SPOILERS
The Dancing Floor
Here as elsewhere Buchan is pretty free with coincidences. Edward Leithen, the narrator, becomes lost while hillwalking in Westmorland; he takes shelter at a remote house which turns out to be that of Vernon Milburne, who’d made an impression on him earlier. During the Great War, Leithen is hospitalized; the patient next to him is Milburne. Leithen learns of Milburne’s adventure at the Greek island of Plakos and his recurrent dream, and, in the course of his work as a lawyer, is given papers relating to Plakos, where is property owned by the Arabins – Leithen having encountered the heiress at a dance. Later, while yachting, Milburne happens to take shelter in the fog at Plakos, just in time to be involved with Koré Arabin’s deliverance.
Of all things, Brideshead Revisited came to my mind. There are jazz age scenes. You have the first-person narrator (Leithen) who is much taken with the “beauty” of the younger, wealthier man (Vernon Milburne) – cf. Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, though they must be about the same age). Leithen thinks about Milburne a lot, has a close friendship with him, is “miserable” when they drift apart. Leithen is a bachelor without a romantic interest in any woman. Many readers today will assume his feelings for Milburne are homoerotic, like Ryder’s for Flyte.
In Brideshead Revisited, Ryder falls in love with Flyte’s sister, who resembles Sebastian. In The Dancing Floor, Leithen, who was at first repelled by what he misconstrues as bad manners in the boyish-looking Koré Arabin, becomes romantically intrigued by her -- but she is Vernon’s soulmate (not sister). There is a sense of a transference in Leithen of romantic feelings from the male character to the female, though, when he sees Koré with Vernon as Maiden and Youth, in their impersonation that becomes something more impressive, he clearly knows they belong together. Like Ryder, Leithen comes through his experiences as if he has made his “peace with life.” He’s aware that the villagers have fled from the pagan site to the church for the Orthodox Easter, and (unlike Ryder), is not a part of that, but at least he seems to feel affirmative about it.
So I wouldn’t say that Waugh’s and Buchan’s books are all that much alike, but there’s some similarity.
I was reminded a little also of Haggard’s She, in which the narrator (Holly) is an older man with a splendid-looking young college man as his center of interest (Holly is Leo Vincey’s guardian), whose soulmate is a sort of sorceress-queen connected to ancient paganism; Koré is feared by the Plakos islanders as a (supposed) witch, while Ayesha really does possess preternatural powers. Ayesha lives in the ruinous ancient city of Kôr, while Koré owns an old house on the island. (Her Greek name Κόρη means “maiden” and presumably the resemblance to the name of the city in She is coincidental and irrelevant.)
All three novels that I’ve mentioned here bespeak a now bygone time in which educated Englishmen had a Classical education.
The Dancing Floor was interesting to read again after 40 years, but will not be one of my topmost Buchan favorites.
