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An odd, gripping thriller from 1939 which begins with the unnamed hero getting hurled off a cliff after being tortured, and raises the stakes from there.
He is the most British hero ever, even by the standards of books written around that period; he muses on class, he endures with a stiff upper lip, he doesn't want to bother other members of his club by appearing in a disheveled state (due to having fled for his life after nearly getting killed!) but he takes the qualities of that hero type to a bizarre extreme. So much so that I began to suspect him of being an unreliable narrator, even though I’ve read so many books in which he wouldn’t be; this turns out to be partly but not entirely correct.
The reason for the cliff was that he was hunting in an unnamed European country when he got the idea that it would be an awesome challenge to see if he could stalk its unnamed dictator with his rifle, just for the fun of it; he understands, but is annoyed, that the dictator's bodyguards think that was not his actual motive.
Given the publication date, I assume the dictator is Hitler, though I could be wrong. If so, I can see why he and even his country went unnamed, but the protagonist is too, which makes that seem more of literary significance. If so, I’m not sure what it means; maybe an effort to make the themes feel more universal?
Note: Contains cat death.
Spoilers!
The protagonist, after a lot of nailbiting adventures and endurance, makes it back to England. He then discovers that agents of Anonymous Adolf are pursuing him, and it’s politically complicated to seek official help from his own government. Perhaps more importantly, he’s not the sort of person who seeks help.
Instead, he digs himself a burrow in Dorset and lies in it much of the rest of the book. It’s not a cozy hobbit hole, it’s a dark, wet, filthy tunnel, like a grave. The hunter has become the hunted, but a dangerous quarry. The climax is bizarre and horrifying and weirdly mythic: his enemy kills the tomcat that he befriended and was low-key telepathic with (yes, this is canon), and tosses the corpse into his burrow, only for the protagonist to use his hide to construct a sort of slingshot with which he can both enact his own revenge and that of the cat.
This is such a strange book. The hero is both a very common type and incredibly weird; he talks about burrowing in Dorset like of course this is the only possible way to deal with an assassin on his trail, much like in a Jack C. Chalker book of course all the most desirable whores have hooves. The book starts out like James Bond, then becomes Lord of the Flies, then returns to James Bond by way of a fairly conventional decision to avenge a loved one by way of a somewhat unusual psychological revelation.
Leaning into premise: Yes, definitely, regardless of what you consider the premise to actually be. It works on the level of straightforward thriller, and it also works as a weird psychodrama with mythic overtones.
I hope some of you have read this because I’m really curious what you made of it.
Rogue Male (New York Review Books Classics)
He is the most British hero ever, even by the standards of books written around that period; he muses on class, he endures with a stiff upper lip, he doesn't want to bother other members of his club by appearing in a disheveled state (due to having fled for his life after nearly getting killed!) but he takes the qualities of that hero type to a bizarre extreme. So much so that I began to suspect him of being an unreliable narrator, even though I’ve read so many books in which he wouldn’t be; this turns out to be partly but not entirely correct.
The reason for the cliff was that he was hunting in an unnamed European country when he got the idea that it would be an awesome challenge to see if he could stalk its unnamed dictator with his rifle, just for the fun of it; he understands, but is annoyed, that the dictator's bodyguards think that was not his actual motive.
Given the publication date, I assume the dictator is Hitler, though I could be wrong. If so, I can see why he and even his country went unnamed, but the protagonist is too, which makes that seem more of literary significance. If so, I’m not sure what it means; maybe an effort to make the themes feel more universal?
Note: Contains cat death.
Spoilers!
The protagonist, after a lot of nailbiting adventures and endurance, makes it back to England. He then discovers that agents of Anonymous Adolf are pursuing him, and it’s politically complicated to seek official help from his own government. Perhaps more importantly, he’s not the sort of person who seeks help.
