennial theme that pits one worldview against another, with the fate of civilization hanging in the balance. The exotic settings (in Germany, Hungary, and Turkey) add another layer of intrigue. The plot is too convoluted -- and, to be honest, a little too hocus-pocus -- to recap, but it doesn't really matter. Once the reader has gotten by some of the initial artifice of the premise, it's a sleigh ride.
One thing that I found slightly difficult was the dated parlance of the WWI-era soldier. Germans, for example, are almost always referred to by Hannay as "the Boche," while frequent references to the Boer War, the Turkish campaign, and other contemporary events make the book at times heavy going. I have a fairly good grounding in the history of this period, but still at times I found passages such as this opaque:
"I watched the figures in khaki passing on the pavement, and thought what a nice safe prospect they had compared to mine. Yes, even if next week, they were in the Hohenzollern, or the Hairpin trench at the Quarries, or that ugly angle at the Hooge."
Well, clearly those refer to places of heavy fighting during WWI, but I've no idea where they were. The point is, these sort of references pepper the narrative and the reader is advised to just sail on by and not too worry too much about it.
Another thing that is more worrisome, though, are the frequent lucky chance encounters. Hannay is forever running across one or another of his fellow adventurers at opportune moments -- in an obscure town on the banks of the Danube, for example. It seems more than a little contrived to the modern reader.
Finally, there's one more hurdle for contemporary audiences: the "stiff-upper-lip," "jolly-good-show" British warrior ethos that pervades the book. Here's a representative passage from near the end of the book, when Hannay and two of his companions are trapped and face almost certain death:
"We're the lucky fellows," said Sandy; "we've all had our whack. When I remember the good times I've had I could sing a hymn of praise. We've lived long enough to know ourselves, and to shape ourselves into some kind of decency. But think of those boys who have given their lives freely when they scarcely knew what life meant. They were just at the beginning of the road, and they didn't know what dreary bits lay before them."
I won't give away what happens next, but let's just say the phrase deus ex machina springs to mind.
The remarkable thing is that in spite of all these shortcomings, I could scarcely put this book down. Buchan's prose, however laden with WWI jargon, sings. His heroes bound larger than life from the pages. And those villains... oh those villains! Rosa Klebb and Ernst Blofield have nothing on them. Heady stuff indeed.
April 23, 2023
First published in 1916, the tale is based on the actual history of the region in that time (On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, by Peter Hopkirk, describes the actual events in gripping detail).
Rather topical then, this fictional foray.
I read ‘Riddle of the Sands’ back in December and with that (which I enjoyed immensely) I really did struggle to picture the characters, their garb, the etiquette, the times. I did with this, but this times I did a few hours on the www looking at images of the day in that part of the world: it did help.
The story…
The hero, Richard Hannay, is sent off by the government to sniff out what’s going on in and around the Ottoman Empire: there’s rumours, sneaky whisperings, that the Boche are planning on agitating the Muslims and fuelling the fires in order to create a Holy War with the British.
Hannay calls on a few trusted buddies and away they go.
It is a great read and difficult to put down. There’s loads of adventure, risky business, close-calls and narrow escapes.
Some say, ‘Riddle of the Sands’ was a template for the modern day spy-thriller. This has to be up there with it.
Rather topical then, this fictional foray.
I read ‘Riddle of the Sands’ back in December and with that (which I enjoyed immensely) I really did struggle to picture the characters, their garb, the etiquette, the times. I did with this, but this times I did a few hours on the www looking at images of the day in that part of the world: it did help.
The story…
The hero, Richard Hannay, is sent off by the government to sniff out what’s going on in and around the Ottoman Empire: there’s rumours, sneaky whisperings, that the Boche are planning on agitating the Muslims and fuelling the fires in order to create a Holy War with the British.
Hannay calls on a few trusted buddies and away they go.
It is a great read and difficult to put down. There’s loads of adventure, risky business, close-calls and narrow escapes.
Some say, ‘Riddle of the Sands’ was a template for the modern day spy-thriller. This has to be up there with it.
July 1, 2025
Published during WW1, Greenmantle should be classified as a classic simply because it was published more than a hundred years ago but then add the espionage elements with the harrowing cloak and dagger escapes, and the novel comes to life despite its age. True that the novel has not aged well, in the sense that there is a plodding nature to the story, and that there is an understanding that one must read the novel with a world Atlas in-hand in order to track Hannay's trek through the Middle East.
Here in Buchan's second novel about his secret agent, Richard Hannay is sent to the Middle East to decipher several intercepted code words, among which is 'Greenmantle.' Along the way, it is learned that the Turks and Germans are plotting an offensive designed to stir the Muslim world's involvement in the war. Hannay, along with a group of friends introduced in the first book, The 39 Steps, must determine what is the intervening action and how to impede its progress with limited help.
Because Buchan was a pioneer to espionage fiction many of the story beats will appear cliche to a postmodern audience, despite the fact that they are original here. (Femme fatale, code breaker lingo, and the geo-political intrigue are all such elements.) Overall, a recommendation with the caveats already mentioned.
Here in Buchan's second novel about his secret agent, Richard Hannay is sent to the Middle East to decipher several intercepted code words, among which is 'Greenmantle.' Along the way, it is learned that the Turks and Germans are plotting an offensive designed to stir the Muslim world's involvement in the war. Hannay, along with a group of friends introduced in the first book, The 39 Steps, must determine what is the intervening action and how to impede its progress with limited help.
Because Buchan was a pioneer to espionage fiction many of the story beats will appear cliche to a postmodern audience, despite the fact that they are original here. (Femme fatale, code breaker lingo, and the geo-political intrigue are all such elements.) Overall, a recommendation with the caveats already mentioned.
December 4, 2020
A classic spy story, a tale of espionage set during the First World War, that is what this is.
I don’t usually read spy stories or tales of adventure, which this is too. I was trying to stretch my borders—but I failed. Reading this further convinces me that the genre is not for me. Lovers of mysteries, espionage and adventure tales will most likely get a kick out of this, even if I don’t.
The story is James-Bond-y. It is action filled and there are multiple mysteries to be solved. Even I could make sense of the events. Even I understood how the mysteries came to be resolved. That it is set during the First World War did somewhat intrigue me. The British feared that the Germans would incite the Islamic people in the Middle East to rise up in a jihad, upsetting British control in India. The son of senior intelligence officer, Sir Walter Bullivant, dies having left clues, mysterious words on a scrap of paper. The words on the paper were Kasredin, cancer and v.I. What do the words signify? When the son died, he had been investigating just such an uprising.
Richard Hannay is asked to carry out further investigations. He accepts the mission. Under the guise of other names, he sets out to travel through German territory to gather information and then meet up with his friend Sandy Arbuthnot in Constantinople two months later. They are joined by an American, John S. Blenkiron, eager to fight the Kaiser, and Peter Pienaar, a Boer and longtime friend from their shared experiences in Africa.
The problem is that I don’t give a hoot about the characters. The mysteries to be resolved are, in my view, convoluted and farfetched, made for the movies rather than reality. I am not drawn in by the excitement of the story.
There is nothing wrong with the writing per se. There are occasionally lines that are humorous. Some lines perceptively draw human behavior. Nevertheless, the focus on action, excitement and the solving of mysteries just doesn’t appeal to me. The author has failed to make me care.
This novel is available free at Librivox, here: https://librivox.org/greenmantle-vers...
At Librivox, it is Tom Weiss who narrates.
I chose instead to listen to the audiobook narrated by Simon Vance / Robert Whitfield. His narrations are usually very good and proved to be excellent this time around. With ease he flips between American, English and Boer accents. In every dialogue you easily hear who is speaking. He doesn’t overdo his dramatization. His narration I have given five stars.
***************************
The Richard Hannay books can be read in any order. I began with the second because it interested me more.
*Greenmantle 2 stars
*The 39 Steps maybe
I don’t usually read spy stories or tales of adventure, which this is too. I was trying to stretch my borders—but I failed. Reading this further convinces me that the genre is not for me. Lovers of mysteries, espionage and adventure tales will most likely get a kick out of this, even if I don’t.
The story is James-Bond-y. It is action filled and there are multiple mysteries to be solved. Even I could make sense of the events. Even I understood how the mysteries came to be resolved. That it is set during the First World War did somewhat intrigue me. The British feared that the Germans would incite the Islamic people in the Middle East to rise up in a jihad, upsetting British control in India. The son of senior intelligence officer, Sir Walter Bullivant, dies having left clues, mysterious words on a scrap of paper. The words on the paper were Kasredin, cancer and v.I. What do the words signify? When the son died, he had been investigating just such an uprising.
Richard Hannay is asked to carry out further investigations. He accepts the mission. Under the guise of other names, he sets out to travel through German territory to gather information and then meet up with his friend Sandy Arbuthnot in Constantinople two months later. They are joined by an American, John S. Blenkiron, eager to fight the Kaiser, and Peter Pienaar, a Boer and longtime friend from their shared experiences in Africa.
The problem is that I don’t give a hoot about the characters. The mysteries to be resolved are, in my view, convoluted and farfetched, made for the movies rather than reality. I am not drawn in by the excitement of the story.
There is nothing wrong with the writing per se. There are occasionally lines that are humorous. Some lines perceptively draw human behavior. Nevertheless, the focus on action, excitement and the solving of mysteries just doesn’t appeal to me. The author has failed to make me care.
