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jayrothermel's review
4.0
Buchan's Zenda, a charming and busy thriller (which also recalls "Blind Corner" by Dornford Yates) with McCunn, Jaikey, et al making sure Evallonia gets the Mussolini-inspired regime it deserves after a decade of insidious republican rule.
sadie_slater's review
4.0
After reading Wanderlust I found myself in the mood to read more about walking, and as for my money John Buchan is hands-down the best writer of fictional walks, I thought I'd read the third of the Dickson McCunn trilogy (following Huntingtower and Castle Gay).
Unlike the first two books, which are both set in Scotland, The House of the Four Winds is set in the fictional central European country of Evallonia, where retired Glasgow grocer and incurable romantic Dickson McCunn, former Gorbals Die-Hard and now Cambridge graduate and rugby international Jaikie Galt and friends find themselves involved in a revolution. It's an entertaining Ruritania romp with plenty of mild peril, likeable characters and particularly likeable and deeply competent female characters and some nice descriptions of scenery. I did feel that there was a sad kind of irony in a novel that sees a populist youth movement playing an instrumental role in the restoration of a benevolent and enlightened monarchy, published in 1935 in a Europe where fascism had already gained a strong hold. It's clear from a couple of passages and references to Hitler and Mussolini that Buchan the politician was not unaware of the gathering shadows and their possible implications, and that his adventure story is also a fantasy about how the world could be diverted into a different course (with the help of the English and English educations, naturally), and there's definitely a poignancy to reading it knowing how events really worked out.
Unlike the first two books, which are both set in Scotland, The House of the Four Winds is set in the fictional central European country of Evallonia, where retired Glasgow grocer and incurable romantic Dickson McCunn, former Gorbals Die-Hard and now Cambridge graduate and rugby international Jaikie Galt and friends find themselves involved in a revolution. It's an entertaining Ruritania romp with plenty of mild peril, likeable characters and particularly likeable and deeply competent female characters and some nice descriptions of scenery. I did feel that there was a sad kind of irony in a novel that sees a populist youth movement playing an instrumental role in the restoration of a benevolent and enlightened monarchy, published in 1935 in a Europe where fascism had already gained a strong hold. It's clear from a couple of passages and references to Hitler and Mussolini that Buchan the politician was not unaware of the gathering shadows and their possible implications, and that his adventure story is also a fantasy about how the world could be diverted into a different course (with the help of the English and English educations, naturally), and there's definitely a poignancy to reading it knowing how events really worked out.
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