Mr Standfast

In the last grim year of the Great War, Brigadier-General Richard Hannay is pulled out of the trenches and set a stranger task than any in the field: to put off his uniform, pose as a South African pacifist, and work his way to the heart of a German spy network operating inside Britain. At its centre is a smooth, plausible, omnipresent master-spy called Moxon Ivery, whose true identity Hannay must uncover before the secrets he gathers can be turned into catastrophe on the Western Front.

The hunt runs from a pacifist colony in the English countryside to the Scottish Highlands, from a château behind the lines in Picardy to a snowbound Swiss village, and at last to the battlefield itself for the great German offensive of 1918. Hannay is joined by the drawling American agent Blenkiron, by the cool and fearless Mary Lamington — the woman he comes to love — and by the old Boer hunter Peter Pienaar, grounded now and crippled, who carries a battered copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and the soul of the book.

The third and richest of the Richard Hannay novels, Mr Standfast takes its title and its inner life from Bunyan’s allegory, threading the pilgrim’s road through the spy story until the chase becomes a trial of character. It is a thriller that has grown a conscience — about pacifism and duty, about endurance when the first courage is spent, and about the cost of standing fast — and it closes on one of the most moving scenes John Buchan ever wrote.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, its Bunyan framework, and its place in the Hannay trilogy, together with a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.