This novel is available free at Librivox, here: https://librivox.org/greenmantle-vers...
At Librivox, it is Tom Weiss who narrates.
I chose instead to listen to the audiobook narrated by Simon Vance / Robert Whitfield. His narrations are usually very good and proved to be excellent this time around. With ease he flips between American, English and Boer accents. In every dialogue you easily hear who is speaking. He doesn’t overdo his dramatization. His narration I have given five stars.
***************************
The Richard Hannay books can be read in any order. I began with the second because it interested me more.
*Greenmantle 2 stars
*The 39 Steps maybe
December 9, 2008
Greenmantle follows Buchan's "Thirty-nine Steps" not as a sequel so much (imho), but rather as something along the line of the further adventures of Richard Hannay, the main protagonist and overall hero of the Thirty-nine Steps. Hannay has since been a soldier in WWI, in which he was injured at Loos. Now he is called into action once again, this time by the Foreign Office. Sir Walter Bullivant, the senior man at the FO, explains to Hannay that there is a German plot to drag Turkey into the war. The problem is not so much Turkey, per se, but all of the provinces where Islam is very strong; and the rumor is that Germany has something to bring all of the provincial Muslims together to fan the flames against the allies under German auspices. Just what Germany has is the unknown factor, and it's up to Hannay to figure it out. He is given only one clue: a half-piece of paper with the words "Kasredin", "cancer," and "v.I." It is from here that an incredible adventure begins which will keep the reader pretty much glued to the book.
Phenomenal read, and I recommend it highly. Yes, there are some improbable spots in the novel, but hey...it's an adventure and it's fun. The characters are great, and as noted at the beginning, you'll be wondering after a while how the good guys are ever going to get out of each predicament in which they find themselves. Also...consider the subject matter. This book was written in 1916, but in some ways is quite relevant to the world's situation today.
I can't recommend this one highly enough; those who like older stories of espionage and spycraft will really enjoy it. Others who may enjoy it are those who like good old-fashioned stories of adventure; and those who read The Thirty-Nine Steps by the same author may wish to read it to find out what happens next to Richard Hannay. Very well done.
Phenomenal read, and I recommend it highly. Yes, there are some improbable spots in the novel, but hey...it's an adventure and it's fun. The characters are great, and as noted at the beginning, you'll be wondering after a while how the good guys are ever going to get out of each predicament in which they find themselves. Also...consider the subject matter. This book was written in 1916, but in some ways is quite relevant to the world's situation today.
I can't recommend this one highly enough; those who like older stories of espionage and spycraft will really enjoy it. Others who may enjoy it are those who like good old-fashioned stories of adventure; and those who read The Thirty-Nine Steps by the same author may wish to read it to find out what happens next to Richard Hannay. Very well done.
May 8, 2023
The plethora of modern day thrillers, most written to abide with the modern day convention, to meet with the modern day ‘expectation’, consigns this novel to the past.
I made the effort to rid recollection, of that I’ve read before and keep Poppy’s contention in mind: “Some say, ‘Riddle of the Sands’ was a template for the modern day spy-thriller. This has to be up there with it.”
I agree.
I tried (I’m not saying it was easy - reading ‘The Great Game’, by Peter Hopkirk, previous to this was of benefit) to imagine life, behaviour, the mind-set, of those times and accept the writing style of those times.
Also, it was written in that time, the author did not have the history of events in WW1 to refer back to and as someone else has said before me, the author had no idea of the final outcome to the war this novel is set within.
If you can place yourself within those times, you have in your hand a riveting thriller.
The is nothing here that the reader would find, preposterous and I’m glad to say the reader is not subjected to a regular helping of sexual madness; all remains within the boundaries of normal behaviour - other than the hero of the day is off to thwart the enemy: trickery, deception and derring-do abound.
I enjoyed every morsel.
I made the effort to rid recollection, of that I’ve read before and keep Poppy’s contention in mind: “Some say, ‘Riddle of the Sands’ was a template for the modern day spy-thriller. This has to be up there with it.”
I agree.
I tried (I’m not saying it was easy - reading ‘The Great Game’, by Peter Hopkirk, previous to this was of benefit) to imagine life, behaviour, the mind-set, of those times and accept the writing style of those times.
Also, it was written in that time, the author did not have the history of events in WW1 to refer back to and as someone else has said before me, the author had no idea of the final outcome to the war this novel is set within.
If you can place yourself within those times, you have in your hand a riveting thriller.
The is nothing here that the reader would find, preposterous and I’m glad to say the reader is not subjected to a regular helping of sexual madness; all remains within the boundaries of normal behaviour - other than the hero of the day is off to thwart the enemy: trickery, deception and derring-do abound.
I enjoyed every morsel.
April 30, 2020
Wow. Loved it. Richard Hannay is such a chameleon: he is humble, has outstanding loyalty to his friends and almost devoutly patriotic.
I read the '39 Steps, as a teenager. And seen 3 different film versions. The historic part is also true.
Admittedly there are too many plot co-incidences: but it is a ripping good yarn.
Unputdownable
I read the '39 Steps, as a teenager. And seen 3 different film versions. The historic part is also true.
Admittedly there are too many plot co-incidences: but it is a ripping good yarn.
Unputdownable
July 19, 2023
Great fiction wrapped around the events detailed in Peter Hopkirk's, On Secret Service East of Constantinople:
Real life, credible spy-fiction.
A real treat.
Real life, credible spy-fiction.
A real treat.
August 16, 2021
There are adventure stories that take readers to places, on daring and foolhardy adventures full of the customary thrills and spills and end expectedly with a sensational climax that one can foresee well in advance. And then, there are adventure stories like John Buchan's "Greenmantle" - only a few of which really exist and which is something of a rarity these days - which seem as if you can predict how they will unfold and yet keep on surprising, startling and, most importantly, doing a great job of enthralling the reader without reserve.
There have been a few that I have read earlier this year as well - Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" and of course, last year, there were Greene and Stevenson faithfully living up to expectations. But honestly, I never expected John Buchan, whose much-more popular "The Thirty-Nine Steps" had been a little disappointing to me; I had enjoyed it but could not quite get through its quaintness or the fact that coincidences were too conveniently lined up for Richard Hannay on his admittedly entertaining scramble through the atmospheric Scottish Highlands. In "Greenmantle", on the other hand, Buchan subverts all those inevitable quaint touches, ratchets up the stakes, presents a bigger game of chess, sweeps us along on a wider scale across the breadth of Europe, from the West to the East, and, most importantly, gives us a meticulously detailed, evocatively written and almost mesmerising and magical story of rich adventure and real danger, so brilliantly written and put together is everything that one will find it hard, even when the pace becomes leisurely, to put it down.
Richard Hannay is recruited, once again, for a daring and unquestionably dangerous game of espionage by the dainty Sir Walter Bullivant to sneak behind the German lines, in the thick of the tumult of the Great War, and try to find the hidden truth behind the wind of a conspiracy to foment a Holy War in the Middle East that will leave a substantial blow in the British defenses. It is literally a shot in the dark; the only clues are cryptic last words scribbled by one of the most trusted agents of the British Intelligence before dying and yet with this slender scraps of information, Hannay and his allies - the American master of disguise and bluff John Blenkiron, the old Boer veteran Peter Pienaar and, most memorably, the romantically charming fellow Scot, Sandy Arbuthnot - have to plod and probe further into the immediately suspicious terrain of the continent held in the sway of Germany and find it out so that they can just save the day in time.
And while that might sound like yet another espionage thriller in today's times, Buchan's brilliant storytelling skills are enriched by a vivid prose style that captures action and suspense with clean-cut simplicity and yet also lingers on mood, milieu and gives a heady flavour of location and atmosphere. And all these qualities come to the fore as he masterfully orchestrates this immaculately written story from one twist or turn to another, taking our brave and enterprising men-on-a-mission from London to Germany and thence from there through the Danube to further east, leading them to the exotic but beautifully textured landscape of Turkey, the city of Constantinople teeming with paranoia and suspicion and the hills and highlands of Anatolia and the Tigris where this thrilling yarn reaches its sensational conclusion.
Yes, sensational is the right word for it. Unlike in “The Thirty Nine Steps”, where, for some part, I was able to predict quite safely as to where the chase would eventually lead, “Greenmantle” kept me guessing and kept on whetting up my appetite for things to come together, for all the grand plans to come to fruition. Right till the last three pages of the narrative, Buchan refuses to reveal his hand and keeps us on tenterhooks, not at all certain as to how things would turn out and genuinely anxious and even tense as to whether our heroes will even get out of this scramble alive, even as we know otherwise. And yet, what distinguishes this mastery of tension and suspense is how believable it feels and how stirringly dramatic is the emotional heft that the writer accomplishes with each new turn in the tale. We believe in the importance of this mission, we understand, thanks to Buchan’s astute understanding of political intrigues of the time, how its success or failure can alter the balance of world power and even the tide of the war and we yearn, we wish for its victory, we root for these brave men, far from idealistic heroes yet wholly admirable for their derring-do and courage, to win, to save the world from the chaos that it would fall into if their plans would be thwarted.
