The 39 steps john buchan6/7/2023 Hannay welcomes the diversion and agrees to let Scudder hide out there. After three months he is bored out of his mind and is considering going back to Africa when adventure comes knocking. A neighbour called Scudder barges into his rooms with an incredible tale of espionage and assassination. Our hero Richard Hannay, having made his fortune in Bulawayo, has returned to the Old Country to relax and enjoy spending it. So, I resolved to try to take the book seriously. He also argues convincingly that the fairly arresting antisemitism in the opening chapter isn’t Buchan’s, but that of a character who is debunked later in the book. It was written as a ‘shocker’, but had a serious intent as it was published when Britain was at war. The reputation of The Thirty-Nine Steps as the epitome of English boy’s own adventure, with a stiff-upper-lip hero ranged against a dastardly enemy, is undermined by the fact that neither author nor hero are English. The critic Stuart Kelly in the introduction to this edition makes a fair attempt to give the novel depth: ‘the finest piece of propaganda of its era transcends being mere propaganda’. I think John Buchan has a similar problem to Enid Blyton: It is difficult to read them without being influenced by decades of comic reinterpretations of their work as shallow, jingoistic gung-ho nonsense. First published in the UK 1915, Hodder & Stoughton
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