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    Greenmantle
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    Greenmantle
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    Greenmantle
    Ebook339 pages106 hours

    Greenmantle

    By John Buchan and Allan Massie

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Richard Hannay is tasked to investigate rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world and takes off on a hair-raising journey through German-occupied Europe to meet up with his old friend Sandy Arbuthnot in Constantinople, where they must thwart the Germans' plans to use religion to help them win the war. In Greenmantle John Buchan clearly asserts his mastery of the genre of the espionage thriller, by drawing on his wide first-hand knowledge of the worlds of politics and secret intelligence. Set during World War I, Greenmantle is a powerful meditation on the power of political Islam.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPolygon
    Release dateJun 1, 2011
    ISBN9781495651601
    Author

    John Buchan

    John Buchan was born in Perth in 1875, the son of a Church of Scotland Minister. After being educated locally, he attended Glasgow University and Brasenose College Oxford. He exchanged comparative poverty for affluence by his success as an author, but it was as a lawyer that his reputation began. He went to South Africa to serve as private secretary to the British Colonial administrator, Alfred, Lord Milner and assisted in reconstruction of the country after the Boer War. He entered publishing in 1906 as partner in the firm of his friend Thomas Nelson and married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, cousin of the Duke of Westminster, in 1907. They had four children. Buchan was elected to Parliament in 1911, served in various capacities during the First World War, including writing speeches for Sir Douglas Haig and taking on the role of Director of Information under Lord Beaverbrook. He returned to the House of Commons in 1927 and then in 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada and became Lord Tweedsmuir. He died in 1940. John Buchan was a prolific author and wrote poetry and biographies as well as novels, but he is still best remembered for his adventure stories and in particular the five Hannay novels: The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep.

