1917. The war has ground on for three years, and Richard Hannay, the decorated soldier from The Thirty-Nine Steps, is asked to do the one thing he finds most difficult: wait. Posing as Cornelius Brand, a mild-mannered pacifist engineer, Hannay must infiltrate a circle of suspected German agents operating in the English countryside while maintaining a facade of conscientious objection. The thrill lies in the contradiction, a warrior forced to play the coward, a man of action condemned to patience. But this is also the novel where Hannay, who has spent a lifetime 'wholly among men,' finally falls in love, and the vulnerability that introduces into his character transforms him from an efficient operative into something closer to a real man. The title comes from Pilgrim's Progress, and Buchan weaves Bunyan's allegory throughout: Hannay uses a copy of the classic to conceal coded messages from his contacts, and the journey toward peace becomes his own pilgrimage through the valley of shadow. Written by a man who actually served in British intelligence during the war, Mr. Standfast delivers the pleasures of early spy fiction, tension, disguises, a puzzles to be solved, while quietly asking what any of us owe to the people we pretend to be.
