My highlights will hint at what I would have written about this strange, compelling book, and those from the excellent intro by Robert Macfarlane do the job better than I would have (this recent edition is the one with the Macfarlane intro, most of which you can also read here, and whose recent book Holloway is part inspired by the Rogue Male landscape).
I will say though that you mustn't let it put you off - with the distance of about 75 years, the book now appears horribly classist and racist at times, but it is excellent, weird, psychological and exciting. I missed the radio dramatisation last year. Rogue Male is a dark 39 Steps.
From the intro:
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) – in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour are chased across the Scottish Highlands by English redcoats in the 1750s – began the ‘hunted-man’ genre. [Location 53]
John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) – in which Richard Hannay is chased across the Scottish Lowlands by German agents [Location 54]
Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale (1936) – in which a hired killer called Raven is chased from Central Europe to the British Midlands [Location 56]
From Joseph Conrad, I think, Household learned how to pattern a novel intricately without slowing down its story, and he also learned restraint: in particular, the technique of omitting explicit description of key events. [Location 58]
In Rogue Male vital incidents go similarly un-detailed: the torture scene, the death in the Aldwych tunnel, the narrator’s first visit to the holloway with his fiancée. Only the outcomes (wounds and scars, guilt, repressed trauma) of these episodes are alluded to; they are experienced chiefly as their aftermaths. It is no coincidence that the narrator’s eye is brutally damaged early on, leaving dancing patches of shadow where light should be; [Location 61]
Camouflage and cover are the novel’s preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling. Even the narrator remains nameless throughout, only an ‘I’ [Location 66]
There are paired concepts – ‘cover’ and ‘open’, ‘surface’ and depth’ – that repeat and weave. There are images and figures – notably the sunken track, the tunnel, the cave or den, and skins and skinning – that recur dozens of times in different forms. There are tiny details of incident or comment that anticipate or recall earlier versions of themselves. [Location 71]
the sustained analogy between land and mind, whereby the narrator’s access to his buried emotions is enabled only by means of a literal digging down [Location 74]
for as well as becoming part-animal he also becomes part-earth, part-rock and part-tree – a hybrid version of the landscape itself. [Location 99]
The episode might be understood as an early study of Stockholm Syndrome, as a Catholic confessional in which the den’s ventilation shaft serves as the grille, or as an extended psychoanalytical session. [Location 159]
The narrator’s psychological interior is the novel’s last hidden terrain, and its access completes the book’s ongoing processes of digging and rupture [Location 166]
The highlights:
There was a pulped substance all around me, in the midst of which I carried on my absurd consciousness. I had supposed that this bog was me; it tasted of blood. Then it occurred to me that this soft extension of my body might really be bog; [Location 225]
a creature of mud, bandaged and hidden in mud. [Location 230]
I had gone beyond worrying about the state of surfaces. [Location 257]
I felt deliciously secure, for I was not looking forward at all; I felt as if I were a parasite on the tree, grown to it. I was not in pain, not hungry, not thirsty, and I was safe. [Location 266]
I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did. I must try to make my behaviour intelligible. [Location 295]
I might have been transparent. [Location 324]
The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognized, nameless, formless secret society. There isn’t much that the bits of scum can do to help one another, but at least they can cling and keep silence. [Location 485]
At need I could walk very slowly and correctly, hanging on each foot, as if waiting for somebody. [Location 537]
I was comfortable enough, more relaxed than I had been since the first week on the river. The darkness and the six walls gave me an immediate sense of safety. I had gone to ground after the hunt, and the cold iron of the closed tank was more protective than the softest grass in the open. [Location 674]
the first of my dens, and I think that it provided me with the idea of the second. [Location 676]
After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins – though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity. [Location 712]
No, I was an outlaw not because of my conscience (which, I maintain, has no right to torment me) but on the plain facts. [Location 762]
I’d be lucky if I ever perceived more than light and darkness, [Location 773]
I passed him on the level of the Central London, and went down the escalator to the west-bound Piccadilly Tube. [Location 845]
I pretended I had forgotten something, and shot out of the exit, up the stairs and down a corridor to the north-bound platform. [Location 848]
I noticed that the shuttle train at the Aldwych left from the opposite side of the same platform. This offered a way of escape if ever there were two trains in at the same time. [Location 849]
I took the second escalator to the surface, and promptly dashed down again. [Location 853]
At the bottom of the Piccadilly escalator you turn left for the north-bound trains, and continue straight on for the west-bound. To the right is the exit, along which an old lady with two side parcels was perversely trying to force her way against the stream of outcoming passengers. [Location 859]
I ran on to the north-bound platform. An Aldwych shuttle was just pulling in, but there was no Piccadilly train. I shot under the Aldwych line, down to the west-bound platform, into the general exit, jamming him in another stream of outcoming passengers, and back to the north-bound Piccadilly. There was a train standing, and the Aldwych shuttle had not left. I jumped into the Piccadilly train with the Major so far behind that he was compelled to enter another coach just as the doors were closing and just as I stepped out again. Having thus despatched the Major to an unknown destination, I got into the Aldwych shuttle, which at once left on its half-mile journey. [Location 862]