And yet, again, “Greenmantle” is no simple tale of good versus evil, no Manichean narrative of blacks and whites; this is also a rare thriller for its times that portrays its supposed antagonists and the “enemy” with realism and conviction; they are not merely racial stereotypes but rather convincingly sinister but believable characters who are also as patriotic in their duty as our heroes and thus deserving of the same respect and empathy. It is again this layer of realism, apart from its sound political judgements and its unmistakable parallels from real-life – for a character’s ultimate moment of heroism is modelled on the real-life Lawrence of Arabia as well – that lifts “Greenmantle” head and shoulders above most thrillers and adventures of its time and reminds us that Buchan was one of the most intelligent, imaginative and empathetic storytellers of his times and of all time as well. You can almost imagine every subsequent storyteller being inspired by him, from Graham Greene to Eric Ambler and even Ian Fleming, taking down their notes in the background.
There have been a few that I have read earlier this year as well - Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" and of course, last year, there were Greene and Stevenson faithfully living up to expectations. But honestly, I never expected John Buchan, whose much-more popular "The Thirty-Nine Steps" had been a little disappointing to me; I had enjoyed it but could not quite get through its quaintness or the fact that coincidences were too conveniently lined up for Richard Hannay on his admittedly entertaining scramble through the atmospheric Scottish Highlands. In "Greenmantle", on the other hand, Buchan subverts all those inevitable quaint touches, ratchets up the stakes, presents a bigger game of chess, sweeps us along on a wider scale across the breadth of Europe, from the West to the East, and, most importantly, gives us a meticulously detailed, evocatively written and almost mesmerising and magical story of rich adventure and real danger, so brilliantly written and put together is everything that one will find it hard, even when the pace becomes leisurely, to put it down.
Richard Hannay is recruited, once again, for a daring and unquestionably dangerous game of espionage by the dainty Sir Walter Bullivant to sneak behind the German lines, in the thick of the tumult of the Great War, and try to find the hidden truth behind the wind of a conspiracy to foment a Holy War in the Middle East that will leave a substantial blow in the British defenses. It is literally a shot in the dark; the only clues are cryptic last words scribbled by one of the most trusted agents of the British Intelligence before dying and yet with this slender scraps of information, Hannay and his allies - the American master of disguise and bluff John Blenkiron, the old Boer veteran Peter Pienaar and, most memorably, the romantically charming fellow Scot, Sandy Arbuthnot - have to plod and probe further into the immediately suspicious terrain of the continent held in the sway of Germany and find it out so that they can just save the day in time.
And while that might sound like yet another espionage thriller in today's times, Buchan's brilliant storytelling skills are enriched by a vivid prose style that captures action and suspense with clean-cut simplicity and yet also lingers on mood, milieu and gives a heady flavour of location and atmosphere. And all these qualities come to the fore as he masterfully orchestrates this immaculately written story from one twist or turn to another, taking our brave and enterprising men-on-a-mission from London to Germany and thence from there through the Danube to further east, leading them to the exotic but beautifully textured landscape of Turkey, the city of Constantinople teeming with paranoia and suspicion and the hills and highlands of Anatolia and the Tigris where this thrilling yarn reaches its sensational conclusion.
Yes, sensational is the right word for it. Unlike in “The Thirty Nine Steps”, where, for some part, I was able to predict quite safely as to where the chase would eventually lead, “Greenmantle” kept me guessing and kept on whetting up my appetite for things to come together, for all the grand plans to come to fruition. Right till the last three pages of the narrative, Buchan refuses to reveal his hand and keeps us on tenterhooks, not at all certain as to how things would turn out and genuinely anxious and even tense as to whether our heroes will even get out of this scramble alive, even as we know otherwise. And yet, what distinguishes this mastery of tension and suspense is how believable it feels and how stirringly dramatic is the emotional heft that the writer accomplishes with each new turn in the tale. We believe in the importance of this mission, we understand, thanks to Buchan’s astute understanding of political intrigues of the time, how its success or failure can alter the balance of world power and even the tide of the war and we yearn, we wish for its victory, we root for these brave men, far from idealistic heroes yet wholly admirable for their derring-do and courage, to win, to save the world from the chaos that it would fall into if their plans would be thwarted.
And yet, again, “Greenmantle” is no simple tale of good versus evil, no Manichean narrative of blacks and whites; this is also a rare thriller for its times that portrays its supposed antagonists and the “enemy” with realism and conviction; they are not merely racial stereotypes but rather convincingly sinister but believable characters who are also as patriotic in their duty as our heroes and thus deserving of the same respect and empathy. It is again this layer of realism, apart from its sound political judgements and its unmistakable parallels from real-life – for a character’s ultimate moment of heroism is modelled on the real-life Lawrence of Arabia as well – that lifts “Greenmantle” head and shoulders above most thrillers and adventures of its time and reminds us that Buchan was one of the most intelligent, imaginative and empathetic storytellers of his times and of all time as well. You can almost imagine every subsequent storyteller being inspired by him, from Graham Greene to Eric Ambler and even Ian Fleming, taking down their notes in the background.
June 29, 2025
Most Americans probably never gave conservative – much less militant – Islam a thought prior to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. And even then, from 1980-2001 the mujahadeen were seen as independence-loving, anti-Communist freedom fighters, as portrayed in such books as Ken Follett’s Lie Down with Lions and Gaz Hunter’s The Shooting Gallery, or in films like “Rambo 3.”
But the British, with their centuries of global colonial adventurism, have long understood the power (if not outright threat) of awoken religious fervor, be it the Mahdi’s Army in Sudan, or China’s Taiping Rebellion, (the bloodiest civil war in history, which was fought concurrently with – and largely laid the groundwork for the British to win – the Second Opium War).
Point being, as an American living in a post-9/11 U.S., I was struck by the timeliness of the basic plotline of Greenmantle; i.e., Germany’s plans during the First World War to foment a messianic, perhaps “Taliban-like” Muslim uprising aimed at throwing the Middle East, North Africa and pre-partition India into chaos and therefore distracting the Allies from the war in Europe.* The fact that the book was published in 1916 and therefore had a direct – if immeasurable – impact on America’s decision to join the war just makes it even more historically relevant.
That said, however, as literature this story probably hasn’t held up as well as other classics, either of its day or in the overall spy genre. As in Buchan’s earlier and more famous Hannay book, The 39 Steps, our hero spends the bulk of the story either escaping or avoiding capture in the first place, here running across Eastern Europe and Turkey instead of the Scottish Highlands. The plot itself is largely an ill-defined McGuffin – “the Germans are planning something, so find out what it is and…stop it?” – to get Hannay to put in a Flashman-esque appearance at the battle or Erzurum, with WAY too many coincidental meetings along the way; for four people wandering separately across Europe, these knuckleheads seem to bump into each other on a daily basis.
Plus, I also had a continuing problem with the character of Hilda von Einem, who is consistently described as an evil, crazy, devilish, fanatical, etc., seductress; whereas in fact she really just comes across as…I dunno, a generic female character – not even that much of a “bad guy.”
It's always tough to review books written over 100 years ago when viewed through our modern lens, but I’ve frankly enjoyed other stories from that period – Kim, The Lost World, even A Princess of Mars – more. So a sold 3-3.5 stars I guess, but that should be enough Buchan for a while.
* And while there are certainly numerous books written about the role of militant Islam in WWI – most notably Peter Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire – I didn’t realize that this was well-known enough to be used as source material for contemporaneous fiction.
NOTES ON THE AUDIOBOOK(S): Our library only had this on audio, but offered two versions. I started with this one narrated by Christian Rodska, which wasn’t bad; his Hannay sounded a little too upper-class prim and proper, but Rodska did a good job with his Scottish – and later Boer – accents. But then, as soon as he came to the characters of Blenkiron and Stumm, all bets were off – he suddenly became all gravelly and shouty and just over-the-top unlistenable, to the point where I went back and downloaded the other audiobook, narrated by Robert Whitfield. And this one also started out fine, with a stronger Hannay voice…but then as soon as Whitfield got to any of the non-Brit characters is was just WTF??. His American, Germans, Scots, Turks and South Africans all sounded like interchangeable “non-English foreigners,” and so I switched again back to the first book and just suffered through the Stumm/Blenkiron passages whenever they appeared, (and I do mean suffered).
And then turns out, Richard Whitfield is in fact Simon Vance recording under a different name; Vance being the narrator of the Kingsley Amis James Bond story Colonel Sun, where I similarly criticized the narration for its ersatz accents...so at least I’m consistent in my opinions here, even if Vance/Whitfield isn’t with his voices. (BTW, he also records under “Richard Matthews” – so consider yourself warned.)
Also, this audiobook? With the biplane on the cover? I guess that says “World War I,” but there's not an aircraft in the entire story. Just sayin'.
But the British, with their centuries of global colonial adventurism, have long understood the power (if not outright threat) of awoken religious fervor, be it the Mahdi’s Army in Sudan, or China’s Taiping Rebellion, (the bloodiest civil war in history, which was fought concurrently with – and largely laid the groundwork for the British to win – the Second Opium War).
Point being, as an American living in a post-9/11 U.S., I was struck by the timeliness of the basic plotline of Greenmantle; i.e., Germany’s plans during the First World War to foment a messianic, perhaps “Taliban-like” Muslim uprising aimed at throwing the Middle East, North Africa and pre-partition India into chaos and therefore distracting the Allies from the war in Europe.* The fact that the book was published in 1916 and therefore had a direct – if immeasurable – impact on America’s decision to join the war just makes it even more historically relevant.
