Prester John (2003)

By John Buchan
I got a bit confused reading this book because I kept getting mixed up between the author’s name and the name of one of the main protagonists. Too many Johns – what was the author thinking??

Most famous for his novel The thirty-nine steps, which has been made into a movie several times, this book sees our young hero, David Crawfurd, travelling to Blauwildebeestfontein (yes, that’s right, Blauwildebeestfontein – Monty Python couldn’t have done better if they tried) in sort of deepest darkest colonial Africa, in order to sell lots of foodstuffs and other goods to all those intellectually challenged natives. Not surprisingly, our hero runs afoul of a native uprising, in particular the compelling and powerful figure of the black minister John Laputa, who claims to be the incarnation of an ancient African hero, Prester John. Also, of course, there are large amounts of diamonds around – apparently one of the worst things you could do at the time was to engage in “IDB”, which is something to do with the illegal sale and purchase of diamonds, but I didn’t quite manage to figure out what “IDB” stood for at any time during the book.

This book is so well written, and an excellent adventure story – it is just peculiar to read now because of its obvious racism, which I guess was typical of the era (1910-ish). The most peculiar thing is, though, that it’s almost as if Buchan wrote it deliberately so that the reader would see through Crawfurd’s xenophobia and sympathise with the Africans’ point of view. The “anti-hero” himself, Prester John, is much admired by the hero, for his strength, his education, his integrity and his ability to inspire and lead the people of Africa into war with the European settlers. If someone now was trying to write a book about that time, and therefore trying to “infuse” the text with contemporary views, this is the way it would sound.

Rating: 8 out of 10