Huntingtower Review

Huntingtower review: an ordinary man enters a romance

This Huntingtower review begins with the correction its old catalog record most needed: John Buchan's novel was published in 1922, not 1910. That date places its revolutionary anxieties, Russian émigrés, and appetite for restored order in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also helps explain why the book feels suspended between an older adventure romance and a modern world of organized political violence.

Its hero, Dickson McCunn, is a retired Glasgow provision merchant who sets out on a walking holiday hoping that life might imitate the romances he loves. He soon encounters John Heritage, a young poet with different ideas about literature, and becomes involved in rescuing Saskia, a Russian princess held at Huntingtower. The plot knowingly gathers coincidences, disguises, secret loyalties, and arrivals by sea.

Buchan's most appealing choice is not the imprisoned princess but the rescuer. Dickson is neither young nor trained for danger. His commercial habits, civic decency, and romantic imagination prove unexpectedly useful. The novel asks whether reading adventure can prepare an ordinary person to recognize a moral demand—and gently mocks the vanity built into that hope.

Dickson McCunn and the comedy of belated adventure

Dickson is funny because he wants experience to arrive in a form he can recognize from books. A road, a tower, a mysterious young woman, and a cause all seem to validate his private idea that retirement might reveal a hidden heroic self. Buchan indulges that fantasy while repeatedly forcing it into contact with hunger, weather, confusion, and other people's plans.

The result is affectionate rather than cruel. Dickson's romantic expectations may be naive, but they lead him toward responsibility. He does not become physically invincible. He becomes willing to stay involved when retreat would be easier. His courage is social and cumulative: he listens, recruits, improvises, and accepts help.

That makes him a more democratic figure than the polished adventurer common to imperial romance. His lifetime in trade is not glamorous, yet it has taught him how to judge character and organize practical support. Buchan sometimes falls back on hierarchy elsewhere, but Dickson's usefulness challenges the assumption that heroism belongs to a class or age.

The Gorbals Die-Hards change the balance

The band of Glasgow boys known as the Gorbals Die-Hards supplies the novel's most memorable collective energy. They are resourceful, loyal, alert to terrain, and unimpressed by adult pretension. Their presence turns rescue from a gentleman's private performance into coordinated action.

Buchan's treatment is not free of period attitudes toward class, but the boys repeatedly know more than their social superiors. Their practical intelligence contrasts with John Heritage's cultivated rhetoric and Dickson's literary daydreams. When action is required, they make plans work.

The group also keeps the book comic. Grand language meets improvised tactics, and a princess-rescue plot depends on children whom respectable society might ignore. That reversal is one reason the adventure remains readable even when its politics have aged poorly.

Romance, politics, and the limits of Saskia's role

Saskia is introduced through a romantic convention: the beautiful foreign princess enclosed within a dark tower and threatened by political enemies. Buchan gives her dignity and courage, but the structure still makes her the object around which male action forms. Contemporary readers may reasonably wish that her agency extended further into the rescue itself.

The political background is similarly schematic. Bolshevism and counterrevolution become ingredients in a British adventure, and national identities are sometimes rendered through stereotype. The book is more interested in moral clarity than in the competing histories it invokes. Readers should resist treating its villains, loyalties, or social categories as reliable political analysis.

Yet the fairy-tale frame is not merely accidental simplification. Characters consciously interpret events through romance. The tower, princess, poet, retired merchant, and young irregulars are roles that expose what each person wants courage to look like. Buchan's best irony comes when conduct matters more than the grandeur of the role.

Strengths: pace, setting, and tonal agility

The Scottish landscape gives the novel a strong physical line. Roads, waters, woods, and the coastal approach matter to movement and defense. Buchan's experience as a thriller writer appears in the way geography becomes action rather than background.

Pace is generally brisk. The book moves from travel comedy into siege and rescue without abandoning character humor. Coincidences are conspicuous, but they belong to the romance tradition the narrative announces. A reader who accepts that contract can enjoy the machinery instead of demanding procedural plausibility.

Tonal agility is the larger strength. Dickson can be ridiculous in one scene and morally admirable in the next. The boys can be comic and strategically serious. Readers interested in another older adventure with a more solitary Western mythology might compare Riders of the Silence.

Cautions for a modern reader

The novel carries assumptions about nation, class, masculinity, and revolution that deserve scrutiny. Some descriptions reduce people to types, and the rescue fantasy associates legitimacy with inherited rank. These elements are not neutral decoration simply because the work is old.

Dialect may also slow readers unfamiliar with Scots speech, though it contributes strongly to voice and social setting. Project Gutenberg's public-domain text preserves much of Buchan's spelling and dialect, making patience with linguistic texture part of the experience.

Finally, readers seeking deep psychological realism will find the characters broad. This is a romance of action and moral testing. Coincidence, recognition, and timely arrival do work that a realist novel would distribute across slower development.

Reader fit and adjacent routes

Huntingtower best fits readers who enjoy public-domain adventure, genial unlikely heroes, and stories aware of their own romantic conventions. It is a lighter Buchan than readers may expect from The Thirty-Nine Steps, with community and comedy taking precedence over solitary pursuit.

For another comic journey shaped by older social attitudes, Three Men on the Bummel provides a useful comparison. Readers drawn to the theatrical mechanics of class and courtship can try She Stoops to Conquer. The broader history and ideas shelf helps place the novel beside works that demand more direct historical interpretation.

This is not a recommendation for readers who need politically nuanced treatment of revolution or a heroine centered in her own liberation. It is a qualified recommendation for those willing to enjoy the adventure while examining its limitations.

What the novel believes reading can do

Dickson and Heritage approach literature differently, and their arguments are more than comic characterization. Dickson wants romances to preserve noble action; Heritage initially brings the confidence of a modern poet correcting an older taste. Events test both positions. Books do not provide an accurate script for politics, yet the capacity to imagine obligation beyond comfort helps Dickson recognize a call to act.

Buchan therefore offers a modest defense of reading without claiming that fiction supplies expertise. Romance can enlarge sympathy and courage, but it can also encourage vanity and misrecognition. Dickson succeeds when he gives up being the hero of his private book and joins a collective effort. That distinction gives the novel's literary jokes a serious edge.

Final assessment

Huntingtower survives less through its princess plot than through Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Die-Hards. Their alliance lets Buchan imagine courage emerging from commerce, childhood, civic loyalty, and literary enthusiasm rather than aristocratic destiny alone.

The novel's stereotypes and gendered structure prevent an unreserved endorsement. Its coincidences will also test readers who prefer realism. Still, its humane comic center remains effective: a man who thinks adventure belongs to books discovers that imagination has moral value only when it helps him act for someone beyond himself.