That said, however, as literature this story probably hasn’t held up as well as other classics, either of its day or in the overall spy genre. As in Buchan’s earlier and more famous Hannay book, The 39 Steps, our hero spends the bulk of the story either escaping or avoiding capture in the first place, here running across Eastern Europe and Turkey instead of the Scottish Highlands. The plot itself is largely an ill-defined McGuffin – “the Germans are planning something, so find out what it is and…stop it?” – to get Hannay to put in a Flashman-esque appearance at the battle or Erzurum, with WAY too many coincidental meetings along the way; for four people wandering separately across Europe, these knuckleheads seem to bump into each other on a daily basis.
Plus, I also had a continuing problem with the character of Hilda von Einem, who is consistently described as an evil, crazy, devilish, fanatical, etc., seductress; whereas in fact she really just comes across as…I dunno, a generic female character – not even that much of a “bad guy.”
It's always tough to review books written over 100 years ago when viewed through our modern lens, but I’ve frankly enjoyed other stories from that period – Kim, The Lost World, even A Princess of Mars – more. So a sold 3-3.5 stars I guess, but that should be enough Buchan for a while.
* And while there are certainly numerous books written about the role of militant Islam in WWI – most notably Peter Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire – I didn’t realize that this was well-known enough to be used as source material for contemporaneous fiction.
NOTES ON THE AUDIOBOOK(S): Our library only had this on audio, but offered two versions. I started with this one narrated by Christian Rodska, which wasn’t bad; his Hannay sounded a little too upper-class prim and proper, but Rodska did a good job with his Scottish – and later Boer – accents. But then, as soon as he came to the characters of Blenkiron and Stumm, all bets were off – he suddenly became all gravelly and shouty and just over-the-top unlistenable, to the point where I went back and downloaded the other audiobook, narrated by Robert Whitfield. And this one also started out fine, with a stronger Hannay voice…but then as soon as Whitfield got to any of the non-Brit characters is was just WTF??. His American, Germans, Scots, Turks and South Africans all sounded like interchangeable “non-English foreigners,” and so I switched again back to the first book and just suffered through the Stumm/Blenkiron passages whenever they appeared, (and I do mean suffered).
And then turns out, Richard Whitfield is in fact Simon Vance recording under a different name; Vance being the narrator of the Kingsley Amis James Bond story Colonel Sun, where I similarly criticized the narration for its ersatz accents...so at least I’m consistent in my opinions here, even if Vance/Whitfield isn’t with his voices. (BTW, he also records under “Richard Matthews” – so consider yourself warned.)
Also, this audiobook? With the biplane on the cover? I guess that says “World War I,” but there's not an aircraft in the entire story. Just sayin'.
August 23, 2023
The sequel to 1915's The Thirty-Nine Steps - a beloved adventure novel notable both for predicting the events that led to the outbreak of WWI as well as for its early film version directed by a young Alfred Hitchcock - finds our hero Richard Hannay (based to some degree on the real-life military officer Field Marshal Lord Ironside) drawn into an espionage assignment during WWI that has the potential to change the outcome of the war. Like its predecessor, this novel was hugely influential to later adventure authors like Ian Fleming and John le Carré for its breathless and non-stop action which is almost enough to allow one to overlook the plot implausibilities, the dull stretches of expository dialogue, the pompous archaic language and slang of the time when "the sun never set on the British Empire," and the mild racial insensitivities. It's not for pure literary merit that this one landed on the Guardian 1000 list, but more for the numerous progeny it inspired.
January 31, 2016
I’m going to start my review of this First World War thriller with what, for me, is one of the most terrible confessions a man can make. I am a book thief.
My copy of Greenmantle, now tattered, its spine weak from years of rereading, and its faded red cloth cover falling apart at the hinges, still has the book plate of my school library. I borrowed the book and loved it so much, I never returned it. More than fifty years later, I still cherish it too much to part with.
Over the years my habit has been to read compulsively, bingeing on stories and authors I love; reading and rereading them, obsessed as any addict in a smoke-filled Limehouse den. But Greenmantle has remained my opiate of choice during a lifetime of literary addictions – the book I return to so that I can relive the thrill of my first adventure story.
Curiously, the older I’ve grown and the more experienced I’ve become as a writer, the more ashamed I’ve become of loving this book so much, as though it were nothing more than an embarrassing juvenile infatuation. But there is much, much more to this little book than merely teenage love, and much more to its author, as I want now to tell.
First, the story itself. Intrepid spy and soldier Richard Hannay is convalescing in London in 1915 after a major battle in Flanders. Only a year earlier, he had saved Britain’s greatest secrets from falling into the hands of a German spy ring in The Thirty Nine Steps. Now, the spymaster he encountered in that earlier book, Sir Walter Bullivant, sends for Hannay and asks again for his help.
The enemy is once more the German secret service, but this time, they are even more devilishly cunning in their planning, and the stakes are even higher. The Germans have latched onto a Muslim holy man – “The Emerald” or Greenmantle of the title – and they are making him a pawn in their game throughout the Arab world, using him to whip up Muslim fundmentalists to declare jihad against the hated British – a plot with a surprisingly modern ring.
Together with a small band of friends, Hannay’s task is go into the enemy’s heartland, Germany itself, disguised as a Boer who hates the British, and ferret out the secret of Greenmantle, and put an end to the German plan before they succeed in setting the Middle East ablaze.
To help him, Hannay has a small dedicated band. There is his old friend Sandy Arbuthnot, an experienced Arabist, linguist and master of disguise who can disappear as easily into the backstreets of Berlin as into a Turkish bazaar. There is a grizzled old hand from his days in South Africa, Pieter Pienaar, able to pass for a Boer, like Hannay. And there is a dyspeptic American businessman, John S. Blenkiron who can travel innocently as a neutral.
Each has his adventures and brushes with danger, which form the tapestry of the story. Those dangers include a ruthless and mysterious femme fatale, German masterspy Hilda von Einem, and her bulldog aide Colonel Ulrich von Stumm.
One can see plenty of opportunity for clichés in reviewing Greenmantle. Like most of Buchan’s work, it is a ripping yarn, boy’s own adventure, another episode of the Great Game. It has cliché heroes and villains in the dauntless Hannay and the ruthless von Einem.
Yet from our modern perspective it’s easy to forget that many of these tropes were originated by Buchan in these early action-adventure thrillers. Hannay is perhaps the earliest prototype of James Bond – the secret agent whose loyalty is to his country. The dangers that Britain and Hannay face are as much those of psychological warfare as they are physical dangers – indeed Buchan’s identification of resurgent fundamentalist Islamists as a powerful enemy of the west is astonishing in the light of modern developments.
It wasn’t only Ian Fleming who borrowed from Buchan. The 1985 Hollywood action-adventure “The Jewel of the Nile” also lifted the central premise of a Muslim holy man – The Jewel – being used as the pawn in a jihadist plot.
Buchan’s prose is laconic, like his hero. There are no wasted words. But he was also capable of infusing poetry into even the most mundane description. When Hanny is being briefed on his mission by Sir Walter at the Foreign Office, for instance:-
Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of taxis in Whitehall.
That tiny, deft detail, the trivial impatience of taxi drivers who know nothing of great secrets and great affairs of state, still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as I eavesdrop on the two men in their high office.
Again, such writing may be commonplace today but in 1916 it was one of the sources of the kind of terse, fast-moving prose that later journalists like Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming were to use so effectively.
But there is even more to marvel at here. Because Buchan wrote Greenmantle specifically because he had been asked by Charles Masterman, a Liberal MP who was head of the secret British War Propaganda Bureau to produce a book, paid for at government expense, as part of the propaganda war against Germany. And because it was first and foremost a propaganda weapon in Britain’s war with the Hun, Buchan took several opportunities in Greenmantle to belittle Germany and the Germans – or at least its wartime leaders.
Disguised as a disaffected Boer named Cornelius Brandt, Hannay is taken in tow by Colonel von Stumm, a caricature German officer with bullet head, thick neck and monocle as well as the regulation arrogant bullying manner. That is, until they stay the night at the Colonel’s castle in their journey across Germany. Hannay is taken upstairs by von Stumm to his private apartment.
Here Buchan sets up a scene clearly intended to tell readers who could read between the lines that the vile von Stumm is secretly nothing less than an effeminate homosexual.
It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army.
Hannay soon shows this German pansy how decent English chaps respond to that sort of beastly behaviour by punching him on the nose and escaping. Clearly, the German army is not, after all, the most highly-trained and highly-disciplined body of men in the world, but merely a bunch of sissies who like nothing better than dressing in women’s knickers.
At another point in the story Hannay, in disguise, is travelling through wartime Germany and just happens to meet the Kaiser, to whom he is introduced. It is plain from the gaunt, haggard expression on the Kaiser’s face that he is a beaten man and that Germany is already finished, though it is only early 1916. Hannay tells us;
The last I saw of him was a figure moving like a sleep-walker, with no spring in his step, amid his tall suite. I felt that I was looking on at a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in action. Here was one that had loosed Hell, and the furies of Hell had got hold of him. . . I would not have been in his shoes for the throne of the Universe . . .
