Rogue Male

For Rogue Male’s narrator, however, only the personal is legitimately political.* Like all Household heroes, he hates the state and respects the rights of the individual. He eschews all patriotism and believes in “dying against,” not “dying for.” Only under extreme mental duress, then, does he finally admit, to Quive-Smith and to himself, that “of course” he had meant to shoot. And with that admission comes a flood of self-knowledge about the depth of the feelings he has never fully acknowledged: his love, grief, and rage over the execution of the woman he loved by the dictator’s secret police. The man who had mocked, at the start of his adventure, the notion of “yowling of love like an Italian tenor” has been delivered into his higher, more authentic self by his deeper co

Quive-Smith, in contrast, whose courage, superior hunting skills, and intelligence superficially make him a Class Xer, is excluded from the brotherhood because of two overweening flaws—cruelty and ambition. Half English and half German, he resembles many other Household antagonists who serve as distorted mirror images of his heroes. The ex—Resistance fighter “Savarin” of The Watcher in the Shadows is a half-English, half-French vicomte who pursues Charles De

In Household’s late masterpiece Dance of the Dwarfs (1968), the unknown adversary proves not to be human at all and delivers a particularly gruesome death to the hero and his Indian mistress. Dance of the Dwarfs further inverts this writer’s usual pattern to focus on the vast and chillingly impersonal wilderness of the New World, pitting the hero, Owen Dawnay, against a foe who is only gradually revealed to be a creature of the impenetrable jungle bordering the llano, the vast inland plain of Colombia.* The shared theme of sacrificing one’s life in the service of a doomed love makes Rogue Male and Dance of the Dwarfs Household’s two finest novels.

After Rogue Male’s narrator experiences his transcendent moment of clarity, the denouement unfolds swiftly. His prohibition against taking human life is lifted when Quive-Smith and his henchman kill the cat Asmodeus for sport and throw the body down the ventilator hole. Now that the rules of honor have been flagrantly breached, murder can be legitimized as an act of war. From the hide of his animal comrade he fashions a lethal sling-shot as his instrument of vengeance, and once this score has been settled he will decide to take on his original quarry once more and do the job properly. Offsetting this a

Robert MacFarlane rightly dubs Household the heir of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, but the scale, I think, must be tipped in favor of the egalitarian Stevenson. Buchan’s Richard Ha

One suspects that Geoffrey Household, were he alive today, would be delighted by new DNA research suggesting that those of Her Majesty’s citizens whose ancestors were long-term inhabitants of the British Isles are far more genetically homogenous (forget Viking, Celt, Saxon, Norman!) than previously thought. He would be even more delighted by the likelihood that most of these people, himself included, descend from a single population of Paleolithic hunters who migrated north from the Iberian peninsula some 16,000 years ago—back in those far-off days “when men could simply walk from France, following game,” in the nostalgic words of a character in The Courtesy of Death—speaking a language, for the best and final touch, very much like that still current among his beloved Basques.* And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some future spelunker in the Mendips, taking a cue from this twentieth-century romancer, will uncover a cave painting or two that brings to life again, across three hundred generations, the timeless dance of Hunter and Hunted in Household’s native land.

—VICTORIA NELSON

*Granta, “The Wild Places,” September 2007.

*In Against the Wind, Household notes significantly that his own sentiment toward Nazi Germany “had the savagery of a personal vendetta.”

*In some respects, the predators in this novel resemble the worst sort of humans, including the Nazis in Rogue Male; they kill their own kind and kill for the pleasure of killing, acts that violate a kind of trans-species Class X code of honor.

*Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story, quoted in Nicholas Wade, “English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest,” The New York Times, March 5, 2007.

ROGUE MALE

To Ben

who knows what it feels like

‘The behaviour of a rogue may fairly be described as individual, separation from its fellows appearing to increase both cu

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