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\u00a9 BBC<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019m currently halfway through William Boyd\u2019s 2009 London-set thriller Ordinary<\/strong> Thunderstorms<\/strong> which, after a rather unengaging start, I\u2019m happy to say is now shaping up to be a gripping read.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting how quickly Boyd\u2019s plot, of an innocent man being accused of a murder he didn\u2019t commit and having to go to ground \u2013 literally so, hiding in a neglected patch of waste ground by the Embankment \u2013 to avoid both the police and the real killers, reminded me of several other books, namely, John Buchan\u2019s The 39 Steps<\/strong> (1915), Geoffrey Household\u2019s Rogue Male<\/strong> (1939) and, in a rather more skewed way, J.G. Ballard\u2019s Concrete Island<\/strong> (1974).<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s been a good while since I read The 39 Steps<\/strong> and Concrete Island<\/strong>, but I read Rogue Male<\/strong> just a couple of years ago and was impressed enough to post something about it on this blog.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the entry again, slightly updated to incorporate some Benedict Cumberbatch-related news.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For a novel whose plot hinges around an attempt to kill Adolf Hitler, there\u2019s remarkably little about Hitler in Geoffrey Household\u2019s Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em>.\u00a0 In fact, the genocidal German dictator isn\u2019t mentioned once.\u00a0 Presumably this is because although Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> first appeared in print in late 1939, after war had broken out between Britain and Germany, it was written before the outbreak of war when Household felt it would be diplomatic not to name names.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thus, the book\u2019s hero goes boar-hunting in Poland, crosses the border into a neighbouring country that isn\u2019t identified, and one day ends up with the brutish leader of that country, also not identified, in the sights of his hunting rifle.\u00a0 Is he actually in Germany and on the point of bagging Hitler?\u00a0 Or could he be somewhere else, Russia say, where he\u2019s targeting Joseph Stalin?\u00a0 But although Household keeps it ambiguous, given historical events soon after the story\u2019s late-1930s setting, it\u2019s impossible to read Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> now and not visualise in those sights a bloke with a square-shaped scrap of a moustache, an oily side-parting and a swastika armband.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Incidentally, when Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> was brought to the screen, the filmmakers didn\u2019t follow Household\u2019s ambiguity.\u00a0 A 1941 Hollywood adaptation<\/a> called Manhunt<\/em>, directed by Fritz Lang \u2013 who\u2019d bailed out of Germany in 1933 after Joseph Goebbels started taking an interest in him \u2013 readily depicted the target as Hitler and, viewed today, the film feels like an unabashed wartime propaganda piece.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a 1976 adaptation by the BBC, directed by Clive Donner, was also unequivocal that its hero was going after Hitler.\u00a0 The actor playing Hitler was none other than Michael Sheard, fondly remembered by kids of my generation for playing Mr Bronson, the hard-nut deputy headmaster on the BBC\u2019s children\u2019s drama \/ soap opera Grange<\/em> Hill<\/em> (1978-2008).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Just as the book\u2019s target is anonymous, so is its hero, even though he tells the story in the first person.\u00a0 Again, the film versions differ from the book in giving him an identity.\u00a0 In 1941\u2019s Manhunt<\/em>, he\u2019s called Captain Thorndyke and is played by Walter Pidgeon.\u00a0 In 1976\u2019s Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em>, he\u2019s called Sir Robert Hunter and is played by the marvellous Peter O\u2019Toole.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Penguin Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Whoever he is, he\u2019s apprehended before he can fire the rifle and subjected to a brutal interrogation.\u00a0 Then his captors decide that the easiest way to deal with him is to bump him off and make his death look like an unfortunate hunting accident.\u00a0 The ensuing story can be divided into two parts, with each part having a similar, contracting, funnelling structure where the action begins in an expansive setting but ends in a cramped, claustrophobic one.\u00a0 First, Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em>\u2019s hero manages to escape from his captors and is pursued by them across the countryside of whatever foreign nation he\u2019s in.\u00a0 Okay, for the sake of simplicity, let\u2019s just say his captors are<\/em> the Gestapo and the nation is<\/em> Germany.\u00a0 His pursuers close in but he manages to elude them by stowing away on a London-bound ship, hiding on board inside an empty water tank.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then begins the second, longer part of the narrative.\u00a0 Back in Blighty, he discovers that Hitler\u2019s agents are still on his trail.\u00a0 They don\u2019t just want to eliminate him but also want to make him sign a document saying that he carried out his attempted assassination with the blessing of the British government.\u00a0 Again, the pursuit begins against a broad vista, this time the streets of London and landscapes of southern England.\u00a0 But again, his options narrow and eventually he digs and hides himself in a little cubbyhole under an unruly and remote hedgerow marking the boundary between two farms in Dorset.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One thing that surely inspired Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> was Richard Connell\u2019s short story The Hounds of Zaroff<\/em> (1924) about a big-game hunter who gets hunted as game by another, even bigger-game hunter.\u00a0 \u00a0However, while Household borrows this ironic scenario of a hunter becoming the hunted, he explores it with surprising depth.\u00a0 His hero obviously grew up in a rural aristocratic culture of shooting and hunting but he\u2019s remarkably empathetic with the creatures on the receiving end of the bullets and hounds.\u00a0 He mentions once or twice that he got sick of hunting rabbits because of their harmlessness and defencelessness.\u00a0 And, holed up in his Dorset burrow, he becomes rabbit-like himself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He also bonds with a cat living wild in the hedge above him, whom he names \u2018Asmodeus\u2019, presumably after the \u2018worst of demons<\/a>\u2019 described in the Catholic and Orthodox Book of Tobit.\u00a0 At one point he speculates of Asmodeus, \u201cthere is, I believe, some slight thought transference between us\u2026\u00a0 back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action.