Today, John Buchan (1875-1940) is principally remembered for The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), a rip-roaring thriller set in World War One. Buchan enjoyed a distinguished political career, including appointments as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and service as Canada’s fifteenth Governor General from 1935 to 1940. His prodigious literary output totalling 83 books, which included histories and poetry as well as 29 novels, was a way of retreating mentally into wild nature, processing his thoughts, and expressing his feelings and longings.

Sick Heart River, published posthumously in 1941,[1] was Buchan’s penultimate novel. It is about a journey into the Canadian wilderness, through which Buchan explores the themes of mortality, vocation, and faith. The story is told from the perspective of Sir Edward Leithen, a lawyer and politician who is a thinly disguised version of Buchan himself.

Leithen, knowing that he is dying from tuberculosis, lays aside his legal and political callings in order to take up one final task, that of tracking down Francis Galliard, a financier who has disappeared from his New York home and is presumed to be somewhere in northern Canada. Galliard has suffered a mid-life crisis, as he has come to realise just how much his lifestyle among New York’s social elite has disconnected him away from his connection with the language, land, and lifestyle he knew growing up on a farm in rural Quebec. The novel thus begins with two sick hearts. Galliard is in search of his roots, of his family, and is trying to ‘find himself’ by retreating from business and from busyness. Leithen is in search of peace, of meaning, and of a good ending.

Leithen’s pursuit of Galliard brings him into contact with two more sick hearts. Lew Frizel and the First Nations Hare tribe. Lew Frizel had been Galliard’s guide into the wilderness. But Lew was on a quest of his own. Fixated on the idea of finding the Sick Heart River, Lew abandons the injured Galliard in the forest. Lew’s obsession with achieving his career goal cuts him off from his family, his friends, and even those it was his job to serve. When he eventually reaches the Sick Heart River, he discovers that, despite its beauty, it is sterile. No animal or bird lives there.[2]

Leithen and his guide, Lew’s brother Johnny, recuperate Galliard and rescue Lew, but by now the harsh Canadian winter is far advanced. As they slowly trek back before the heavy snows come, a message reaches them from a priest ministering to the Hare tribe. Disease is spreading rapidly, and the tribespeople’s fatalistic response to it means that they are no longer hunting, and therefore starvation is worsening their situation. The heart-sickness they are suffering from is acedia, the deadly sin of sloth, a paralysis of inactivity resulting from despair.[3]

Leithen, whose condition has been improving thanks to the fresh air and careful management of his workload, chooses to go to assist the tribal chief and the priest in organising the Hare tribe’s winter survival efforts. His friends try to dissuade him, knowing that the exertions will hasten his death. Despite their pleas, Leithen sets his face to the task before him, choosing to do what he can to help the Hares despite the cost to himself.

Leithen’s journeys show us that vocations are gifts. God calls us to particular tasks at certain times but may also ask us to lay them down and to trust him to lead us in a new direction. Leithen also experiences how vocations can develop over time: he sets out into the wilderness in order to find Galliard but, having done so, he then feels the responsibility to go on to rescue Lew and to restore a sense of hope and determination to the Hare tribe.

Sick Heart River also shows, however, how vocations can become ends in themselves. Lew loses all sense of responsibility in his dogged pursuit of a career pinnacle. Galliard finds that his career as a New York merchant banker has led him to lose touch with who he truly is and where he has come from.[4] Leithen began his journey with the desire to ‘die standing’,[5] to work to the end, ‘to make his soul’.[6] As he travels, he moves, in a meandering fashion from working because he is trying to give his life meaning to working because he has discovered his life’s meaning.

Leithen, whose upbringing, like Buchan’s own, was Calvinistic,[7] but whose faith has ‘mellowed and broadened’[8], finds in the wilderness confirmation of God’s omnipresence and omnipotence, but also of God’s ‘deep purpose of mercy’.[9] The priest’s judgment is that ‘beyond doubt he died in grace.’[10]

Reading Sick Heart River in Canada gives colour to Buchan’s evocations of the woods, valleys, and rivers, but it is in his portrayal of Leithen’s inner life that Buchan is at his most vivid. Buchan provides plenty of food for thought for those contemplating their next career steps or confronting retirement from the law. Who are we being called to serve?, by what measurement will our life be regarded as a success or a failure?, does our career bear witness to our growth in the virtues or only to our acquisition of the glittering prizes?

One of the many ramifications of the death and resurrection of Christ is that, because Jesus has saved the world, we are released from the burden of having to do so. Buchan’s heart was sick at the time he wrote Sick Heart River, not just because of his own impending death but also because the world had been plunged into another global conflict by Nazi aggression. Leithen, and Buchan himself, saw this as ‘a contest between Death and Life’, and one in which he was confident ‘that Life would triumph’.[11] Confident in the victory Jesus had won, Leithen was freed to pursue with determination the small task laid in front of him.

Buchan’s writings exhibit some of the prejudices of his era, but a charitable reading of Sick Heart River is that in the faces of the Hare tribe, Leithen comes to see Jesus amongst ‘the least of these’.[12] Here, at last, he discovers the perfect freedom of those who serve the Lord.[13]

As we prepare ourselves for what God has placed in front of us to do in the new legal year, let us do so: with gratitude for all that God has done for us in Christ, holding our vocations as gifts given to us by God which we will pursue faithfully for as long as He asks us to do so, but finding our identity, meaning, and rest in the One who is the God of peace, the One who has the power to raise from the dead, and the One great shepherd of his sheep.[14]

[1] J. Buchan, Sick Heart River (Hodder & Stoughton, 1941).

[2] SHR, 180-83.

[3] SHR, 283.

[4] SHR, 307-8.

[5] SHR, 23.

[6] SHR, 21, 331.

[7] SHR, 19, Memory-Hold-The-Door (Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), 16.

[8] SHR, 172.

[9] SHR, 203.

[10] SHR, 314.

[11] SHR, 305.

[12] Matthew 25:40; SHR, 305, 312.

[13] Thomas Cramner wrote, in the ‘Collect for Peace’ said at the conclusion of the Anglican Service of Morning Prayer, that our service of God is ‘perfect freedom’. In so doing, he was adapting a phrase from the Latin, cui servire, regnare est, which can be found in Gelasius’s Sacramentary and in a prayer attributed to Augustine of Hippo.

[14] Hebrews 13:20.