After half a minute in the Aldwych shuttle I realized that I had panicked like a rabbit in a warren. The mere couple of ferrets who had been after me had been magnified by my escape mechanism – a literal escape mechanism this, and working much faster than my mind – into an infinity of ferrets. [Location 869]
I turned back and re-entered the shuttle. The passengers were already seated in the single coach, and the platform clear; but a man in a black hat and blue flannel suit got in after me. That meant that he had turned back when I had turned back. At Holborn I remained seated to prove whether my suspicions were correct. They were. Black Hat got out, sauntered around the platform, and got in again just before the doors closed. [Location 873]
As we left again for Aldwych, Black Hat was at the back of the coach and I was in the front. We sat as far away as possible from each other. Though we were both potential murderers, we felt, I suppose, mutual embarrassment. Mutual. I wish to God he had sat opposite me, or shown himself in some way less human than I. [Location 879]
I can still hear them, and the sound of steps and his scream and the hideous, because domestic, sound of sizzling. They echoed along that tunnel which leads Lord knows where. A queer place for a soul to find itself adrift. It was self-defence. He had a flash-light and a pistol. I don’t know if he meant to use it. Perhaps he was only as frightened of me as I was of him. I crawled right to his feet and sprang at him. By God, I want to die in the open! If ever I have land again, I swear I’ll never kill a creature below ground. [Location 897]
ALDWYCH MYSTERY was occupying half a column of the centre page. [Location 937]
rigour of the climate was not inviting. My own county, though I carried the ordnance map in my eye and knew a dozen spots where I could go to ground, had to be avoided. [Location 963]
The business that had taken me to Dorset was so precious that I kept it to myself. [Location 971]
Though the precise spot where I was going was no more nor less present in my consciousness than the dark shadows which floated before my left eye, I knew I had to have a fleece-lined, waterproof sleeping-bag. [Location 975]
I took a train to Guildford, and thence by slow stages to Dorchester, where I arrived about five in the afternoon. I changed after Salisbury, where a friendly porter heaved my roll into an empty carriage on a stopping train without any corridor. By the time we reached the next station I was no longer the well-dressed man. I had become a holiday-maker with Mr Vaner’s very large and dark sun-glasses. [Location 995]
He had the perfect self-possession and merry eyes of a craftsman. One can usually spot them, this new generation of craftsmen. They know the world is theirs, and are equally contemptuous of the professed radical and the genteel. [Location 1010]
I admitted to myself now where I was going. [Location 1079]
I passed out of the chalk into the sandstone; the lanes, worn down by the packhorses of a hundred generations plodding up from the sea on to the dry, hard going of the ridges, were fifteen feet or more below the level of the fields. [Location 1102]
There is not, any longer, enough to do. I am not affected by loneliness nor by the memories of this place. [Location 1199]
I am uncertain of myself. Even this journal, which I was sure would exorcise my misgivings, has settled nothing. [Location 1200]
Well, I suppose I wished to save myself pain. But I cannot even remember her face, except that her eyes appeared violet against the tawny skin. [Location 1214]
I wrote to Saul for books: meaty stuff which I could reread throughout the winter, penetrating with each reading a little further into what the author meant rather than what he said. I did not, of course, sign the letter, but wrote in block capitals, asking him to send the books to Professor Foulsham at a sub-post office in Lyme Regis. [Location 1218]
There is no animal but man which can be hunted simultaneously by two different packs without the two becoming one; [Location 1274]
carrion thought [Location 1286]
it worried me that I had come to move with such instinctive quietness. I was already on the look-out for all signs of demoralization – morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity. [Location 1459]
Eggardon affected me as a city. The camp was haunted. I didn’t feel the presence of its builders, those unknown imperialists who set their cantonments on the high chalk, but I was suddenly terrified of the sleeping towns and villages that lay at my feet and clustered, waiting, [Location 1502]
I was obsessed by this sense of all southern England crowding in upon the hill. [Location 1507]
The lifeless centre seems full of gases, unsatisfying in themselves and carrying in suspension the brown dust and debris that fall from above [Location 1696]
All initiative is at an end. All luck is at an end. We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women – cases faintly parallel to mine – who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is. [Location 1702]
to hide I am ashamed. So I endure without object. [Location 1712]
Admit it now, my dear fellow, you could get along perfectly well without any State!’ ‘Yes, damn you!’ [Location 1917]
Yet I was mad with grief and hatred. I describe myself as then mad because I did not know it. The tepidity of my sorrow was not indifference; it was the blankness which descends upon me when I dare not know what I am thinking. [Location 1994]
Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs. [Location 2002]
My fantasy had developed as far as shooting my way out of the magistrate’s court [Location 2438]
My Dear Saul, I write this from a pleasant inn where I am accustoming myself to a new avatar. [Location 2467]
One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is – in these days – a town. Chimney-pots should be the cover, and the method, snapshots at two hundred yards. [Location 2479]
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