Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Mr. Standfast
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love wartime adventure, spies and chases with a moral edge, and for fans of Buchan's other Hannay books.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Mr. Standfast is a spy novel by John Buchan, published in 1919, in the last months after the First World War. It is the third book about Richard Hannay, the Scottish engineer and soldier who first appeared in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan wrote it after working in wartime intelligence and propaganda, and he knew how the war looked from the offices at home as well as from the front.
This time Hannay is not running across moors with the police behind him. He is sent into the English home front to find a network of German agents who are passing secrets out of the country. To do it, he must pretend to be a pacifist, a man who opposes the war, while his friends are dying in it. That is a hard role for a soldier, and the book makes you feel the cost of it.
You get a chase, a love story and a study of what courage means when nobody can see it. You also get a book that borrows its title and its code from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a Puritan story of a traveller on a hard road. Let us begin where Hannay does, with a summons to leave the war he knows and enter one he does not.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Hannay is called home to a stranger warFree
- 2Playing the pacifist among the village thinkers
- 3Mary Lamington and the meaning of courage
- 4Old friends join the hunt
- 5A charming enemy named Moxon Ivery
- 6From quiet England to the war itself
- 7Duty, doubt and the courage that is not loud
- 8Bunyan's road and the meaning of the title
- 9How Buchan tells it and why it lasts
Punkt 1 von 9
Hannay is called home to a stranger war
The story opens in 1917. Richard Hannay is now a brigadier-general, back from the fighting and expecting to return to his men. Instead he is called to see Sir Walter Bullivant, a senior figure in the secret service, who has a task that no uniform can help with.
Bullivant explains that something is wrong at home. Plans and news seem to leak to the enemy, and the leak does not look like the work of one clumsy spy. It looks like an organised web, run by a clever mind, with helpers in ordinary places.
Hannay is not a trained detective. His gift is that he can learn a country quickly, read faces and keep his nerve. Bullivant also knows that Hannay can pass as a plain, honest man, which suits what he has in mind.
The plan is strange. Hannay is to leave his rank behind and move among people who say the war is wrong and should stop. Some of them are sincere and some may be tools of Germany. He must learn to tell which is which, and he must do it without anyone guessing he is a soldier.
The opening matters because it sets the question that the whole book keeps asking. Is it harder to fight in the open, where the enemy is plain, or to serve in secret, where your own friends may think you a coward? Hannay accepts, and that choice is the first step on his road.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Mr. Standfast
What is Mr. Standfast about?
It follows Richard Hannay in the First World War as he goes undercover as a pacifist in England to find a German spy network, with help from friends and from Mary Lamington.
Do I need to read the other Richard Hannay books first?
No. It is the third Hannay novel, after The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, but it stands on its own. Some friendships are better understood if you know the earlier books.
Where does the title Mr. Standfast come from?
It comes from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where Mr. Standfast is a pilgrim who holds firm to the end. The old book also plays a part in the story's secret code.
Is Mr. Standfast a true story?
No, it is fiction, published in 1919. Buchan drew on his own work in wartime intelligence and information, and on real events and attitudes of the First World War.
Is Mr. Standfast hard to read?
Not really. The sentences are clear and the pace is brisk.