Buchan et al: The Thirty-Nine/39 Steps

Though it may be entertaining up to a point, I stopped reading John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps at about the half-way mark because I just couldn't care less about what happens to the narrator. The novel is full- too full - with ridiculous escapes and the most improbable encounters w friends and enemies: for example the narrator is trying to elude his pursuers in the most remote region of Scotland when along comes a "motor car" driven by a friend from London- as if the entire span of Great Britain were inhabited by two dozen people! (Which btw is something novelist Anthony Powell plays w to his comic advantage). Another ex.: When the narrator is caught and locked into a closet while his captors discuss his fate he fumbles around and lo and behold discovers that the closet hold cases of dynamite and it just so happens that he knows how to set a fuse and he blows up the cabinet and is hurled (uninjured) to safety! At this point you either go along for the ride knowing this adventure is impossible except in a cheap novel or on film, as noted yesterday, or you move on, as I did - though I did look ahead to see if the fantastic scene in Hitchcock's v of this novel (the reveal re the meaning of the title) came from Buchan; in fact it came from Hitchcock (we can also see how this novel influenced H's North by Northwest in re the chase in an open field w a crop duster shooting from overhead - much like the chase in this novel across the moor - an early example showing that open spaces can be more scary than enclosed spaces.

Sent from my iPhone