Instead, he digs himself a burrow in Dorset and lies in it much of the rest of the book. It’s not a cozy hobbit hole, it’s a dark, wet, filthy tunnel, like a grave. The hunter has become the hunted, but a dangerous quarry. The climax is bizarre and horrifying and weirdly mythic: his enemy kills the tomcat that he befriended and was low-key telepathic with (yes, this is canon), and tosses the corpse into his burrow, only for the protagonist to use his hide to construct a sort of slingshot with which he can both enact his own revenge and that of the cat.
This is such a strange book. The hero is both a very common type and incredibly weird; he talks about burrowing in Dorset like of course this is the only possible way to deal with an assassin on his trail, much like in a Jack C. Chalker book of course all the most desirable whores have hooves. The book starts out like James Bond, then becomes Lord of the Flies, then returns to James Bond by way of a fairly conventional decision to avenge a loved one by way of a somewhat unusual psychological revelation.
Leaning into premise: Yes, definitely, regardless of what you consider the premise to actually be. It works on the level of straightforward thriller, and it also works as a weird psychodrama with mythic overtones.
I hope some of you have read this because I’m really curious what you made of it.
Rogue Male (New York Review Books Classics)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Household#Series
published nearly 40+ years later, which is also wild.
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All the wilderness stuff is just so great: it feels simultaneously fever-dreamish and ultra-plausible, probably because Household's familiarity with the details shines through. (Apparently Household is known for his combination of suspense and nature details.) I feel like it's rare to get this kind of blend of competence porn and claustrophobia, where the character does the absolute best that anyone could do but still can't raise the bar above "shitty" in terms of his situation. And everything with the cat has really stayed with me.
I've always loved both the seeming premise--"I'm just curious to see if I can do this," which seems eminently relatable, because everyone's always offhandedly curious about whether or not they could get away with certain things--and the twist to it, which, like you said, is conventional, but which also works really interestingly with the unreliable narrator aspect, because it's him sort of caving at that point and admitting that he's not as light and reasonable and "fair play" as he's been presenting himself. He's been telling us the story directly, and he's lied to us about his motives to avoid getting into the mess of his feelings and acknowledging his own motivations even to himself, and I've always liked that.
I definitely take the dictator to be Hitler, which always makes the narrator not succeeding at the beginning even more haunting.
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The "let's see if I can do this" is also something I've seen in other British books with on-the-surface-similar heroes - they're so above messy emotions, all they care about is the joy of the hunt. It was so neat for me to not know where that was going and to be kept thinking "Is this guy supposed to be unreliable?"
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I definitely want to see that. Walter Pidgeon in the 1941 film is not weird enough.
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he talks about burrowing in Dorset like of course this is the only possible way to deal with an assassin on his trail --This feels like dream logic. In dreams, all kinds of weird inconceivable stuff just seems eminently logical. Makes me wonder if there's a kind of universe where yes: burrow-in-Dorset is THE solution. Like if you're in Inner Mongolia and being pursued by an assassin, your first step is not to buy a shovel but to buy a plane ticket, because the burrow has to be in Dorset.
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(Though in the 1930s, you could hardly throw a stone in Dorset without hitting some boho writer - they were hanging out there in groups, e.g. Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lesbian coterie.)
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That was me and Howl's Moving Castle and John Donne's "Song."
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That's completely legitimate. I think I was in grad school when I realized he hadn't invented Laird Cregar.
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Household was quoted once as saying that he always envisioned the dictator as Hitler, but left it open in case the reader wanted it to be Stalin. [edit] It even says so on Wikipedia.
I never had a choice about seeing him as Hitler because I read the novel after seeing the first film version, Man Hunt (1941), which is a perfectly enjoyable anti-Nazi WWII thriller directed by Fritz Lang and is one hundred and ten percent not as batshit as the novel. I saw it with my mother and her reaction was essentially to go straight to the library and get the book for me. (Then the NYRB came out with its timely reprint and I got her a copy of her own.) I've never read anything else of Household's and I keep meaning to, partly because of the casual genre mix-in in Rogue Male. There are ways in which it reminds me of Dick Francis cranked up to eleven or maybe twelve.
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(and I see
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