How Racist John Buchan Is Remembered Thanks To A Sex Harasser

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I've finished The Thirty Steps by John Buchan. Having read Prester John was expecting heaps of racism in this book too. So it's a surprise to say that there is no racism in the book.

There is instead anti-Semitism. Mainly in the first chapter. But it's there. All you need to find now is sexism (which I'll come back to in a moment) and homophobia and you'll have a connect four of bigotry.

But ignoring all of that what's surprised me about this book is how bad it is. The style is pedestrian and lazy, I've seen cotton reels more tense than this supposed thriller. I think I've written before that some bestsellers are badly written but the power of the story pulls it through. Not so here.

So then we have to ask why it is that if you ask people who've heard the name John Buchan they remember this novel and are very unlikely to know of any of the other stuff he wrote?

The answer, it occurred to me was in the all round (in the very literal sense) form of serial sex harasser/film director Alfred Hitchcock who made the book into a movie

Now let me say I've never seen the full film but I know from the bits I have seen already that it's better than the so called thriller that it was based on? How? Well there are two things I already know that make it better.

Firstly there are women in the film. In the novel there are, wait for it, no women at all. Indeed I can only recall one female character actually being mentioned in the entire book, and that was in passing. So any female readers expecting to pretend to be whatever character Madeleine Carroll played in the movie, you're going to be disappointed. And to the male readers out there, trust me when I say the lack of any women in this book doesn't improve it at all. So I would suggest the sexist counter mentioned earlier is dropped here through omission.

Secondly the climatic finale to the film, which I have seen but won't spoil for you, doesn't exist in the book either. The ending is in fact rather dull.

So before John Galsworthy and The Forsythe Saga or Michael Dobbs with House of Cards here is arguably the first case where the moving picture version was better than the bad book it was based on. But because it was so much better, it allowed the inferior original version to live on in the memory.

So a sexist/racist/anti Semite should thank a sex harasser. Such is the world we live in.

Until the next time.

Why Didn't I Like Treasure Island More?

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, part of the literary bucket list of classics I should read before I die that my Kindle seems to be giving me (does it know something I don't?) can now be crossed off.

More than any of these books I've read recently though when finished I felt unenthused. Won't say neutral, because I did like the novel. Just not as much as I thought.

So there am I on completion thinking to myself "Why Didn't I Like Treasure Island more?" Mentally found myself  making a short list of reasons.

Here's it is:

That I knew too much about the book before reading it: Regular readers to this blog will know that I try to avoid film/TV adaptations of famous novels as much as possible to avoid the probability of the reading experience being spoilt. But the more famous the book the more chances there are of images in the popular consciousness, consequently there are less chances of you being able to be monk like in the isolation of them.

Of the recent classic books I've read Treasure Island was far and away the most famous. Who doesn't know about Long John Silver and that parrot, Jim Hawkins etc. It's also responsible for a lot of popular pirate clichés. Perhaps I just knew too much before I started reading it to have enjoyed it now?

That the book had just one strong character in Long John Silver and was damaged because of it: I've read bad books in my life where what pulled you through as a reader was the strength of one particular character. Soames Forsyth and Francis Urquhart in the novels of John Galsworthy and Michael Dobbs springs to mind. It didn't mean that I enjoyed the book, it just meant there was a reason why I continued to turn the page.

The trouble however was that when the strong character wasn't in a scene the book seemed dull in comparison. Although let me stress I don't think that this is a bad novel to me it was exactly what occurred in Treasure Island.

And linked to this reason comes the following:

That the "good guys" in Treasure Island are just dull/unbelievable: And so they are. Even Jim Hawkins, who is able at thirteen to do things that elders in his group are incapable of.

That people should just know their place: If we leave aside Jim Hawkins for a moment. It's noticeable that the "good guys" in Treasure Island are all in positions of authority (the captain.the squire and the doctor). The subliminal message here is that the lower orders should follow people of a higher strata than them. It's irritating to say the least.

All of the above are genuine reasons why I didn't like Treasure Island as much as I was expecting to. But one reason dominates above all else.

I read it too late: When starting to read this book I didn't know whether it was purely for children or "for all the family". Having read it I now know that it's the former. More specifically a book for boys between about ten and thirteen before girls come into the picture. It's on reflection noticeable that there's just one female character in the entire novel, Jim Hawkins' mother. And she's gone after a few chapters.

What more could a boy of that age want than adventure in the high seas and foreign climes without bothersome whiny women to stop you? Not only that but you prove yourself just as invaluable as the adults around you. It's very Boy's Own.

However I'm a very old man with very grey hair. I no longer have the enthusiasm of thirteen, just the fatigue of fifty three.

So the fault as to why I didn't like Treasure Island as much is not Stevenson's but mine. I was too old to truly enjoy it (a sentence I'll be saying a lot of as these years go on).

The next book from the great unread is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. Arguably the most important work of socialist fiction in English.

So definitely a book a fifty three year old man can read.

Until the next time.