Just enough of the Buchan adventure yarn to keep the Victorian Hero stuff palatable. Nowhere near his best though. BBC audio version. 17 April 2017 ( )

Edward Leithen, a lawyer/statesman close to possibly becoming prime minster, finds he is dying of a form of t due to have been gassed in World War One. He is actually younger than I now,but i very much identify with his sense of weakness and weariness. He is persuaded to go to Canada in search of a promising French Canadian who had made a success of business in New York, married a woman there and then suddenly vanished baxk into the Canadian wilderness. Leithen expects the search will use up his last energy, but in act he finds that it strengthens him. (Spoiler warning) --however, after finding him and recovering much of his heath, he deliberately chooses to spend all his renewed strength saving a tribe of First people who have despaired of life themselves and are dying off. ( )

When his health suddenly deteriorates, Sir Edward Leithen receives from his doctor the grim news that he is suffering from a form of tuberculosis brought on by his gassing in WWI, and that in all likelihood he has less than a year to live. His impulse being to hide himself from the world, Leithen avoids his friends while setting his affairs in order, then begins to ponder the question of where to live out his days, all those places most dear to him seeming to mock him with their associated memories of youth and health. One place that does call to him is a valley in Canada known as the Clairefontaine, briefly glimpsed but never forgotten. When an American businessman called Blenkiron solicits Leithen's help in finding his nephew-in-law, the financier Francis Galliard, who vanished of his own volition some time earlier, his acceptance is influenced both by the hope of re-visiting that particular scene, and his desire for one last task to keep him occupied to the end.

Travelling first to New York, Leithen meets with Galliard's wife and a number of his friends. He learns that as a young man Galliard, a French-Canadian of farming stock, turned his back upon his family and their way of life, becoming a naturalised American and rising to great prominence in the world of business and finance. Leithen also hears of Galliard's acute sensitivity, and his recent restlessness; and that in the brief note of apology he left for his wife before his disappearance, he claimed to be sick in mind. One friend, Walter Derwent, provides a concrete clue when he tells Leithen that Galliard asked him about a guide for a journey into the far north of Canada, and that he recommended Lew Frizel, a brilliant woodsman of mixed Scots-Indian blood. Recruiting Frizel's brother, Johnny, Leithen sets out on what he believes will be his final journey, in which it slowly becomes evident that Galliard and Frizel have sets their sights upon one of the most remote, and most dangerous, areas in Canada: a near-legendary territory known as the Sick Heart River...

The knowledge that Sick Heart River was published posthumously, from a manuscript from amongst John Buchan's papers after his death in 1940, adds a further layer of poignancy to this already inherently elegaic work, in which Sir Edward Leithen, of all Buchan's characters the closest to him, is confronted by his own mortality. Leithen's immediate impulse upon receiving the news of his state of health is to hide himself - to withdraw from public life and avoid his friends - yet at the same time, something within him rebels against the thought of passively waiting for death. The search for Francis Galliard offers Leithen the opportunity he desires to keep working until the very end, to "die on his feet"; but as sets out on his journey into northern Canada, as he moves ever further away from civilisation and the world that he has known, the search for a missing man becomes something much greater - an exploration of the right way to live, and the right way to die.

It is the combined force of the heritage he rejected and the religion he has neglected, suppressed but not defeated, that has poisoned for Francis Galliard the world of wealth and privilege to which he has ascended; yet as Edward Leithen follows his trail, it becomes evident that instead of the closure and comfort he was seeking, Galliard has encountered only loss and guilt: a valley ruined by a pulp mill owned by a company in which Galliard has interest; the family farm neglected under an alcoholic uncle; and, in the deep interior, the graves of another uncle and Galliard's brother, who went to seek him. Leithen, too, finds disappointment, discovering that the Clairefontaine valley of his memory has likewise suffered under the hands of time: an event foreshadowing the ultimate revelation of the true nature of the Sick Heart River. Though named by a native chief "sick at heart" for his homeland and a symbol of the terrible yearning that, one way or another, grips each of the characters in this tale, when the travellers reach their destination it is to find, not the redemptive paradise on earth envisaged by the desperate, half-mad Lew Frizel, but a beautiful but desolate wasteland incapable of supporting life...

During the last years of his life, John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada; and even as his early novel about Edward Leithen and his friends, John Macnab, reflects Buchan's deep love for the Scottish Highlands, the pages of Sick Heart River similarly reveal a profound appreciation of the very different but equally beautiful Canadian scenes, the vastness of the country inspiring both awe and terror. However, at the same time there is an uncomfortable paternalism about the novel's attitude to the native Canadians, who are presented as needing to be "looked after" by white men; and an important aspect of the story revolves around the fate of a small community of the Hare tribe, which has been devastated by disease and famine. The human ugliness of the natives' lives is starkly contrasted with the pristine yet dangerous beauty of the landscapes surrounding Leithen and his companions. As they journey northwards, the world of man ceases to exist for them, their existence becoming stripped down to the most elemental level - hunger, cold, exhaustion, fear, survival. And it is in this great emptiness that Edward Leithen is able to bare his own soul and confront the final, and greatest, questions of his life: his place in the universe and his relationship with God; and, in these contexts, his connection and responsibility to his fellow man.