Buchan is most often criticised today for the coincidences he employs as plotting devices. Yet he anticipated this criticism in the foreword to Greenmantle where he wrote of his tale;
Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land.
Buchan was able to write Greenmantle with some authority because he was himself both a soldier and a spymaster. By the end of the War he was head of the War Propaganda Bureau. He was also a director of his own publishing company, Nelsons, and as an editor he originated the idea of the weekly part-work (again paid for by the government) on the First World War.
For modern thriller audiences there is plenty of more sophisticated fare available – Forsyth, Clancy, Ludlum. But there is a freshness, an originality, and a magic in Greenmantle that no modern writer quite has.
I will not be returning my copy. I am still a book thief.
My copy of Greenmantle, now tattered, its spine weak from years of rereading, and its faded red cloth cover falling apart at the hinges, still has the book plate of my school library. I borrowed the book and loved it so much, I never returned it. More than fifty years later, I still cherish it too much to part with.
Over the years my habit has been to read compulsively, bingeing on stories and authors I love; reading and rereading them, obsessed as any addict in a smoke-filled Limehouse den. But Greenmantle has remained my opiate of choice during a lifetime of literary addictions – the book I return to so that I can relive the thrill of my first adventure story.
Curiously, the older I’ve grown and the more experienced I’ve become as a writer, the more ashamed I’ve become of loving this book so much, as though it were nothing more than an embarrassing juvenile infatuation. But there is much, much more to this little book than merely teenage love, and much more to its author, as I want now to tell.
First, the story itself. Intrepid spy and soldier Richard Hannay is convalescing in London in 1915 after a major battle in Flanders. Only a year earlier, he had saved Britain’s greatest secrets from falling into the hands of a German spy ring in The Thirty Nine Steps. Now, the spymaster he encountered in that earlier book, Sir Walter Bullivant, sends for Hannay and asks again for his help.
The enemy is once more the German secret service, but this time, they are even more devilishly cunning in their planning, and the stakes are even higher. The Germans have latched onto a Muslim holy man – “The Emerald” or Greenmantle of the title – and they are making him a pawn in their game throughout the Arab world, using him to whip up Muslim fundmentalists to declare jihad against the hated British – a plot with a surprisingly modern ring.
Together with a small band of friends, Hannay’s task is go into the enemy’s heartland, Germany itself, disguised as a Boer who hates the British, and ferret out the secret of Greenmantle, and put an end to the German plan before they succeed in setting the Middle East ablaze.
To help him, Hannay has a small dedicated band. There is his old friend Sandy Arbuthnot, an experienced Arabist, linguist and master of disguise who can disappear as easily into the backstreets of Berlin as into a Turkish bazaar. There is a grizzled old hand from his days in South Africa, Pieter Pienaar, able to pass for a Boer, like Hannay. And there is a dyspeptic American businessman, John S. Blenkiron who can travel innocently as a neutral.
Each has his adventures and brushes with danger, which form the tapestry of the story. Those dangers include a ruthless and mysterious femme fatale, German masterspy Hilda von Einem, and her bulldog aide Colonel Ulrich von Stumm.
One can see plenty of opportunity for clichés in reviewing Greenmantle. Like most of Buchan’s work, it is a ripping yarn, boy’s own adventure, another episode of the Great Game. It has cliché heroes and villains in the dauntless Hannay and the ruthless von Einem.
Yet from our modern perspective it’s easy to forget that many of these tropes were originated by Buchan in these early action-adventure thrillers. Hannay is perhaps the earliest prototype of James Bond – the secret agent whose loyalty is to his country. The dangers that Britain and Hannay face are as much those of psychological warfare as they are physical dangers – indeed Buchan’s identification of resurgent fundamentalist Islamists as a powerful enemy of the west is astonishing in the light of modern developments.
It wasn’t only Ian Fleming who borrowed from Buchan. The 1985 Hollywood action-adventure “The Jewel of the Nile” also lifted the central premise of a Muslim holy man – The Jewel – being used as the pawn in a jihadist plot.
Buchan’s prose is laconic, like his hero. There are no wasted words. But he was also capable of infusing poetry into even the most mundane description. When Hanny is being briefed on his mission by Sir Walter at the Foreign Office, for instance:-
Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of taxis in Whitehall.
That tiny, deft detail, the trivial impatience of taxi drivers who know nothing of great secrets and great affairs of state, still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as I eavesdrop on the two men in their high office.
Again, such writing may be commonplace today but in 1916 it was one of the sources of the kind of terse, fast-moving prose that later journalists like Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming were to use so effectively.
But there is even more to marvel at here. Because Buchan wrote Greenmantle specifically because he had been asked by Charles Masterman, a Liberal MP who was head of the secret British War Propaganda Bureau to produce a book, paid for at government expense, as part of the propaganda war against Germany. And because it was first and foremost a propaganda weapon in Britain’s war with the Hun, Buchan took several opportunities in Greenmantle to belittle Germany and the Germans – or at least its wartime leaders.
Disguised as a disaffected Boer named Cornelius Brandt, Hannay is taken in tow by Colonel von Stumm, a caricature German officer with bullet head, thick neck and monocle as well as the regulation arrogant bullying manner. That is, until they stay the night at the Colonel’s castle in their journey across Germany. Hannay is taken upstairs by von Stumm to his private apartment.
Here Buchan sets up a scene clearly intended to tell readers who could read between the lines that the vile von Stumm is secretly nothing less than an effeminate homosexual.
It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army.
Hannay soon shows this German pansy how decent English chaps respond to that sort of beastly behaviour by punching him on the nose and escaping. Clearly, the German army is not, after all, the most highly-trained and highly-disciplined body of men in the world, but merely a bunch of sissies who like nothing better than dressing in women’s knickers.
At another point in the story Hannay, in disguise, is travelling through wartime Germany and just happens to meet the Kaiser, to whom he is introduced. It is plain from the gaunt, haggard expression on the Kaiser’s face that he is a beaten man and that Germany is already finished, though it is only early 1916. Hannay tells us;
The last I saw of him was a figure moving like a sleep-walker, with no spring in his step, amid his tall suite. I felt that I was looking on at a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in action. Here was one that had loosed Hell, and the furies of Hell had got hold of him. . . I would not have been in his shoes for the throne of the Universe . . .
Buchan is most often criticised today for the coincidences he employs as plotting devices. Yet he anticipated this criticism in the foreword to Greenmantle where he wrote of his tale;
Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land.
Buchan was able to write Greenmantle with some authority because he was himself both a soldier and a spymaster. By the end of the War he was head of the War Propaganda Bureau. He was also a director of his own publishing company, Nelsons, and as an editor he originated the idea of the weekly part-work (again paid for by the government) on the First World War.
For modern thriller audiences there is plenty of more sophisticated fare available – Forsyth, Clancy, Ludlum. But there is a freshness, an originality, and a magic in Greenmantle that no modern writer quite has.
I will not be returning my copy. I am still a book thief.
May 15, 2023
I'm with Polly on this: as a foundation of the modern day 'real-life' spy-thriller this has to be put alongside 'The Riddle of the Sands'.
A fantastic read and nothing preposterous in the plot or how the tale unravels; I'll agree, I wasn't around all those years back for either of these books, but I just know this was how life was and the characters give that feeling of being real.
I give up on most of today's fiction thrillers before I'm that far in: not this, it is super-duper.
A fantastic read and nothing preposterous in the plot or how the tale unravels; I'll agree, I wasn't around all those years back for either of these books, but I just know this was how life was and the characters give that feeling of being real.
I give up on most of today's fiction thrillers before I'm that far in: not this, it is super-duper.
March 31, 2021
2.5 ⭐️ too many coincidences for my liking and not dated that well. Decided not to continue with this series.
September 16, 2007
This is great work--the writing is personal and emotional, and yet it's formula is spy novel, Conan DOyle in the mystery but with added depth because it's about Turkey and the East and will give you insight into World War I in Europe. It's also remarkably prescient, written before the end of that war, about a band of Allied sympathizers who are spies impersonating at one point or another virtually every possible brand German and German sympathizer. This material and the exciting and well drawn but not too excessively over the top narrative of unlikely escapes and murderous Germanic brown-bread eaters--all that makes this book really fun. But for me what notched it up just one more level was the voice and diction of the narrator. I wish I had the book in front of me to quote, but I don't, so you'll have to believe me that the tangents into narrative-reflection are often gorgeously composed and lulling, and effective and affective because they build sympathy for our soul-searching and senstitive narrator. That said, I was struck by a naivete to the work, which seems to me odd and incongruous, because war is war. But in the end I found there to be something quaint and even innocent about the treatment of the subject of danger in this pre WW 2 account. It is as if, as the history books do really say, the world didn't actually know evil yet, didn't know real terror. So, there is one incongrous scene where our endangered and intrepid heroes find themselves imprisoned in a Turkish dungeon, dark and dank and with no place to piss or shit but the corner. It's a startling fast forward to the consciousness of the present, as if Buchan has conceived of and has given a glimpse of a sort of brutality and fear that would not become part of mainstream consciousness until long after, or at least until the HOlocaust. Prescient is a word often used to descrive Buchan's work (he wrote The 39 steps as well). I'd say he's a writer who elevates genre writing from that time through emnotion and a willingness to see bald faced what in other hands is merely trite and candied up.
