Beau Geste

Some novels merely tell a story. Beau Geste salutes smartly, adjusts its kepi, and marches straight into the great imperial theatre of honour, mystery, brotherhood and highly polished courage. P. C. Wren’s most famous adventure novel remains one of those gloriously old-fashioned books that seems to come trailing sand, bugle calls, noble sacrifice and the faint suspicion that everyone involved has very firm views about duty.

First published in the 1920s and presented here in a 1947 John Murray edition, Beau Geste belongs to that rich tradition of adventure fiction in which men with excellent cheekbones and complicated moral codes go off to inhospitable places and behave magnificently under pressure. The setting, of course, is the French Foreign Legion, that irresistible literary institution where mystery, hardship and theatrical heroism have long gone into partnership. Wren understood exactly what he was doing: this is not realism in the muddy, bureaucratic sense, but romance in its grander, more dramatic form, with desert forts, buried secrets, danger and honour all arranged for maximum effect.

At the heart of the novel are the Geste brothers, whose loyalty to one another gives the book much of its real force. Beneath the marching, the mystery and the martial glamour lies a story about family, devotion, sacrifice and the lengths to which people will go when their sense of honour has been properly engaged. It is a tale constructed with enormous confidence, full of revelations, reversals and just enough emotional seriousness to stop the whole thing becoming merely decorative derring-do. Wren may provide the dunes and uniforms, but he also knows that readers need hearts under the tunics.

What makes Beau Geste so enduring is its complete lack of embarrassment about being exactly the sort of story it is. It believes in courage. It believes in honour. It believes in the dramatic usefulness of the desert. And it believes, above all, that adventure should be given every possible advantage. Modern fiction often likes to explain itself apologetically, as though enjoyment were somehow suspect. Beau Geste has no such anxieties. It offers mystery, action, romance and atmosphere with a straight face and leaves the reader to enjoy them properly.

There is, naturally, something delightfully ironic about reading it now. The world from which it emerged was intoxicated by empire, uniforms and the idea that character is best tested in remote and uncomfortable places. Much of that vanished or became rather harder to discuss with a straight face. Yet the novel survives because it is so expertly built and so perfectly aware of its own mythic machinery. Even when one reads it with modern scepticism fully operational, the story still knows how to work its charms. One may smile at the old-world heroics and still be entirely drawn in by them.

This 1947 John Murray edition has exactly the right postwar solidity to carry such a tale. It comes from a moment when publishers still assumed a proper novel ought to feel like an object of consequence: well made, durable, and ready to take its place on a shelf among other serious entertainments. There is something very fitting about Beau Geste appearing in this format. It is a substantial story and deserves a binding with a little backbone.

In Good condition, this copy has the attractive air of a book that has survived sensibly and without drama, which is more than can be said for many of its characters. It remains a handsome, readable survivor from the middle of the twentieth century, carrying within it a tale already old enough by then to feel classic, but still vigorous enough to send readers back into the desert all over again.

For the modern reader, Beau Geste is a fascinating mixture of adventure, melodrama and literary time-capsule. It will appeal to lovers of classic action fiction, military adventure, and those splendidly improbable novels in which men behave with impossible gallantry while the plot piles on one compelling complication after another. It is also perfect for anyone who suspects that books used to be rather better at giving readers proper escapism without needing to wink about it.

In short, Beau Geste is a rattling, romantic, honour-soaked adventure of the old school: dramatic, sincere, mysterious and completely committed to the business of storytelling. This 1947 John Murray copy, in Good condition, is a fine Crappy Old Books survivor from the age when deserts were symbolic, brothers were loyal, forts were doomed, and adventure still knew how to wear a uniform.

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