The wild one. When the Rogue Male misses his chance to assassinate Hitler in peacetime, he goes undercover in Nazi Germany looking for a second opportunity. Here, he declares his own personal war and recklessly fights his way across occupied Europe, with the Gestapo hot on his heels. Battling against Nazi ideology, he's transported across a continent, allied with escaping Jews and resistance groups, as he seeks justice for the evils done to. In the tank war in the desert of North Africa, Major Geoff, as he came to be known, quickly showed himself a soldier of superb athleticism, unwavering will to win and almost superhuman instincts when it came to survival and outwitting the enemy.
Almost incredibly he won the Military Cross. An Englishman plans to assassinate the dictator of a European country. Sir Richard Burton is best known as an explorer and translator of Arabian and Indian books, many of them sexually explicit. Richard Burton was a very famous actor with a brilliant voice and the looks to accompany it. No other work of American literature observes the ancient origins of the human genome. No other poem projects the force of the strong poet into a Space faring civilization.
The idea of exploring the landscape in which it occurred was irresistible to him. So a few months later we drove down to Dorset, and set off on foot from the village of North Chideock. We had map, novel and letter in hand, our rucksacks were packed with billhooks, billy cans and sleeping bags, the sea was hazing blue to our south and the half-moon of hills was sloping green to our north. We should have guessed it wouldn't be a simple matter to track down our hero's bolt hole.
We should have known that this classic book about concealment, escape and evasion would not yield its secrets so easily. Geoffrey Household was as old as his century. Born in , he graduated from Oxford in with a first-class English degree, and spent most of the rest of the decade working in Romania, France and Spain as a banker and then a banana salesman.
But what he wanted to be was an author. Literary success came late, in the form of a novel commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly and published as The Third Hour in In December of the same year, Household began work on Rogue Male. He wrote it in a matter of months. It was serialised over the summer of , published in full shortly afterwards, as Europe tilted into war, and then issued in a Services and Forces edition as buck-up reading for British troops in the early months of conflict.
The novel is Household's masterpiece: a bestseller that redefined its genre. It was filmed, poorly, by Fritz Lang under the title Man Hunt , premiering in New York in June as part of the interventionist campaign to bring America into the war.
It has been adapted for TV and radio several times, and the dark-green cover of its s Penguin edition — reprinted on to T-shirts, tote-bags and coffee mugs — has become a lifestyle accessory and post-ironic man gift.
I am still awaiting sight of the camp parody, Rouge Male , that has surely, somewhere, been written. Household described himself as "a sort of bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad", and the literary genealogy for Rogue Male seems clear enough.
Robert Louis Stevenson 's Kidnapped began the "hunted-man" genre. John Buchan 's The Thirty-Nine Steps updated it for an age of geopolitics and aerial surveillance. Graham Greene 's A Gun for Sale extended its geographies and reversed the logic of pursuit, so the assassin became the quarry.
From these writers Household learned the skill of pacing and the propulsive narrative power of the chase. From Conrad, Household learned how to pattern a novel without slowing its story, as well as techniques of restraint and omission. So much of Rogue Male concerns things — actions, perceptions, memories — that occur out of sight or in darkness. Camouflage and cover are the novel's preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling.
Even the narrator remains anonymous, only an "I" — as artful at concealing his identity and character from his readers as from his pursuers.
Artful, too it turns out , at concealing himself from himself. I first read Rogue Male 20 years or so ago, rapidly and unreflectively, pulled onwards by its plot. It was only later, and on several rereadings, that the complexities of its patterns began to reveal themselves. This is a novel of elaborate design. There are paired concepts — "cover" and "open", "surface" and "depth" — that repeat and weave. And there is a sustained analogy between land and mind, whereby the narrator's access to his buried emotions is enabled only by means of a literal digging into the Jurassic bedrock of south-west Dorset.
An Oxford graduate with a degree in English literature, Geoffrey Household rebelled from what seemed an inevitable career as an international banker and instead led an adventurous life that took him from England to Rumania, Spain, Latin America, the United States, and the Middle East, where he worked for British military intelligence during World War II.
Few authors influenced me more than Geoffrey Household. Not knowing anything about Household graduate school sheltered me from popular fiction , I borrowed Rogue Male from the library, finished it in one night, and eagerly set out to read everything else Household had written. Until then, my attempts at thrillers had felt scholarly and academic, but the visceral elements of Rogue Male woke me to the power that could be achieved in the high-action genre.
The pace of Rogue Male is stunning, as is its premise, which made Household famous among thriller writers. With war looming in the late s, a British big-game hunter makes his way across Europe, stalking an unnamed dictator, who is almost certainly Hitler. They torture him in an effort to learn if he works for the British government. When they finally decide that he acted on his own, they throw him off a cliff, hoping to make his death look like an accident while at the same time accounting for the serious damage that their torture inflicted on his body.
But he survives, landing in mud that cushions his fall and prevents him from bleeding to death. All of these incidents occur in the first four pages. Four pages. The rest of the book moves with equal relentlessness as the main character musters all his wits to hide, regain his strength, and get out of the country.
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