Rogue Male

“I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear; so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. And they behaved, I think, with discretion. I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics; I might perhaps have sat for an agricultural constituency in the south of England, but that hardly counts as politics. I carried a British passport, and if I had been caught walking up to the House instead of watching it I should probably have been asked to lunch. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in an afternoon.”

This book was gifted to and read by Commander Gore in The Ministry of Time , so my decision to read was in large part due the after glow.

This turns out to be a novel previously unknown to me, a seeming precursor to James Bond. Our (unnamed) protagonist is a renowned hunter (this explains why the book is recommended to Gore), well-known in English society: an English gentleman living off family money and ultimately rents from tenant farmers. He tells us his story as if it is his journal. He tells us that he decided “for sport” to stalk the despotic leader of some anonymous illiberal country that borders Poland. This means hiking on foot for several days to approach the man’s villa close enough that he can see the man through his rifle’s scope.

Unfortunately he is caught (after he foolishly, brazenly followed a patrolling body guard in his infiltration attempt). He is tortured on the assumption that he is an assassin but he never confesses and his captors decide to leave him dangling from a cliff hoping that the fall will kill him with plausible deniability. Of course, he miraculously survives and spends half of the book evading the security and police forces as he flees back to good-ole England. But, it turns out, agents of the country he fled have plenty of agents in England. And because he (tells us) he was never told to perform his foolish stalking and nor did he inform any of his government-connected chums of his activities… Yet if his pursuers capture him it will be a fiasco and bring shame upon his country, thus he decides to that his best choice is to “disappear” within England and eventually winds up camping in a hedge bordering between two large Dorsetshire farms… and still he is unrelentingly pursued…

The prose in this book is very serviceable and the story is fun if you like old school thrillers. If the explanation of this adventure seems implausible its because our protagonist is emotionally stunted and in some degree of denial, but that just makes him more believable as the book resolves. The most interesting bits of the book for me were his digressions concerning his status as a gentleman and his sense of noblesse oblige. Anyway, it was a quick enjoyable read.