Title: Fair only
Product review: Not one of Buchan's more rewarding works, this novel finds the author in a mournful and disappointed mood. Largely concerned with the doings of a Scots minister in an impoverished lowlands town in the mid seventeenth century, we are tortuously given a social history in microcosm. David Sempill is involved in plots of witchcraft, rural poverty and a bizarre epidemic, Anglo-Scottish border wars and ultimately flight over the seas.In no sense are we swept up into the life or adventures of the hero, as we are say with Richard Hannay in 'Greenmantle' or Dickson McCunn in 'Huntingtower'; both very different classes of hero but both extremely engaging. David Sempill fails the test of engagement and we remain sharply on the side lines, slightly uninterested observers of a time we can hardly credit occured
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