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    Reviews for Greenmantle

    3.5/5

    220 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Six-word review: Another improbable pulp adventure with charm.Extended review:Escapism has its own appeal, and an author who knows exactly what he's doing makes for a safe escape. Buchan does not pretend to be writing literature, although his own literary background shows. He's writing entertainment. So plots that feature wild schemes and dark missions, plots that rely on amazing coincidences bolstered by daring heroics, aren't measured on a scale of realism. Rather, the question is how much fun they are.Published in 1916, Greenmantle is an adventure of international espionage and intrigue whose first-person narrator, Richard Hannay (of The Thirty-Nine Steps), is a man of action. "Under the black canopy of night," he says, "perils are either forgotten or terribly alive. Mine were forgotten."An assignment in Islamic country pits Hannay against savage Turks and menacing Germans as the tides of World War I sweep forward and back. At that time the outcome of the war, not to mention the fact that it was only Roman numeral one, was unknown. The novel, with its overt patriotism and its celebration of macho courage, spotlights the power of a small team of trained and committed operatives to turn events toward victory, regardless of personal risk.Greenmantle in its time was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, a hundred years later, of course it's dated, and I doubt that it ever did invite deep thought. I read it for a glimpse of another era and other cultures and for an absorbing diversion. It delivered both, and it was fun.
    • 4/5
      Excellent Richard Hannay adventure.
    • 3/5
      Read this with the knowledge that it is simple pulp-fiction. Action packed and full of unlikely co-incidences and old fashioned rascism (It was written in 1920's)
    • 2/5
      Unlike The 39 Steps (which I enjoyed), I found Greenmantle tedious. Something about the spirit of the book, in which steady Brits and one ridiculous American undertake a dangerous mission and are only too happy to die for their country (or something like that) rubbed me the wrong way. This, combined with the total unbelievability of one (or more) essential plot points, made Greenmantle tough to get through.
    • 4/5
      It felt to me that most of the action was with the other characters, not featured in this book. And this felt like the target audience was young men.Some quotes I found interesting: SPOILER"Women have got a perilous logic which we never have, and some of the best of them don't see the joke of life like the ordinary man. They can be far greater than men, for they can grow straight to the heart of things. There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that ever was breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves. . . . There is no Superman. The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either crack-brained professors who couldn't rule a Sunday-school class, or bristling soldiers with pint-pot heads who imagine that the shooting of a Duc D'Enghien made a Napoleon. But there is a Superwoman, and her name's Hilda von Einem.""I guess we Americans haven't got the right poise for dealing with that kind of femail. We've exalted our womenfolk into little tin-gods, and at the same time left them out of the real business of life. [....] We aren't used to regarding them as anything except angels and children." [p. 186]When things get to the pass that nothing you can do can better them, the only thing is to live for the moment. [p. 208]"We've lived long enough to know ourselves, and to shape ourselves into some kind of decency." [p. 259]I fancy it isn't the men who get the most out of the world and are always bouyant and cheerful that most fear to die. Rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling more fiercely to life. [p. 260]
    • 4/5
      This was an uneven book for me.I know it is not about characterisation, but the Blenkiron character did not work in this book for me, although I enjoyed his personality. I do not know whether that was Buchan trying to get the Americans "on board" (as part of the war effort), but Blenkiron felt an artificial character to introduce into an adventure yarn. The femme fatale (Hilda von Einem) also did not work, with us being told what effect she had on the protagonists, rather than this being shown.Subject to these flaws, it is an enjoyable adventure story, about a First World War plot to raise an Islamic "prophet" figure in Asia Minor to reinforce the German war effort in Palestine. Richard Hannay (of The 39 Steps) is the main character, having been serving in the trenches at Loos. However, after having been wounded and invalided out, he is offered an opportunity to perform an intelligence mission to find out the identity and location of a threat in the East (Asia Minor), although it ends up as an adventure story as the intelligence cannot be relayed back in time. He is accompanied in this mission by Peter Pienaar, a friend from Hannay's African days (who coincidentally turns up as Hannay gets ashore in Portugal), in his travel through Germany and Austria - I really enjoyed this and Sandy Arbuthnot, a fellow soldier who is a polymathic multi-lingual friend. The adventure moves on to Instanbul and then to Asia Minor.It was made really interesting by it being published in 1916 and the comments regarding trench warfare, the Germans and Turkish being enlightening as to British attitudes, as individuals are regarded mainly in a sympathetic light, even the Colonel von Stumm character.The Sandy Arbuthnot character also appears incredibly prescient, but one must assume that this type of English character was around (this is before T E Lawrence was sent to Arabia).
