My fascination with John Buchan is growing thin. Prester John still has all the means of inspiration for the boy adventurer--acts of bravery told with a controlled and admirable dose of modesty, detailed strategies made on the fly, acknowledgement of missteps and miscalculations always righted through sheer will, and a straightforward mission that doesn’t leave the young hero room for doubting his sense of right. The only problem is that Buchan’s love-fest with the “white man’s gift of responsibility” and his scoffing at the misguided, then dastardly, idea of African for Africans doesn’t hold. And I’m not just talking about 21st century readers with views enlightened by history or reflection, or even those of his contemporaries who took issue with this view. Change the race, the history, the planet even and it still doesn’t hold. Buchan went to some lengths to create a worthy adversary in Laputa, the man who would take on the mantle of kingship for Africa and easily lead the masses to take back their land. And, given that it’s a simple adventure story, he did a pretty good job with Laputo, so much so that you trust and admire him for all but a few moments of perfidy. The purported hero, young David Crawfurd, admires him, too, and longs to follow him at times, were it not for his evil plan to deny Africans civilization (oh, and his somewhat paganistic strain of Christianity). Unless the reader is predisposed to assuming that “dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies” are incapable of rule and that burning powder should not be a part of any Christian rite--which, of course, his intended audience was--you never get any very convincing argument for why Laputo and his uprising should be put down. For anyone who might not have noticed, this is pretty much the same plot as Greenmantle: the ignorant, easily swayed masses of the Arabs/Africans, although filled with some good people who could be set right, are a tinderbox just waiting for one great leader and by crushing that one leader (inevitably someone who has reached such heights by long study in the west) everyone will just settle down. I guess it worked for Buchan as an easy-to-convey scheme from which to weave a story, and he did a much better job with it in Greenmantle. Me, I think I’ll take a break from Buchan for awhile. He’s definitely inspired me to spend more time hiking and scrambling up and down rocks, even without the satisfaction of putting civilization to rights.
I got a bit confused reading this book because I kept getting mixed up between the author’s name and the name of one of the main protagonists. Too many Johns – what was the author thinking??Most famous for his novel The thirty-nine steps, which has been made into a movie several times, this book sees our young hero, David Crawfurd, travelling to Blauwildebeestfontein (yes, that’s right, Blauwildebeestfontein – Monty Python couldn’t have done better if they tried) in sort of deepest darkest colonial Africa, in order to sell lots of foodstuffs and other goods to all those intellectually challenged natives. Not surprisingly, our hero runs afoul of a native uprising, in particular the compelling and powerful figure of the black minister John Laputa, who claims to be the incarnation of an ancient African hero, Prester John. Also, of course, there are large amounts of diamonds around – apparently one of the worst things you could do at the time was to engage in “IDB”, which is something to do with the illegal sale and purchase of diamonds, but I didn’t quite manage to figure out what “IDB” stood for at any time during the book.This book is so well written, and an excellent adventure story – it is just peculiar to read now because of its obvious racism, which I guess was typical of the era (1910-ish). The most peculiar thing is, though, that it’s almost as if Buchan wrote it deliberately so that the reader would see through Crawfurd’s xenophobia and sympathise with the Africans’ point of view. The “anti-hero” himself, Prester John, is much admired by the hero, for his strength, his education, his integrity and his ability to inspire and lead the people of Africa into war with the European settlers. If someone now was trying to write a book about that time, and therefore trying to “infuse” the text with contemporary views, this is the way it would sound.
What do You think about Prester John (2015)?
This is a gripping adventure story set during the British Empire mostly in South Africa. As a consequence of this, and when it was written (1910), the language is both racist and patriarchal. Written totally in the first person, from the perspective of the hero, the narrative is taut and each paragraph brings new revelations. There is a strong feeling of movement and energy throughout, which is probably why it is so easy to read and why it was so hard to put down. All in all a good adventure story in his typical style.
—Charlotte
John Buchan writes an exciting, fast-paced 'thriller' which is full of his love for the Scottish and African landscapes. His hero, David Crawfurd, is a million miles away from the hero of modern movies: he gets tired and hurt to the point that he cries, and there's never any suggestion that he's invulnerable. As a relaxing read to pass the time I would give this four stars. But ...It's a great big 'But'. Prester John was published in 1910 and its attitude to issues of race is appalling. But is t
—Avril
Buchan, John. PRESTER JOHN. (1910; this ed. 1994). ***. Action! Adventure! Amazing escapes! African tribesmen! They’re all in this novel from Scotsman Buchan. When this novel was published in book form (it was first serialized in a boy’s magazine in a very different form) it was an instant bestseller, and launched Buchan’s career. In his lifetime, he wrote forty books – eleven of them novels. To date, I have only read three of them, including this one. The other two were: “The Thirty-nine Steps,” and “Greenmantle.” Both of those, like this one, were typical of the popular adventure novels of the day. “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” was subsequently used as the basis for his film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock. This novel was set in Africa, and drew on his experiences there in the early 1900s – although his job was much more mundane that the hero of this novel. The plot involves the secret uprising of several African nations under the leadership of a black priest who calls himself Prester John, after the (likely) mythological priest/king of an un-named Asian country during the times of the Crusades. Our hero, “nineteen-year old David Crawfurd, travels from Scotland to South Africa to work as a storekeeper. On the voyage he encounters again John Laputa, the celebrated Zulu minister, of whom he has strange memories, having previously heard him preach at a local kirk. In his remote store, David finds himself with the key to a massive uprising led by the minister, who has taken the name of Prester John. David’s courage and his understanding of this man take him to the heart of the uprising, a secret cave in the Rooirand.” This particular edition from Oxford Press contains copious notes and a glossary of Scots and African terms. You need it, and will find yourself constantly flipping back and forth from your reading page to find out what a word means. Typical of books written during that time, this novel has lost a lot of its appeal for modern readers, but is still a good rip-roaring yarn, in the style of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
—Tony