May 1, 2018
Recovering from injuries sustained at the Battle of Loos, Richard Hannay is charged by Sir Walter Bullivant with investigating rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world. It seems the Germans plan to use religion to help them win the war by causing Britain and its allies to divert troops from the Western Front. Hannay reluctantly accepts the case seeing it as a diversion from his true role leading his troops on the front line.
The action of the book moves from wartime Germany to Asia Minor as Hannay and his comrades seek to disrupt the plot. This involves a perilous journey through enemy territory to meet up with his friend, Sandy Arbuthnot, in Constantinople. Hannay and his other companions Peter Pienaar and John S. Blenkiron, have to outwit some formidable foes, including the thuggish Ulric von Stumm, Turkish army officer Rasta Bey and the charismatic but malevolent, Hilda von Einem.
It’s all terrific fun involving coded messages, a dying prophet, disguises and a secret band known as The Companions of the Rosy Hours as Hannay seeks to foil the dastardly plot. However, there are also elements of real life events. For example, the character of Sandy Arbuthnot is based on Buchan’s friend Aubrey Herbert – with a touch of Lawrence of Arabia thrown in. It all comes to a climax in a vividly described battle scene, again inspired by actual events in the First World War.
The action of the book moves from wartime Germany to Asia Minor as Hannay and his comrades seek to disrupt the plot. This involves a perilous journey through enemy territory to meet up with his friend, Sandy Arbuthnot, in Constantinople. Hannay and his other companions Peter Pienaar and John S. Blenkiron, have to outwit some formidable foes, including the thuggish Ulric von Stumm, Turkish army officer Rasta Bey and the charismatic but malevolent, Hilda von Einem.
It’s all terrific fun involving coded messages, a dying prophet, disguises and a secret band known as The Companions of the Rosy Hours as Hannay seeks to foil the dastardly plot. However, there are also elements of real life events. For example, the character of Sandy Arbuthnot is based on Buchan’s friend Aubrey Herbert – with a touch of Lawrence of Arabia thrown in. It all comes to a climax in a vividly described battle scene, again inspired by actual events in the First World War.
August 1, 2009
Compared to the hectic pace and implausible coincidences of The Thirty-nine Steps, Greenmantle (1916), the second volume of the Richard Hannay trilogy, is more than a Boy's Own adventure tale. Buchan, it turns out, can really write. I was entertained by his deft turns of phrase. Even when the plot whirled away in yet another chase scene, Buchan's language ... part old school jargon, part Rider Haggard, a dash of Sax Rohmer ... surprised me and held my interest. Stylistically, Greenmantle is sort of like reading Lawrence's
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
but without all the metaphysical mumbo jumbo and excruciating detail. For an old tyme spy thriller, it's hard to beat.
September 19, 2015
What a strange, entertaining book!
Greenmantle is an odd kind of historical novel about WWI, a spy story about a team of heroes trying to solve a mystery and foil plots. What makes it unusual is that John Buchan wrote it *during* WWI, while serving in France and in British intelligence. Through the novel he reimagines the war, especially in the east, and ends up creating something of an alternate history.
But don't let my analysis distract you. To begin with, Greenmantle is a grand adventure. The action starts right off and never lets up. Nearly every chapter has a mix of disguises, chases, fine cars, the Kaiser (!), scary/creepy villains, fights, reversals of fortune, and codes. It's a cracking story.
It's also an interesting sequel to Buchan's first spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (my review). We have the same protagonist, Richard Hannay, and he's up to his by-now usual tricks: bluffing, sneaking around the countryside, using his engineering and South African experience. Greenmantle expands the first novel's pattern, rapidly leaving Britain and Buchan's favored Scots countryside for central and eastern Europe, then the Ottoman empire. Also, Hannay is no longer the lone man on the run, but part of a team. This is definitely a group effort.
As World War I fiction... I can't think of another novel like this. It's an alternate present or near future, which is by 2015 alternate history. Buchan doesn't change the western front (he actually only refers to it, rather than showing it us), but posits a German-Ottoman conspiracy to set up a Muslim messiah (not a spoiler; occurs early on). That draws on actual German attempts, which never bore fruit. Buchan lets us imagine they could.
We also get an all too rare glimpse of the eastern front, as Russia invades Anatolia. The novel's finale takes place in the battle of Erzurum (1916), and I can't think of a fictional representation of this struggle. Russians appear as serious, even noble, a far cry from the usual British perception of a clumsy, collapsing army being ground to death by Prussians.
Indeed, one of the weirder scenes has Hannay, ah,
There are other weird scenes. One of the German villains, a ferocious and imposing bully, turns out to have an effeminate side in a somewhat erotic and scary passage. Another turns out to be a femme fatale of sorts, who terrorizes the band of heroes simply by existing. And our heroes possess a disturbing fatalism about impending death.
Other notes... as usual, Buchan balances stress and terror with humor and self-abnegation. We get to spend time with a character only mentioned in 39 Steps. There's a quiet portrait of a touch of PTSD in the veterans, including Hannay. There are references to the failure of Gallipoli, handled carefully. A very silly yet effective American character entertains (and, I think, suffers from the gut troubles that gnawed the author, and with which I sympathize).
The end is tremendous. We get epic action, thunderous war, the whole world balanced in the scales, our heroes in the middle of things. And then...
Enough with the mysteries. Dig into Greenmantle for a wild ride that offers an unusual take on the First World War.
Greenmantle is an odd kind of historical novel about WWI, a spy story about a team of heroes trying to solve a mystery and foil plots. What makes it unusual is that John Buchan wrote it *during* WWI, while serving in France and in British intelligence. Through the novel he reimagines the war, especially in the east, and ends up creating something of an alternate history.
But don't let my analysis distract you. To begin with, Greenmantle is a grand adventure. The action starts right off and never lets up. Nearly every chapter has a mix of disguises, chases, fine cars, the Kaiser (!), scary/creepy villains, fights, reversals of fortune, and codes. It's a cracking story.
It's also an interesting sequel to Buchan's first spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (my review). We have the same protagonist, Richard Hannay, and he's up to his by-now usual tricks: bluffing, sneaking around the countryside, using his engineering and South African experience. Greenmantle expands the first novel's pattern, rapidly leaving Britain and Buchan's favored Scots countryside for central and eastern Europe, then the Ottoman empire. Also, Hannay is no longer the lone man on the run, but part of a team. This is definitely a group effort.
As World War I fiction... I can't think of another novel like this. It's an alternate present or near future, which is by 2015 alternate history. Buchan doesn't change the western front (he actually only refers to it, rather than showing it us), but posits a German-Ottoman conspiracy to set up a Muslim messiah (not a spoiler; occurs early on). That draws on actual German attempts, which never bore fruit. Buchan lets us imagine they could.
We also get an all too rare glimpse of the eastern front, as Russia invades Anatolia. The novel's finale takes place in the battle of Erzurum (1916), and I can't think of a fictional representation of this struggle. Russians appear as serious, even noble, a far cry from the usual British perception of a clumsy, collapsing army being ground to death by Prussians.
Indeed, one of the weirder scenes has Hannay, ah,
There are other weird scenes. One of the German villains, a ferocious and imposing bully, turns out to have an effeminate side in a somewhat erotic and scary passage. Another turns out to be a femme fatale of sorts, who terrorizes the band of heroes simply by existing. And our heroes possess a disturbing fatalism about impending death.
Other notes... as usual, Buchan balances stress and terror with humor and self-abnegation. We get to spend time with a character only mentioned in 39 Steps. There's a quiet portrait of a touch of PTSD in the veterans, including Hannay. There are references to the failure of Gallipoli, handled carefully. A very silly yet effective American character entertains (and, I think, suffers from the gut troubles that gnawed the author, and with which I sympathize).
The end is tremendous. We get epic action, thunderous war, the whole world balanced in the scales, our heroes in the middle of things. And then...
Enough with the mysteries. Dig into Greenmantle for a wild ride that offers an unusual take on the First World War.
March 19, 2009
In fairly recent times I have read John Buchan's The 39 Steps, seen the West End play, rewatched the Hitchcock film and watched the not very good BBC version at Christmas - so I guessed it was time to hit the John Buchan's own follow-up.
The problems The 39 Steps had were largely compensated for by its brevity, the book does rush by at a fair old pace after all. It's sequel however takes more time, which is a shame as it doesn't have substantially more plot. In this the problems of driving a stolen car when you know your enemies have telegraphed ahead can be given ten not very riveting pages.
The plot concerns Richard Hannay and cohorts heading out to Turkey at the height of World war One to stop the Germans taking advantage of an Islamic holy-man for their own ends. The book was actually written in 1916 - so at the height of WWI - and it is odd to read. Most fiction I've encountered about that war ('All Quiet On The Western Front' and so on) is very downbeat, this however is full of the joys of battle. It obviously had its propoganda purposes.
Of course it being 1916, the casually thrown off views of the time are present. We get stated opinions of the Germans, Turks and Jews which will make the modern reader blink (though are probably nothing compared to a Bulldog Drummond book) as well as various other contentious points. However it is a book of its time and you can end up in endless literary arguement if you go down that road.
