The Island of Sheep was first published in July 1936, so its 84th anniversary is this month.
I said in the article about Mr Standfast that The Island of Sheep was lower in my estimation than The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and The Three Hostages. The latter was published in 1924; the 12-year gap between The Island of Sheep and its immediate predecessor suggests to me that John Buchan had finished with Richard Hannay but finally gave in to pressure from publishers and demands from dedicated Hannay fans for more exciting adventure stories.
The new thriller that he produced does not in my opinion have the appeal of some of the earlier books. Something is missing. Rudyard Kipling would have said that Buchan’s creative spirit or daemon was not involved in the construction process.
Much of the material is familiar from the previous books; there are many descriptions of fishing, wildlife, sheep and Buchan’s beloved Scottish landscape and its people for example.
There isn’t much that inspires commentary apart from a few miscellaneous passages and Richard Hannay’s ambivalent feelings and ideas about his comfortable life.
Richard Hannay’s inner conflicts
At the start of The Three Hostages, Richard Hannay was living a quiet life as a country gentleman. He had paid his dues and earned it. Having to leave it all to go on a mission seemed like a fate worse than death to him.
At the start of The Island of Sheep, Richard Hannay has been living the quiet life for many years. His attitude towards it has changed: it is much more complicated and ambivalent this time around.
Hannay gets the feeling that he has used up his credit so it is time for another payment. He has to earn a top-up by going on some mission out in the world:
“I was too comfortable. I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn’t earning them.”
“‘Too comfortable,’ I said. ‘I feel I’m getting old and soft and slack. I don’t deserve this place, and I’m not earning it.’”
The problem is that while he feels strongly that he needs to do something to re-earn what he has, he is afraid that he no longer has what it takes. He is older; he is not what he was:
“...the suspicion I had had all winter that I was myself old and stale and that all my youth had gone...”
“I realized that I was growing old and had left some wonderful things behind me.”
Another dilemma is that while he knows that being content with what one has is a good sign, it can also mean that one has settled for it because it is all one can get or is fit for:
“I had an ugly suspicion that satisfaction with it meant that I had grown decrepit.”
“I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age. What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?”
With all that going on in his mind, no wonder that Richard Hannay is often ill at ease and dissatisfied with his life.
Richard Hannay is back in business
In The Three Hostages, a letter recalling him to the outside world seemed like the snake in his Eden; this time around the sudden feeling that a call to arms was coming restores his contentment. He decides that he had better enjoy his comfortable life while he still has it:
“I wasn't looking for any more difficult jobs in this world, but the mere possibility of one coming along allowed me to enjoy my slippered days with a quieter conscience.”
The difficult job does indeed come along after some ‘chance’ meetings with an old friend from the past and a hunted man with an enormous fortune and a story to tell. Members of a very dangerous gang start to show their hand.
The game is on again for Richard Hannay.
Jacques D’Ingraville
This character first appears in Buchan’s Courts of the Morning (1929). He is one of the villains in both books.
Our old friend Sandy Arbuthnot is also in both books. His usual infiltration of the enemy camp in disguise followed by the big revelation scenario falls rather flat in The Island of Sheep, but he says something very interesting about D’Ingraville:
“'I've been sitting tight and watching him, and all I can say is, that if he was formidable in Olifa he's a dashed sight more formidable to-day.'...
‘He's a beast of prey,' Sandy went on. 'But in Olifa he was a sick beast, living an unnatural life on drugs which must have weakened his nerve. Now he's the cured beast, stronger and much more dangerous than if he had never been sick.
It's exactly what happens with a man who gets over infantile paralysis--the strength of will and mind and body required to recover from the disease give the patient a vitality and self-confidence that lasts him for the rest of his days. I don't know why God allowed it and by what magic he achieved it, but D'Ingraville to-day is as fit a man as any of us here, and with ten times our dæmonic power...“
I think that this is true, and it has wider application than the conditions mentioned by Sandy.
Buchan the Bournemouth basher
The only remark in the book I find particularly amusing is in a description of some people in a hotel in Rhodesia. Their clothes are expensive, exotic and out of place:
“...though no doubt it would have been all right at Bournemouth.”
John Buchan often makes spiteful digs at people, places and ideas that he doesn’t approve of or has a grudge against. I wondered what he had against Bournemouth, and discovered that it was just one of several English seaside towns that I like but he found fault with:
“But any seaside place to which Nigel journeyed was contrasted by him unfavourably with that isle of dreams. There were too many houses at Bournemouth, and too many people at Broadstairs, and a horrible band in green jackets at Eastbourne, and a man who made ugly faces at Littlehampton, but at Eilean Bàn there would be only his father and the sea and the grey seals and the curlews...”
From A Prince of the Captivity
The end of Richard Hannay’s adventures
Although Richard Hannay is mentioned a few times in Sick Heart River (1940), which was published in the year of John Buchan’s death, The Island of Sheep is the final novel in which he is the main character.
Sir Edward Leithen’s words about him in Sick Heart River make a good epitaph:
“And there was Dick Hannay, half Nestor, half Odysseus, deep in Oxfordshire mud, but with a surprising talent for extricating himself and adventuring in the ends of the earth.”
The five Richard Hannay adventures:
