Yet although I did enjoy the book, I still felt that there was something missing. There’s a sinister villain, Major Quive-Smith who, like everything and everyone else in the book, is shrouded in mystery: we don’t know his nationality, his background or who he represents – all we do know is that he’s determined to force a confession from the narrator that the British government was behind the assassination attempt, something the narrator continues to deny even while his real motives are slow to emerge.
His reasons for also leaving the narrator unnamed are less clear, but it does add an extra layer of mystery to the novel while the narrator hides himself from the enemy agents, he also reveals very little of himself to the reader, leaving us wondering who he really is and what his true motives were for carrying out the assassination attempt.įor such a short book (around 200 pages), there’s a lot of plot packed between its covers and the tension builds as we wait to see whether he can continue to evade his pursuers. As the book was published just before the start of World War II, it’s easy to see why he decided to be vague about it. The identity of the protagonist’s target is kept carefully hidden, with very few clues throughout the novel, but it’s not difficult to guess who it was supposed to be and Household later confirmed that it was Hitler. Staying in London is obviously now out of the question, so he heads for the Dorset countryside where he is sure his pursuers will never be able to find him. On his arrival, he discovers that agents of the dictator he’d tried to shoot have followed him to England. Somehow, he survives and manages to make his way back to London. Despite insisting that he wasn’t planning to pull the trigger and was just enjoying the thrill of ‘hunting the biggest game on earth’, the narrator is tortured and thrown over a cliff, where he is left to die. The novel opens in 1938 just after our narrator has been caught aiming a gun at the dictator of an unspecified European country.
It sounded very like The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, which I thought was fun, if a bit repetitive, but while there are definitely some similarities, I found Rogue Male a more satisfying book.
Not knowing much about it, I had added it to my Classics Club list after seeing it included in The Guardian’s Top 10 novels of the 1930s. Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, Rogue Male, was the book selected for me in the recent Classics Club Spin.
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