More important to the quality of the book is the slackness of the narrative, and how - unlike The 39 Steps - there are parts where you just wish Hannay would get on with it.
The problems The 39 Steps had were largely compensated for by its brevity, the book does rush by at a fair old pace after all. It's sequel however takes more time, which is a shame as it doesn't have substantially more plot. In this the problems of driving a stolen car when you know your enemies have telegraphed ahead can be given ten not very riveting pages.
The plot concerns Richard Hannay and cohorts heading out to Turkey at the height of World war One to stop the Germans taking advantage of an Islamic holy-man for their own ends. The book was actually written in 1916 - so at the height of WWI - and it is odd to read. Most fiction I've encountered about that war ('All Quiet On The Western Front' and so on) is very downbeat, this however is full of the joys of battle. It obviously had its propoganda purposes.
Of course it being 1916, the casually thrown off views of the time are present. We get stated opinions of the Germans, Turks and Jews which will make the modern reader blink (though are probably nothing compared to a Bulldog Drummond book) as well as various other contentious points. However it is a book of its time and you can end up in endless literary arguement if you go down that road.
More important to the quality of the book is the slackness of the narrative, and how - unlike The 39 Steps - there are parts where you just wish Hannay would get on with it.
April 15, 2018
An involved plot that drags spy Hannay across half of Europe and into Turkey, with one identity after another.
This was too much convolution out on a limb, not enough grounding the reader in what was going on, an ending that comes out of nowhere, and a lot of scenes where I was expected to react in a certain way, because, dammit, that's the way all right-thinking white Britishers act in the early part of the twentieth century. It didn't age well and is quite sexist and racist. I was more annoyed with the "just go with it" attitude through the whole book. It feels like even the readers at the time might have had questions about why such-and-such a thing was important or relevant.
This was too much convolution out on a limb, not enough grounding the reader in what was going on, an ending that comes out of nowhere, and a lot of scenes where I was expected to react in a certain way, because, dammit, that's the way all right-thinking white Britishers act in the early part of the twentieth century. It didn't age well and is quite sexist and racist. I was more annoyed with the "just go with it" attitude through the whole book. It feels like even the readers at the time might have had questions about why such-and-such a thing was important or relevant.
October 5, 2016
What a splendid adventure story and more.
Richard Hannay in 1915 on a top mission to foil a plot to create a holy war in the Muslim world, to draw troops from the Western Front, and to help Germany win the war. Hannay must track down the mysterious prophet who holds the key to everything - Greenmantle.
Greenmantle demonstrates Buchan's exemplary storytelling ability and political insight. Therefore a treasure for children and adults.
Richard Hannay in 1915 on a top mission to foil a plot to create a holy war in the Muslim world, to draw troops from the Western Front, and to help Germany win the war. Hannay must track down the mysterious prophet who holds the key to everything - Greenmantle.
Greenmantle demonstrates Buchan's exemplary storytelling ability and political insight. Therefore a treasure for children and adults.
July 8, 2025
Good, old-fashioned, tenable fiction, based upon the historical events of that time. Mr Buchan had his finger on the pulse, not unlike Erskine Childers. I'd suggest Mr Childers was an accidental agent of the British and wonder about Mr Buchan.
A great read.
A great read.
January 27, 2026
Listening to Peter Joyce's wonderful narration and am enjoying it even more. Original review below.
Update: reading along with the narration I discovered the audio has some discreet narrating of text to simplify at least one general phrase and the complete omission of something that isn't politically correct. Now I can't enjoy - or trust it at all. MY SOLUTION is to listen to the brilliant Christian Rodska instead.
========
Rereading through funny book circimstance, because Mrs. Appleyard (in Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen) didn't mind staying up to keep an eye on some long cooking dish because she could reread either Greenmantle or Mr. Standfast. Which reminded me of John Buchan! I barely remember any of this book and so am enjoying it as if for the first time. Original review is below.
-----------
This is the second of the four books featuring featuring Richard Hannay, who we first met in The 39 Steps. Having been fighting in WWI, Major Hannay is called back to London to hear the proposition of the official who helped him in the affair of The 39 Steps. A spy mission during which he is told he will almost certainly die, that will probably have him journey to Turkey, and to which there are only three words as a clue. Of course, he steps up and accepts the mission. I am just at the beginning and Hannay is busy bludgeoning himself with questions like, "Why was I so stupid as to accept a suicide mission?" In other words, he is reacting like anyone would. My interest is piqued.
I wound up liking this book much more than I thought I would. It was interesting watching Hannay gather a team together and then seeing their undercover investigations move them far apart and bring them together with surprising results. The one element that didn't work for me was the femme fatale and her effect on Sandy. That just didn't make sense. But perhaps it is because I am reading the book so very many years afterward and it depended on cultural conditions which have since changed. All round, an excellent spy yarn that I can recommend to others.
Update: reading along with the narration I discovered the audio has some discreet narrating of text to simplify at least one general phrase and the complete omission of something that isn't politically correct. Now I can't enjoy - or trust it at all. MY SOLUTION is to listen to the brilliant Christian Rodska instead.
========
Rereading through funny book circimstance, because Mrs. Appleyard (in Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen) didn't mind staying up to keep an eye on some long cooking dish because she could reread either Greenmantle or Mr. Standfast. Which reminded me of John Buchan! I barely remember any of this book and so am enjoying it as if for the first time. Original review is below.
-----------
This is the second of the four books featuring featuring Richard Hannay, who we first met in The 39 Steps. Having been fighting in WWI, Major Hannay is called back to London to hear the proposition of the official who helped him in the affair of The 39 Steps. A spy mission during which he is told he will almost certainly die, that will probably have him journey to Turkey, and to which there are only three words as a clue. Of course, he steps up and accepts the mission. I am just at the beginning and Hannay is busy bludgeoning himself with questions like, "Why was I so stupid as to accept a suicide mission?" In other words, he is reacting like anyone would. My interest is piqued.
I wound up liking this book much more than I thought I would. It was interesting watching Hannay gather a team together and then seeing their undercover investigations move them far apart and bring them together with surprising results. The one element that didn't work for me was the femme fatale and her effect on Sandy. That just didn't make sense. But perhaps it is because I am reading the book so very many years afterward and it depended on cultural conditions which have since changed. All round, an excellent spy yarn that I can recommend to others.
December 21, 2022
Pendant son terme (de 1935 à 1940), John Buchan (aussi connu sous le nom de Baron Tweedsmuir) a fondé les prix du Gouverneur-Général du Canada . Donc il a joué un role important dans l'histoire de la littérature canadienne. Pour cette raison, Greenmantle sera un bon choix pour tout Canadien de langue francaise qui veut pratiquer son anglais.
Personne parmi les gagnants a réussi à vendre autant de livres que John Buchan qui a été un des grands pionniers du thriller. Dans ce romann trouve Buchan est au sommet de son art.
Greenmantle raconte l'histoire comment l'espion anglais Richard Hannay en 1915 déjoue un complot chez les Allemands qui veulent fomenter une mouvement chez les musulmans au Moyen Orient contre les Russes (les alliés des Britanniques) en faveur des Turques (les alliés de l'Allemagne).
La grande valeur de cette oeuvre est est qu'il donne un apercu de la mentalité des des Impérialistes Britanniques au debut du vingtième siècle. Buchan croyait dur comme fer dans la mission civilisatrice des peuples anglo-saxons. La guerre allait plutot mal pour la Grande Bretagne quand Greenmantle a été publié en 1916. Le roman visait carrément à soulever la morale des Britanniques dans un grand moment de crise. De nos jours, la pertinence de Greenmantle vient du fait qu'il témoin d'une époque clé de l'histoire mondiale.
Personne parmi les gagnants a réussi à vendre autant de livres que John Buchan qui a été un des grands pionniers du thriller. Dans ce romann trouve Buchan est au sommet de son art.
Greenmantle raconte l'histoire comment l'espion anglais Richard Hannay en 1915 déjoue un complot chez les Allemands qui veulent fomenter une mouvement chez les musulmans au Moyen Orient contre les Russes (les alliés des Britanniques) en faveur des Turques (les alliés de l'Allemagne).
La grande valeur de cette oeuvre est est qu'il donne un apercu de la mentalité des des Impérialistes Britanniques au debut du vingtième siècle. Buchan croyait dur comme fer dans la mission civilisatrice des peuples anglo-saxons. La guerre allait plutot mal pour la Grande Bretagne quand Greenmantle a été publié en 1916. Le roman visait carrément à soulever la morale des Britanniques dans un grand moment de crise. De nos jours, la pertinence de Greenmantle vient du fait qu'il témoin d'une époque clé de l'histoire mondiale.
September 18, 2022
GREENMANTLE
Another great WWI spy thriller featuring Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, the first in the series being “The 39 Steps.”
In this one, Hannay infiltrates the German Army in an attempt to stop a religious uprising in Constantinople. It’s thought to be the German’s secret weapon to beat the Allied Forces and win the war. Hannay travels throughout Germany and Turkey, getting immersed in one fantastical adventure after another.
Written in 1916, it has an old fashioned and British and Scottish feel to it. But I think that adds to the excitement and to the terrific sense of authenticity. I really enjoyed it a lot.
Another great WWI spy thriller featuring Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, the first in the series being “The 39 Steps.”
