One of the unsung pleasures of a summer weekend in an English country house is the short shelf of books left in the spare bedroom for the entertainment of guests. If you are out of luck, the row of volumes on the bedside table consists of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Regency bodice-rippers by the likes of Georgette Heyer or, worst of all, copies of the Watchtower.
A few years ago, every spare bedroom I slept in seemed to boast a copy of Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death. One could see why one’s kind hosts might not want this gripping volume in a room that they used regularly themselves. It is an entertaining but distinctly macabre exposé of the trade practices of undertakers in the Eisenhower era. Once one has read it, one never forgets the T-shaped layout of the ideal coffin showroom and the methods used to steer mourning relatives toward the most expensive coffins. These, one is told, should be placed in the right-hand arm of the T (because research has shown that wanderers lost in the Antarctic are likely to go round in right-handed circles, like waste water in an antipodean plughole). Some of Miss Mitford’s revelations about embalming are unlikely to induce slumber. I am sure it is all very out of date nowadays. And anyway, she was a Communist.
But the greatest find I ever had was a thriller by John Buchan called The Courts of the Morning. John Buchan was a prolific producer of literate light literature in the decades before and after the First World War (he died as governor general of Canada in 1941). Critics have considered his heroes literary ancestors of James Bond, but actually the contrasts are more instructive. There’s precious little technology (though it is occasionally handy that Sir Archie Roylance is an early aviator).
Unlike the sybaritic Bond, Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot are quietly public-spirited. Though True Love sometimes comes to the surface, there is no sign of Miss Pussy Galore and her bathykolpian avatars; Buchan is the only thriller writer I know to have been an enthusiast for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Perhaps Bunyan also affected Buchan’s genius for evoking landscape. The grand, green hills around Erzerum in Eastern Turkey provide spectacular scenery for the dénouement of Greenmantle, a yarn about Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot using charm and intelligence to foil an Islamic uprising in the darkest days of the First World War. What stuck in the mind from the weekend I spent with The Courts of the Morning was certainly the landscape where the tale unfolds. The core of the story is a miners’ conspiracy in the province of Gran Secco (Big Thirst).
Quite how Sandy Arbuthnot got embroiled in it has long evaporated from memory, but the sense of him speeding up and down the west coast of South America, plunging into deep valleys in sight of snow-topped mountains to deploy his diplomatic skills lingers in the mind like a sweet smell.
I cannot recall what he drank while he was achieving all this. After all, I had to read fast; it would have been tacky to miss meals and tackier still to let the volume find its way into my suitcase (not a temptation for a reader contemplating the grim revelations of Miss Mitford). But there was surely wine to be had. Already in 1933, Viu Manet, nowadays one of the largest wine concerns in South America, was taking advantage of the alternating sea breezes and dry air from the Andes to grow grapes in the temperate vales of Chile.
Since I first met them in England some thirty years ago, Chilean wines have improved massively. Let me commend to you the Semillon made by Viu Manet, a sweet white wine which can be had in half-bottles hereabouts for around twelve dollars. Sweet, but not too sweet, not Bourbon or embalming fluid, lighter than the great French dessert wines of Sauternes that are made from the same sort of grape. Think of it as last-of-the-summer wine, sipped solitarily on the front porch in early evening sunshine, surrounded by the scent of cut grass (so much more pleasing than the sound of grass being cut). Take it with a plain biscuit (OK, cracker) and the kind of light reading whose heroes impart a vicarious sense of mighty deeds achieved. This Semillon might even soothe you into the unjustified conviction that your summer was not entirely wasted. In Chile it is spring.
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