\u00a0 I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Later, he comments, \u201cI had begun to think as an animal; I was afraid but a little proud of it.\u00a0 Instinct, saving instinct, had preserved me time and again\u2026\u00a0 Gone was my disgust with my burrow; gone my determination to take to open country whatever the difficulties of food and shelter.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t think, didn\u2019t reason.\u00a0 I was no longer the man who had challenged and nearly beaten all the cunning and loyalty of a first-class power.\u00a0 Living as a beast, I had become a beast, unable to question emotional stress, unable to distinguish danger in general from a particular source of danger.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em>\u2019s central character becomes unhealthily animal-like, his main adversary is a hunter extraordinaire<\/em>.\u00a0 A German agent masquerading as an English country gent called Major Quive-Smith appears on the scene, displaying impeccable upper-class charm towards the civilians he encounters, whist ruthlessly pursuing his quarry.\u00a0 Quive-Smith books a room in one of the farms adjacent to the hedge and burrow, pretending that he wants to spend a few weeks in the area doing some shooting.\u00a0 Spying on him from afar, Household\u2019s narrator notes uneasily that \u201cthe major carried one of those awkward German weapons with a rifled barrel below the two gun barrels\u2026 the three barrels were admirably adapted to his purpose of ostensibly shooting rabbits while actually expecting bigger game.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 20th Century Fox<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In addition to The Hounds of Zaroff<\/em>, Household was probably influenced by John Buchan\u2019s The 39 Steps<\/em> (1915).\u00a0 But while there\u2019s more to Buchan\u2019s novel than its conventional action-adventure reputation would suggest, due to its recurrent theme of disguise and imposture, I think Rogue Male<\/em> is superior in terms of characterisation and psychological tension.\u00a0 Buchan\u2019s Richard Hannay is an outsider in that he\u2019s a veteran of the African colonies who finds life back in the \u2018Old Country\u2019 stuffy, pretentious and tedious; but the hero of Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> is an outsider in more complex ways.\u00a0 He comes from a world of wealth and entitlement but treats that world with indifference and it\u2019s noticeable that when he\u2019s back in London he has a lack of friends in high places to call upon for help.\u00a0 Indeed, he\u2019s such a loner that at times you wonder if he wants to resign from the human race itself.\u00a0 This is even without the mental and physical stress of being hunted making him less like a man and more like an animal.\u00a0 Household provides a few clues about a past tragedy that may explain his disenchantment but wisely he doesn\u2019t get bogged down in too much backstory.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And though Hannay is no shrinking violet, it\u2019s doubtful if he could put with living for long in the burrow that the narrator digs for himself in Dorset and where he spends a good part of 90 pages, first hiding in it from Quive-Smith and his men, and then besieged in it by them.\u00a0 Household manages the tricky task of not overly describing the dirt, muck and claustrophobic darkness of this hideaway whilst implying its squalor.\u00a0 His hero is accustomed to it while he\u2019s inside it but realises how horrible it is when he\u2019s out of it and then comes back: \u201cThe stench was appalling.\u00a0 I had been out only half an hour, but that was enough for me to notice, as if it had been created by another person, the atmosphere in which I had been living.\u201d\u00a0 Then again, like many men of his generation, he\u2019s already undergone something traumatic that puts this experience in perspective: \u201c\u2026my God, I remembered that there were men at Ypres in 1915 whose dugouts were smaller and damper than mine!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve known the story of Rogue Male<\/em> for a long time thanks to seeing the two film adaptations.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t like the 1941 Hollywood version, which downplays the rawness of the novel and turns it into a conventional espionage thriller, reducing the amount of time Walter Pidgeon spends in the burrow and padding things out with extra characters and plot twists.\u00a0 The film\u2019s low-point comes when Pidgeon gets off the ship and is greeted by a parade of Cockney Pearly Kings and Queens waltzing and singing down a foggy street. I guess that was the filmmakers\u2019 way of assuring American audiences that, yes, he is<\/em> back in London.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But I enjoyed the 1976 BBC version.\u00a0 Its scriptwriter, Frederick Raphael, streamlines parts of Household\u2019s narrative and embellishes others \u2013 most notably, adding a new character, a pompous and unhelpful representative of the British government sublimely played by Alastair Sim \u2013 but it\u2019s gritty and, for the time, brutal, even if Peter O\u2019Toole never quite becomes the desperate, filthy, animalistic figure that his counterpart in the book becomes.\u00a0 In addition, it has a great cast (John Standing, Harold Pinter, Michael Byrne and Mark McManus as well as O\u2019Toole and Sim) and it even slips in a cheeky visual reference to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s wartime classic, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp<\/em> (1943).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And coincidentally, it looks like Rogue<\/em> Male<\/em> could be back in vogue.\u00a0 For the past few years, it\u2019s been known<\/a> that Benedict Cumberbatch wants to produce (and presumably star in) a new version of it.\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope the Cumberbatch version, if it appears, is closer to the sombre tone of the 1976 adaptation than the anodyne, crowd-pleasing tone of the 1941 one.\u00a0 Or, better still, it makes a real effort to capture the fascinatingly introspective, misanthropic and grimy<\/em> mood of the novel that inspired those versions in the first place.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 BBC<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 BBC I\u2019m currently halfway through William Boyd\u2019s 2009 London-set thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms which, after a rather unengaging start, I\u2019m happy to say is now shaping up to be a gripping read.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting how quickly Boyd\u2019s plot, of an innocent man being accused of a murder he didn\u2019t commit and having to … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/RM-Peng.jpg\")
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