In this one, Hannay infiltrates the German Army in an attempt to stop a religious uprising in Constantinople. It’s thought to be the German’s secret weapon to beat the Allied Forces and win the war. Hannay travels throughout Germany and Turkey, getting immersed in one fantastical adventure after another.
Written in 1916, it has an old fashioned and British and Scottish feel to it. But I think that adds to the excitement and to the terrific sense of authenticity. I really enjoyed it a lot.
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May 11, 2024Well...of all the old favourites that I've revisited as an older and wiser adult, I'm kind of devastated to find that GREENMANTLE has fared the worst. All the way through this book, even as I was going feral all over again for the genuinely good things in it, some horrible little bit of casual racism or other prejudice would swing out of nowhere and hit me between the eyes. The worst moment in the book is probably the protagonist priding himself on his talents as a foreman with the words "I hadn't been a n----r-driver in (South Africa) for nothing". But the contempt of the novel is pretty liberally and unremittingly bestowed upon anyone not a white, straight, British male - even unwittingly at those moments when the author is labouring to be respectful. In my teens and early twenties I used to genuinely wonder why GREENMANTLE, such a manifestly good time, was not considered to be a classic. Now I know, and it's awful.
That said...despite the constant casual prejudice on show towards pretty much everybody, it's actually pretty obvious that JB sometimes does try to be respectful in this book, and although with his tendency to wildly stereotype people he's not very good at it, much of the time he succeeds. He attempts to respect women, and Hilda von Einem, our glamorous villainess, is treated with dignity throughout. He is very careful to respect both Germany and Ottoman Turkey, and this in the very middle of World War I, when there must have been plenty of angry voices calling for brutal reprisals against both, and any call for respect and understanding could not have been very popular. And, above all, he handles Islam very gently and with great respect. I do think that Buchan was someone capable of wanting to do better, and that his final book SICK HEART RIVER is the work of someone who DID learn better in some ways. But of course none of that context can erase the awful attitudes that do in fact make their way into the book.
A major theme of the book is Providence, and I think it's the best thing in the book by far. To begin with, it's one of two things that keep the book from floating off into nationalist jingoism. On the face of it, the premise is one which might sound like a recipe for far-right nuttery. Germany's latest ploy to win WWI is to stir up militant Islam against the Allies by presenting them with a great Islamic saint, the titular Greenmantle, and it's our hero's job to put together a small team to venture deep behind enemy lines in order to spy out and stop this plan. Yet as the book unfolds, we see Buchan being very, very careful to insist that Greenmantle himself is a good and peaceful man who will be used by evil people to seduce and corrupt Muslims. (The worst thing the villainess does is an act of violence against the prophet's followers). In opposition to this plan, Buchan refers to the spies as "missionaries", and has his hero compare himself to the ten year old St Theresa heading out with her little brother to convert the heathen. The overt references to religion combined with a very nationalist and imperialist take on WWI would be a recipe for the worst sort of Christian Nationalism if it wasn't for the sort of Christianity that this is: it's not the Christianity of the crusaders, sure that God was on their side and wanted them to kill for his sake, but the Christianity of a defenceless ten-year-old-girl prepared to die for God's sake. The "missionaries" are hysterical with terror, certain that they're being sent on a suicide mission, and have literally no choice but to head out into danger putting their trust blindly in a beneficent Providence to protect them as long as it takes to finish their mission. "Christian" Nationalism knows nothing of such weakness and humility, because it has a theology of power and force, and takes God's blessing for granted. JB was not, alas, a good enough Christian to love all his neighbours all the time as he ought; but he was good enough to understand that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong.
It's this precise theme of Providence watching over man's weakness that made me go utterly feral for this book as a teen. There are things GREENMANTLE does better than any other spy novel in the world. Indeed, while THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS is often cited as the moment when the spy novel was born, that is more of a nineteenth century romance in the vein of RL Stevenson, crossed with a cosy Scottish travelogue, that happens to include spies. It is in GREENMANTLE that the spy genre really gets going: a desperate journey deep into enemy territory, where danger lurks around every corner, the heroes are always playing a part, and the goal is to glean information and foil some big plan of the enemy's. GREENMANTLE contains a very specific atmosphere, of that exhilaration you feel driving too fast along a mountain road, or galloping a horse you can't quite trust. Everyone in this book spends half their time completely drunk on danger, lurching desperately from one escape to the next and making things up as they go along and just trusting to Providence to guide them where they need to be. The result is extraordinarily heady - a continual trust fall into the arms of God. (I think it's also extremely important to this theme that our heroes themselves may outwit the villains, but they do not fight and kill them; both Hilda von Einem and Stumm lose their lives in an act of God rather than at the hands of the protagonists). It's this that makes the book genuinely thrilling in a way no other spy thriller ever has been, because no other spy novelist has been this much of a Presbyterian.
When GREENMANTLE is good it's intensely, gloriously, intoxicatingly good; and when it's bad it's horrid. I still go feral for this story, now more than ever seeing how intimately the theme works to drag the book back from the worst it could be and to make it, instead, as gloriously exciting as it ought to be. It is a tragedy that the entire book is still imbued by such pride and self-congratulatory snobbery. Someday, I hope, a nice Presby boy will write some more thrillers, and they will have all of GREENMANTLE's virtues and none of its vices.
That said...despite the constant casual prejudice on show towards pretty much everybody, it's actually pretty obvious that JB sometimes does try to be respectful in this book, and although with his tendency to wildly stereotype people he's not very good at it, much of the time he succeeds. He attempts to respect women, and Hilda von Einem, our glamorous villainess, is treated with dignity throughout. He is very careful to respect both Germany and Ottoman Turkey, and this in the very middle of World War I, when there must have been plenty of angry voices calling for brutal reprisals against both, and any call for respect and understanding could not have been very popular. And, above all, he handles Islam very gently and with great respect. I do think that Buchan was someone capable of wanting to do better, and that his final book SICK HEART RIVER is the work of someone who DID learn better in some ways. But of course none of that context can erase the awful attitudes that do in fact make their way into the book.
A major theme of the book is Providence, and I think it's the best thing in the book by far. To begin with, it's one of two things that keep the book from floating off into nationalist jingoism. On the face of it, the premise is one which might sound like a recipe for far-right nuttery. Germany's latest ploy to win WWI is to stir up militant Islam against the Allies by presenting them with a great Islamic saint, the titular Greenmantle, and it's our hero's job to put together a small team to venture deep behind enemy lines in order to spy out and stop this plan. Yet as the book unfolds, we see Buchan being very, very careful to insist that Greenmantle himself is a good and peaceful man who will be used by evil people to seduce and corrupt Muslims. (The worst thing the villainess does is an act of violence against the prophet's followers). In opposition to this plan, Buchan refers to the spies as "missionaries", and has his hero compare himself to the ten year old St Theresa heading out with her little brother to convert the heathen. The overt references to religion combined with a very nationalist and imperialist take on WWI would be a recipe for the worst sort of Christian Nationalism if it wasn't for the sort of Christianity that this is: it's not the Christianity of the crusaders, sure that God was on their side and wanted them to kill for his sake, but the Christianity of a defenceless ten-year-old-girl prepared to die for God's sake. The "missionaries" are hysterical with terror, certain that they're being sent on a suicide mission, and have literally no choice but to head out into danger putting their trust blindly in a beneficent Providence to protect them as long as it takes to finish their mission. "Christian" Nationalism knows nothing of such weakness and humility, because it has a theology of power and force, and takes God's blessing for granted. JB was not, alas, a good enough Christian to love all his neighbours all the time as he ought; but he was good enough to understand that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong.
It's this precise theme of Providence watching over man's weakness that made me go utterly feral for this book as a teen. There are things GREENMANTLE does better than any other spy novel in the world. Indeed, while THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS is often cited as the moment when the spy novel was born, that is more of a nineteenth century romance in the vein of RL Stevenson, crossed with a cosy Scottish travelogue, that happens to include spies. It is in GREENMANTLE that the spy genre really gets going: a desperate journey deep into enemy territory, where danger lurks around every corner, the heroes are always playing a part, and the goal is to glean information and foil some big plan of the enemy's. GREENMANTLE contains a very specific atmosphere, of that exhilaration you feel driving too fast along a mountain road, or galloping a horse you can't quite trust. Everyone in this book spends half their time completely drunk on danger, lurching desperately from one escape to the next and making things up as they go along and just trusting to Providence to guide them where they need to be. The result is extraordinarily heady - a continual trust fall into the arms of God. (I think it's also extremely important to this theme that our heroes themselves may outwit the villains, but they do not fight and kill them; both Hilda von Einem and Stumm lose their lives in an act of God rather than at the hands of the protagonists). It's this that makes the book genuinely thrilling in a way no other spy thriller ever has been, because no other spy novelist has been this much of a Presbyterian.
When GREENMANTLE is good it's intensely, gloriously, intoxicatingly good; and when it's bad it's horrid. I still go feral for this story, now more than ever seeing how intimately the theme works to drag the book back from the worst it could be and to make it, instead, as gloriously exciting as it ought to be. It is a tragedy that the entire book is still imbued by such pride and self-congratulatory snobbery. Someday, I hope, a nice Presby boy will write some more thrillers, and they will have all of GREENMANTLE's virtues and none of its vices.
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