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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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(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.)