How To Disappear Incompletely: Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male
This year marks the 80th anniversary of Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 novel Rogue Male, a tense and taut thriller complete with failed assassinations, desperate escapes, a relentless pursuit, psychological trauma and a hero who spends much of the book’s second half literally hiding like a hunted animal in a hole in the ground. Not sure 007’s ever had to do that.
Briefly put, it’s the tale of an unnamed British adventurer who comes within a hair’s breadth of assassinating an anonymous European dictator (Household later admitted it was meant to be Hitler), before he’s apprehended by the authorities. Despite being tortured and left for dead, he manages to stage a miraculous escape back to England. But, with his enemies still on his trail, he realises he’s no safer on British soil than he was on the continent – and so he attempts to disappear from the face of the Earth, and into the earth.
While the book owes a debt to the more widely known The Thirty-Nine Steps and Riddle Of The Sands, for me Rogue Male is easily their equal. It stands up to repeat reads, thanks to a perfectly judged mix of pursuit and paranoia and the almost cartoon-like stiff upper lip and self possession of the hero, which gradually begins to crack under the pressure of the manhunt.
But it’s the literal escapism at the heart of the novel that provides its greatest appeal. The more firmly that surveillance and social media take hold of 21st century life, the stronger Rogue Male tightens its grip on the imagination. As anyone who’s watched Channel 4’s Hunted will know, try dropping off the radar in 2019 and you’ll be lucky to get beyond the end of your road before a helicopter swoops down and Peter Bleksley leaps out and body-slams you to the ground. Fortunately for Household’s hero, he exists in a time where going off grid, whether through choice or necessity, is a more realistic proposition.
That’s not to say he finds it easy. In fact, despite living in the CCTV and mobile phone-free Britain of 1939, it’s impossible for him to disappear completely. And, even though he takes that drastic step of holing up in a sandstone burrow somewhere in deepest Dorset, he’s still not quite able to give his nemesis, dogged, oily undercover hitman Major Quive-Smith, the slip.
Of course, the poor guy’s not helped early on by the whacking great bandage he has around his head – a result of the nasty, Nazi-flavoured roughing up he receives at the start of the story. And his decision to make some of his escape on a laughably conspicuous, homemade aluminium tandem bike, complete with its own sidecar-slash-pram, seems a little misguided. Still, being a resourceful sort, he makes a decent fist of vanishing for a while and possibly would have got away with it indefinitely if it hadn’t have been for that pesky post-mistress who recognises him from a description circulated by the police.
I won’t spoil the plot any further, not least because it seems Rogue Male will soon get another chance to emerge again from its own cultural hiding place. Three years ago it was announced that Benedict Cumberbatch is set to star in a new film version, although at time of writing the project appears still to be in production. It won’t be the first time the book’s been adapted, however. Just two years after publication it made its first leap to the big screen, in the shape of Fritz Lang’s 1941 movie Manhunt. And, in 1976, the book was turned into an underwhelming BBC TV film, starring the legend that is Peter O’Toole.
With any luck you won’t have need to spend a few weeks living in a dank, dark vault dug into the side of an ancient holloway anytime soon. But if you do, make sure you have a copy of Rogue Male to hand. The hours will fly by!
When I Disappear 