Greenmantle
JOHN BUCHAN

John Buchan’s Greenmantle , first published 100 years ago this month and never out of print since, is the most popular of what the prolific author rather dismissively dubbed his “shockers”, outselling the better- known The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Like all his works, it is packed with spiritual and religious reflections as well as thrilling deeds of derring-do. Particularly prescient is its portrayal of the power of Islam, harnessed in the novel by the evil and mysterious Hilda von Einem to whip up the Turks and others in Asia Minor and Africa in support of the German side in the First World War: “There is a dry wind blowing throughout the East and the parched grasses wait the spark.”

Sandy Arbuthnot, the British army officer who assumes the mantle of the Islamic prophet Greenmantle, reflects: “the West knows nothing of the true Oriental. It pictures him as lapped in colour and idleness and luxury and gorgeous dreams. But it is all wrong. The Kâf he yearns for is an austere thing. It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror.”