The Dancing Floor
£3.45
Strange and Haunting - John Buchan is, sadly, a rather neglected writer these days, so it s encouraging to see a few of his books creeping back into print. I have no doubt he will always be best known for The 39 Steps but, as The Dancing Floor amply shows, there is a great deal more to Buchan s work than daring exploits and Boys Own adventure.The Dancing Floor centres on a young English woman, Kore Arabin, who inherits a house on a remote Greek island. Sadly for Kore the locals regard her as a witch, responsible for the failure of their crops, and become convinced she must be sacrificed in order to ensure better harvests in the coming years. Much of the story deals with the attempts of Sir Edward Leithen - all-round good-egg and gent - and the curiously morbid Vernon Milburne to save her. So far so conventional but what makes the novel a curiously compelling experience is the care Buchan takes to build up character and an all-pervading sense of unease. For example Milburne suffers from a recurring dream, each year, on a particular night, he dreams he is in a room connected in a long line to several other rooms. Something else, something dark and malevolent, is slowly moving towards the room in which he sits, creeping ever onwards at a rate of one room a year, each year the haunting, unknown it has crawled one room closer to the room in which Milburne nervously and helplessly waits..... As an idea many writers would probably use it as a hook upon which to hang the weight of an entire novel but here, with Buchan, it s merely a single strand in a much more complex picture. Similarly Kore is far from the damsel in distress of so much adventure fiction: she s gauche, rude, self-centred, pushy and, deep down, completely lost and very lonely.Buchan is a writer very much of his time: the men are all gentlemen and the British, quite rightly, rule the world. But if you can look beyond that what he presents in The Dancing Floor is a compelling and far from straight-forward tale of a battle between Christianity and paganism in which the genuinely supernatural plays a large part. It s dark, and it s haunting and it does linger in the mind long after the last page has been turned. Curious but very compelling and well worth searching out if you re looking for something a little different.
Great but a little dated! - The Dancing Floor by John Buchan is a good read. I read in in two days - while it has a good story - being 80-90 years old the wording and thoughts at times can be dated. So 4 stars.
One of Buchan s most thoughtful - I ve been a fan of John Buchan s for a very long time. This book, which is the third of the Edward Leithen s, deals with ideas of purity and kindness. While Vernon is a major character, the eyes we most often view other character s through are those of Leithen. Through him we meet the girl Kore whom he doesn t care for at first. Later we see how modern manners and fashions have shadowed over her essential goodness and slowly she becomes identified with the eternal maiden that her name implies. It s been many years since I ve re-read this book, but I will always remember the impact that it had on me.