    • 4/5
      I don't believe this was the case with this novel, but I can definitely visualize it as a serialization back in its day, with lots of cliffhangers and people fidgeting in their seats waiting for the next installment. Once it gets started, the action just doesn't let up, and I can remember thinking, okay, Richard Hannay has a couple of more adventures in store by this author so he has to come out okay. It's one of those books where you find yourself inwardly rooting for the good guys, and where you are also inwardly waiting for the bad guys to get theirs. Greenmantle follows Buchan's "Thirty-nine Steps" not as a sequel so much (imho), but rather as something along the line of the further adventures of Richard Hannay, the main protagonist and overall hero of the Thirty-nine Steps. Hannay has since been a soldier in WWI, in which he was injured at Loos. Now he is called into action once again, this time by the Foreign Office. Sir Walter Bullivant, the senior man at the FO, explains to Hannay that there is a German plot to drag Turkey into the war. The problem is not so much Turkey, per se, but all of the provinces where Islam is very strong; and the rumor is that Germany has something to bring all of the provincial Muslims together to fan the flames against the allies under German auspices. Just what Germany has is the unknown factor, and it's up to Hannay to figure it out. He is given only one clue: a half-piece of paper with the words "Kasredin", "cancer," and "v.I." It is from here that an incredible adventure begins which will keep the reader pretty much glued to the book.Phenomenal read, and I recommend it highly. Yes, there are some improbable spots in the novel, but hey...it's an adventure and it's fun. The characters are great, and as noted at the beginning, you'll be wondering after a while how the good guys are ever going to get out of each predicament in which they find themselves. Also...consider the subject matter. This book was written in 1916, but in some ways is quite relevant to the world's situation today.I can't recommend this one highly enough; those who like older stories of espionage and spycraft will really enjoy it. Others who may enjoy it are those who like good old-fashioned stories of adventure; and those who read The Thirty-Nine Steps by the same author may wish to read it to find out what happens next to Richard Hannay. Very well done.
    • 5/5
      A dying British agent reports a handful of words as clues to German plot to inflame the Near East against the British in World Wr 1. Richard Hannay, the hero of The 39 Steps, and his Boer friend Peter Pienaar disguise themselves as pro-German Boers, while their friend Sandy Arbuthnot goes out in the guise of a Muslim himself. (Spoiler warning) After divers adventures on the way in Germany, they end up in Ottoman Turkey and find there is indeed a plot to revive the islamic caliphate with a man who possesses all the qualities to be a credible candidate, being managed by a brilliant and beautiful German spy, Hilda von Einem and a capable but thuggish German colonel named Stumm. Unfortunately for them, the potential caliph dies of cancer, and Hilda attempts to persuade Sandy to replace him. He pretends to agree, but turns against her at a critical moment., jut as the Russians are successfully invading eastern Turkey.
    • 2/5
      Buchan had a fascinating career before his early death. Always a prolific writer, who worked In publishing at first, he authored a history of the WW1 at its inception, then worked in intelligence during the war, eventually becoming Director of Intelligence at the new British Ministry of Information. When the war ended he rewrote the background history, incorporating it into a four volume History of the Great War. He was friends with both Aubrey Herbert and T.E. Lawrence, and a composite of the two is thought to be the basis of one character in this 1916 work. A ideal background for a writer of WW1 spy stories, surely. I was fascinated by the detailed discussion of late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Middle East power gaming and politics, and views of the geared-up WW1 German War Machine, particularly given the relevance of that local history and culture to today's wars and volatile areas. Not having read up on WW1 south of the Med during school or come across useful background in other fiction, the issue of control of the Middle East as a key, possibly critical tipping point in WW1 now appears to have be unhelpfully ignored except among war history buffs.Unfortunately warning is needed that it is occasionally tainted by the contemporary attitudes to indigenous African populations, which arise largely through the odd colloquialism and the fallout of fallout of main character Hannay's background of living in South Africa with the Boer. If, as with Shakespeare or other writers of previous centuries, it is possible to wince through those now-unacceptable contemporary attitudes, the book is rather interesting and worth reading, though lacking the flow of The 29 Steps, I thought. It is again a very episodic work and I regretted that the characters are dispersed for so much of it. I'm still processing my reaction but on balance I found it an interesting rather than satisfying read, so, together with the bigotry issue which really got my hackles up, I'm tending to a harsh rating. I'm hanging on to the book though.
    • 4/5
