THIS beautifully produced volume of essays commemorates the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Buchan, known to his family and admirers as JB. Inevitably, in bringing fresh perspectives to the life of one who was a writer, lawyer, publisher, politician, and public servant, ending up as Governor General of Canada, it ranges widely in subject matter.
Likely to be of particular interest to Church Times readers is David Weekes’s assessment of JB’s Christian faith, which argues that this son of the manse retained much of his father’s Free Church of Scotland Calvinism, with its emphasis on the primacy of conversion and the need to make one’s soul.
Weekes concludes that, despite JB’s evident ecumenism, which showed itself in an attachment to the Cambridge Platonists, and led him to worship happily at the parish church in the Oxfordshire village of Elsfield during his time living there, he remained a lifelong Presbyterian, ever grateful for his grounding in the Free Church.
An interesting contribution from an Estonian academic explores JB’s identification with the medieval chivalric tradition and the figure of Sir Galahad, the theme of the quest for soul-making emerging again, and a Canadian professor of English locates him in the Wordsworthian tradition and describes him as the last real Romantic.
Several essays allude to the deep spiritual resonances in JB’s last novel, Sick Heart River, in which the dying hero, Edward Leithen, rediscovers his Christian faith in the desolate landscape of north Canada, and comes to realise that God is all-loving as well as all-mighty.
Perhaps the most important theme to emerge from this collection is the prescience of JB’s writing and its applicability to our own troubled times. He had an overwhelming sense of the thinness and fragility of civilisation, and how easily it could be threatened by populism and fanaticism. He also warned in 1908 of what he saw as a dangerous new intolerance in British public life, in which “difference of opinion is assumed to involve a difference of moral code”. How much we need his voice today!
Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.
John Buchan Reconsidered: Thirty-nine years of war and peace 1901-1940
Marcus Paul, editor
Handsel Press £27*
(978-1-917841-02-3)
*from handselpress.org.uk
