Rogue Male was published in 1939 and is the first person account of an accomplished, aristocratic, English huntsman, who seemingly on a whim, decides to stalk a European leader (Hitler). The question of whether he actually means to assassinate him is left slightly ambiguous at first (though we later learn that he had good reason for wanting to do so) but the point is moot as he is discovered before he could fire and is captured. He is interrogated and tortured quite badly before being thrown over the side of a cliff to make it look as if he died accidentally. But he survived the fall and, using the cunning he had as a huntsman, managed to hide whilst they searched for his body and then escape on a boat down river. Once back in England, though, he was not safe as agents were still in active pursuit. He was unable to escape unnoticed and was forced to kill one of them, which meant that he was being hunted by both the police and the foreign secret service. But it was an agent who tracked down his hideout in Dorset. He the huntsman became the hunted by someone who was as skilled as himself. He is cornered and trapped in an underground lair and although things seem to be totally hopeless he manages to fashion a weapon with which he can kill his pursuer. After that he escapes and is able to travel abroad and start a new life with a new identity, in South America.
As you can tell from the synopsis, it it a neat tight plot and the thing clips along at a good pace - there is after all a reason why it is seen as a classic thriller - but it is much more cunning than that. There are all sorts of ellipsis where you have to go back to work out exactly what happened and there are all sorts of themes about cover, hiding, concealment, man as animal, instincts and knowing yourself. It is interesting, for example, that our hero only really gets to consciously understand his motive towards the end, after being questioned by his pursuer.
But I am partly reading this for the attitudes of its time and it is rich in examples. In the foreground there is the premise of a huntsman. The whole practice of stalking big game, as a skilful, solitary pursuit that engages all the senses and a deep knowledge of the natural world, is something from a past era. We know engage with the wild in a different, more limited way. We have to find other ways to get in touch with our animal self. For our huntsman hero, he had that knowledge because of what he did, who he was.
“ This was the reasoning of a hunted beast, or rather, it was no reasoning at all. I don’t know if a sedentary townsman’s mind would have worked in the same way. I think it would if he had been badly enough hurt. You must be hurt badly to reach the stage of extinction where you stop thinking what you ought to do and merely do it.”
But merely doing it was also a model of how one behaved.”like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and and disbelieve in cold blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anybody else.” This is part of the national character myth of the English gentleman that was potent until the latter part of the Twentieth Century. A myth that had us believe there was an innate superiority that would always enable us to triumph in the end through instinctive knowledge and basic judgement. We were proud to be empirical and not think too much but underlying it there was a form of stoicism. The famous stiff upper lip, that can rarely be seen anywhere in contemporary society. Of his initial interrogation by the security forces our hero says: “I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless” What wonderful understatement! Other details of the interrogation are dribbled out later on but there are no descriptions. As a buttoned up English gentleman of the time he takes it on the chin:
“I hold no brief for the pre-war Spartan training of the English upper class - or middle class as it is now the fashion to call it, leaving the upper to the angels - since in the ordinary affairs of a conventional life it is not of the slightest value to anyone: but it is of use on the admittedly rare occasions when one needs a high degree of physical endurance … We torture a boy’s spirit rather than his body, but all torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit. I was conditioned to endure without making an ass of myself. That is all I mean by detachment.”
I must admit that I am attached to this idea of the English gentleman hero. I was bought up on in all the books I read as a child, Biggles stories and the like. Reading Rogue Male was in some ways comforting because it reminded me of the pleasures I had with those stories when younger, when everything seemed bigger, bolder and brighter. But I can only now read it as my older self and now I get the pleasure from other details in the writing and the way themes are slipped in. Like, for example, the earlier quote about ‘the reasoning of a hunted beast’ there is the phrase about reaching ‘the stage of extinction’ and it is something to bear in mind when you read a story of covering up and trying to disappear.
Date of first publication
1939
Link to last book
I am going to abandon the idea of the randomness for the moment and play a game of consequences, just to see where it leads. I read this book because of a question in the previous book about reading to find out about the past
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