This is the fifth and last Richard Hannay novel but was written and published a decade after the fourth Hannay adventure The Three Hostages just a year or two prior to the start of World War Two. It is often considered to be the forgotten Richard Hannay novel. It features many of the regular characters from the other Hannay novels but here Hannay is rather more passive than in previous novels in which he features. There are some stunning descriptive passages about country life, landsape and place and thankfully although written against the backdrop of The Great Depression and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, it is an optimistic book and a call to arms that even the most ordinary of men feel they can make a difference. There are scenes of great adventure throughout the book but there isn't a pervading sense of threat in quite the way previous Hannay books had.
From the Introduction by Andrew Lownie in The Island of Sheep:
Increasingly critics have become aware of the depth and complexity of Buchan’s writing and the hidden subtexts, literary, geographical and historical, and Classical references which here range from Homer, Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning to episodes in African history and the Norse Sagas. A strong influence on the book was Robert Louis Stevenson. Buchan’s thrillers had hitherto not featured children as central characters but The Island of Sheep, especially the last part, is dominated by the adventures of Peter John and Anna, placing the book very much in the tradition of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Buchan had just finished writing a biography of Walter Scott (1932) and The Island of Sheep is replete with Scott references. This is not coincidental. One of the themes of the book, the recovery of an ancestral Northern culture, that fascinated Buchan the politician as well as the writer had also been an important inspiration for Scott and was currently being mobilised by the Nazis. There is also a conscious borrowing as a literary conceit from Joseph Conrad. Just as there are similarities between Courts of the Morning and Nostromo (1904) – San Tome is the name of the mine in both books – The Island of Sheep reaccentuates motifs from Conrad’s Victory (1915).
The Island of Sheep is one of Buchan’s least known books, but, with its various layers of meaning, excellent descriptive writing and several wonderful set pieces of action, it is a book well worth reading after the early Hannay adventures. As The Times Literary Supplement wrote in its review:
If we sometimes feel that John Buchan brings gifts of too high an order to the adornment of stories of mere plot and counterplot, it is his own generosity that prompts the criticism. He is so evidently very much more than a yarnspinner; and yet as a yarn-spinner so complete a master.
| Primary Genre | Thriller and Suspense |
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