      GreenmantleJohn BuchanApril 10, 2011This is a rollicking yarn, spy mystery, and adventure, set in WW1. The hero, Richard Hannay, is tasked to leave his battalion in France to undertake a difficult mission in Germany and Turkey, heading off a plan of the German general staff to rise up a muslim prophet, the Greenmantle of the title. The rise of the Jihad would embarass and impede the British war effort. There is a journey on a tramp steamer, evasion of sinister German officials. a trip down the Danube and into Turkey, ultimately victory by the Russians. Hannay has friends in an old Boer tracker, Peter, and a British spy, and enemies in the form of a sinister countess. Coincidence drives the plot, but the atmospherics and adventure are rich.
    • 3/5
      Longer than The 39 Steps and the adventure drags on too long for me. Still, it's the same sort of thing, same main character, same pre-World-War-I setting. If you loved The 39 Steps, you should love this. If you didn't love The 39 Steps, well...
    • 3/5
      Overall, an OK yarn, but the geographic and political detail prevalent through out this tale revealed the fact that i apparently know absolutely nothing about the global relationships defining WWI!!! Now, that would be my fault; but holy cow, the name-dropping of people, places, historic relationships from Britain, throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Middle East was a bit overwhelming....much of it without any explanation...merely an assumption that the reader would know exactly what was being discussed. Also, along the line of Buchan's "The 39 Steps," the string of lucky coincidences that allows this small band of spies to accomplish the impossible gets a little hard to swallow after awhile. With that said, there were some sections of exciting adventure that made it worthwhile....and maybe it has embarrassed me enough to do a little boning up on my early 20th century world history!
    • 3/5
      A piece of great nonsense. Very much fun, however, as Richard Hannay continues his undercover career. The author later went on to be appointed as the governor general of Canada. (1935 - 40) the Book itself seems to be part of the Indiana Jones neighbourhood.Written as escapism in 1916.
    • 5/5
      This is the second book in the WWI-era Richard Hannay espionage/adventure series.This installment finds Hannay embedded with the enemy as he travels through Europe and Turkey seeking the enemy's greatest secret.It was a simple read, and at times the author used obvious plot devices to get the protagonist out of a sticky situation. But who cares? It was a great ride!
    • 5/5
      i loved this book. must have read it a few times. hope you enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      Really solid WWI spy adventure from Buchan, party of the Richard Hannay series. Really a ripping good adventure story. Unfortunately, it started out so slow and talky that I almost gave up on it. I'm glad I didn't though. This one has Hannay spying for the Brits in the Ottoman Empire. Interesting and fun.
    • 4/5
      A good adventure story and espionage thriller. Again we find Richard Hannay from "The Thirty-Nine Steps" on the run - this time not in Scotland running from the police and central intelligence - but on the run as an undercover agent in Germany. He and his three fellow spies set out to get behind the enemy lines and find out the truth about the mysterious Greenmantle - they eventually end up in Turkey where the Germans and their Turkish allies are plotting to create a Muslim uprising. Written in 1916 in the thick of WWI it’s an interesting read from a literary and historical perspective. I liked the fresh tone of the book, and the very, very British all in the good sense of cheerful comeraderie, displaying fair play, honour and courage in the worst of situations. In a “I-say-steady-on-old-chap-jolly-good-fellows” kind of way.
    • 4/5
      The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star—man, prophecy, or trinket—is coming out of the West. The Germans know, and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.''And the mission you spoke of for me is to go and find out?'He nodded gravely. 'That is the crazy and impossible mission.'While recuperating from injuries sustained in the Battle of Loos, Richard Hannay is given a secret mission that will take him all the way to Constantinople. Hannay, his friend and fellow soldier Sandy Arbuthnot, and American John S. Blenkiron must make their journey across Europe undercover, without any support from the British government should they be captured. The secret they must uncover is connected to Islam, and it is something that could ignite a jihad. The three men take different routes for their journey in the hope that at least one of them will make it all the way to Constantinople in time to meet the unknown threat.Buchan wrote Greenmantle during the war, before its outcome was known. The climactic war scene must have shored up Allied spirits in the midst of the war. Sandy Arbuthnot reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia. When I Googled to see if Buchan might have based his character on T. E. Lawrence, I discovered that it's more likely that Sandy was modeled on British diplomat Aubrey Herbert. Many of the book's themes and locations still have a timely feel, making the occasional racial epithet or stereotype even more jarring to 21st century readers. It's a good choice for readers who enjoy adventure, espionage, and a mild adrenaline rush.
    • 2/5
      This is a book that hasn't aged well. What may have once seemed a rollicking good yarn in the style of Boys Own or Biggles now seems very thin - the plot sparse, the characterisation limited and the whole concept quite unrealistic. But the basic plot line, that someone, or something, could bring pious muslims together in rebellion against the west, could have seemed prescient in retrospect. Sadly, the author fails totally to flesh out this idea and the plot device remains a repeated hollow phrase with no any attempt to fill in any details.