The Half-Hearted - John Buchan

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Résumé :
The Half-Hearted is a 1900 novel of romance and adventure by the Scottish author John Buchan. It was Buchan's first novel in a modern setting and was written when he was 24 while working for an All-Souls fellowship and reading for the bar. In Clubland Heroes (1953, revised 1974), Richard Usborne suggested that this novel is in some ways more revealing of the Buchan 'decent-fellow' ethic than any other till the last, Sick Heart River, with Haystoun's death to some extent foreshadowing that of Edward Leithen in the later work. Buchan was only 25 when he completed The Half-Hearted, and had not at that stage quite found his wavelength. But in Haystoun there is much of his later characters Sandy Arbuthnot and Richard Hannay. David Daniell, writing in 1975, considered the novel to be flawed but interesting. He felt the book weakest in its depiction of London clubs and upper class manners and conversation, but noted other areas that show flashes of the true Buchan gift. Buchan worked through several of the themes that did not quite succeed in this novel, and returned to them with more assurance in later years, particularly in Mr Standfast (1919), Huntingtower (1922) and John Macnab (1925). Writing for the John Buchan Society website in 2001, Christine Drews noted that this novel is the one most influenced by John Buchan's study of Greek tragedy. She held that the work's conclusion illumines a path of understanding that can provide perspective on small real-life disappointments and missed satisfactions. The telescoping of the immensity of a single gifted man's death into a purposeful cog in the turning of the wheel of eternity is a foreign, yet broadening philosophy, which shakes the reader's complacency. She concluded that the book is a difficult one to enjoy, but a compelling one to contemplate. Andrew Lownie, in his 2013 biography The Presbyterian Cavalier, called the novel 'a very uneven book' that reflects Buchan's attempt to reconcile the differing attitudes to life of his Oxford circle: with the 'careless and gay' Lewis Haystoun contrasting with 'the world's iron and salt' represented by the author himself. (wikipedia.org)

Biographie:
John Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.

Sommaire:
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish author, historian, writer, and editor who lived from 1875 to 1940. Besides writing, he was a lawyer, a publisher, a lieutenant colonel in the Intelligence Corps, the Director of Information during the First World War, reporting directly to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and a Unionist MP who was Governor General of Canada, the fifteenth person to hold the position since Canada became a country. Buchan was born in Perth, Scotland, and got into the University of Glasgow to study classics in 1892. During his first year there, he edited Francis Bacon's works, which came out in 1894. The next year, he was given a scholarship to attend Brasenose College, Oxford. Soon after he got there, he released his first book, Sir Quixote of the Moors, which he dedicated to his college professor, Gilbert Murray. He had written five books by the time he graduated from college. Scholar-Gipsies was his first non-fiction book. Buchan wrote a lot of non-fiction that was based on his own life. For example, The African Colony was based on his time in South Africa, and he wrote a number of books about the First World War and the Scottish and South African troops in particular....