I stopped reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping the other day, and I’m not sure I want to finish it. It’s character-driven, but with few characters, and very light on plot. I think I can handle that well enough. I’m beginning to doubt myself on that point.

I’m bringing it up here because I ran across this review of Housekeeping on Good Reads. It’s written by someone who claims to enjoy mostly plotless, character-driven literary novels. He writes:

When I say that I have limited access to these characters and this world, and that it ultimately felt untrue, here’s what I mean (this is Ruthie in the final pages of the book): I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. Really? It’s character revelations and discoveries like this that pepper the book, and for each one that I could say ‘Yes, I get this, I’m with you,’ there were two or three like that quote above where I just couldn’t grasp the experience or couldn’t relate to the introspection.

I haven’t thought I couldn’t relate to the characters, but perhaps that’s the reason I don’t care about the story anymore. It may also be that the characters make me uncomfortable in a way that repels me. I don’t feel a challenge in the book or tension I wish to resolve. I just don’t like hanging around it, doing nothing.

Due to a combination of tight finances and the possession of a Kindle, I’ve been reading a lot of old books lately, of the kind you can get cheap or free in electronic versions. So I came to read, at last, Mr Standfast, John Buchan’s second sequel to The 39 Steps.

Richard Hannay, hero of the series, is now a brigadier general in the British Army, fighting in France in World War I. As Mr Standfast begins, he has been summoned to the War Office for a special assignment. He is ordered to take on the character of a South African political radical, go to a village called Isham, and insinuate himself into a group of radicals he will find there. Further orders will follow.

The story that follows is rather discursive, ranging as far as Scotland and the battlefields of France. Hannay is reunited with several old friends and one very dangerous old enemy.

A point of interest here is that the author finally adds to the narrative the major element all film versions of The 39 Steps that I know of add at that earlier point in the saga—a love interest. Hannay meets, and falls in love with, a charming young woman who is also a spy. It’s amusing to the modern reader to see the delicacy with which her part (a rather scandalous one at the time) is portrayed.

Buchan’s portrayal of radicals and pacifists is remarkably evenhanded, in my opinion. There are German agents among them, but he makes it clear (perhaps even giving them more credit than they were really due) that most of them are patriotic in their own way—one of them even heroic.

James Bond can be reasonably called Richard Hannay’s literary son, but the differences between the generations are telling. We read modern spy stories partly to be shocked, to see what technical wizardry or ruthless killing technique the agent will use to save his life this time. The Hannay books are written with moral purpose, and seem boy-scoutish to us. The title of the book comes from a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the whole story is, in a way, a commentary on that Christian classic, except that the subject is courage rather than faith. I enjoyed it.

Cautions for occasional racial and cultural comments which were acceptable then, but are so no more.