The Gap in the Curtain

John Buchan wrote six Richard Hannay novels, the first and best-known being The 39 Steps, with its propulsive chase story, but he wrote another series, of five books, with a markedly different tone and a very different hero, Sir Edward Leithen.  Hannay is sort of a muscular Christian, brash and unambiguous, Leithen is more thoughtful, and acts less with animal cunning than with his wits. 

The first of the Leithen books is The Power-House, written before the Great War, and serialized in Blackwood’s in 1913.  Conan Doyle had introduced Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” in 1893, and Moriarty is our template for the arch-villain.  All the same, Moriarty is still mortal, not superhuman.The bad guy in The Power-House is modeled expressly on Nietsche, and he heralds a new breed of heavy.  “Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march,” he tells Leithen, and you feel the chill of Mein Kampf, a good twenty years before Hitler makes it come true.

The Power-House is still my favorite of the Leithen novels, and in fact my favorite Buchan, but Buchan explored odd venues in the Leithen stories, not least with The Gap in the Curtain, from 1932, about precognition.  It’s a thriller, with elements of science fiction and the supernatural, the title a spooky evocation of eavesdropping on the future.  Five people attend what might as well be called a séance; two of them foresee their deaths.  Spoiler alert: the predictions come true, but. 

Buchan wrote fast and loose, and called his penny-dreadfuls ‘shockers.’  He perhaps took his historicals more seriously, The Blanket of the Dark (another knockout of a title), Witch Wood, Midwinter.  He never gave less than good weight.  The Gap in the Curtain is a novel of ideas, along the line of H.G. Wells, with its social and political commentary, but it’s chiefly an entertainment.  You don’t have to give it a lot of deep thought to enjoy the ride, if all the same you swallow some sulfur with the molasses.

Buchan died in 1940, of a stroke.  He was Governor-General of Canada.  He’d been a lawyer, a diplomat, a spy.  His last novel, Sick Heart River, was published after his death.  In the book, Edward Leithen is given but a year to live, and he goes off on a quest into the wooded wilderness of the upper Mackenzie River.  It’s a story about redemption, and clearly Leithen foresees his own death.  Buchan had no such premonition, although you can only wonder.  Leithen is the closest thing to autobiographical we find in Buchan, and his career arc as a character is an alternate history to Buchan’s own.  I’d prefer to think Buchan didn’t see it coming.  I’d rather not see it coming, either, but sooner or later, the curtain parts for us.