I remember there was a copy of Prester John in the library of my childhood elementary school (something which wouldn’t happen nowadays, for reasons which will appear). Its cover, as I remember it, featured a painting in the style of N. C. Wyeth (perhaps one of Wyeth’s own) of a bound white man being led across the African veldt by a black man on a horse. My tastes in those days didn’t run to African stories, so I gave it a pass. But in the years since then I’ve become a Buchan enthusiast, and when I found it for free in a Kindle version I snapped it up.

John Buchan was one of the inventors of the modern thriller novel, elevating the genre from the level of earlier (and excellent in their own way) writers like H. Rider Haggard to new realism, seriousness, and economy of language. His most famous work is The 39 Steps, adapted out of all recognition by Alfred Hitchcock, but he wrote other excellent novels. I’m particularly fond of the Richard Hannay books.

Prester John is not part of that series. It will never be widely popular again because, fine as it is purely as a story, it strongly promotes attitudes toward race which are (rightly) offensive to the modern mind.

The hero of the book is David Crawfurd (sic), a 19-year-old Scotsman. In a prologue, set years earlier, he observed a visiting preacher, an African named Rev. Laputa, performing a heathen ceremony in secret, on a beach near his home town. Now, traveling by steamer to Africa to take a job as a store manager in a wilderness settlement, he spies the same minister, in whispered conference with a sinister Portuguese (David insists on calling him a “Portugoose”) named Henrique. Convinced that the two are up to no good, he makes it his business to spy on them, but learns little except that they appear to be involved in some secret enterprise involving illegal diamonds.

Once David is out in the bush, things begin to move quickly. Before long both Henrique and Laputa show up again, but now Laputa is revealed to be an African king. He is reputed to be the descendant and heir of the legendary Prester John of Ethiopia, and he is busy fomenting rebellion among the natives.

The action gets intense, particularly because David is the rashest of young men, consistently running into danger instead of away from it (sometimes straining the reader’s credulity). But Buchan knew the trick of keeping his characters going fast enough to divert the reader from improbabilities in the plot. The climax in a secret mountain cave is fully worthy of H. Rider Haggard.

The problem, as I mentioned above, is the racial attitudes. I’m confident Buchan thought himself pretty broadminded in those matters, since he describes Laputa himself as an enemy worthy of much admiration. However he also makes it clear that he considers Laputa an exceptional case. His opinion of ordinary Africans, though friendly enough if they’re peaceful, is condescending in the extreme by our standards. He says, among other things, that blacks are insensible to pain, and cannot wink (!). I’m no booster of the present age as opposed to the 19th Century generally, but on this subject we’re right and they were wrong.

This is the difference between white and black [David says], the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.

Digressions like that fatally mar what is otherwise a well-written and exciting old-fashioned adventure story. Adults who can discriminate will enjoy it. Children should be kept away from it.