The extraordinary curiosity that we find in much modernist literature about myth, and the way myth erupts into, collides with or can be discovered in modern lives, is a subject on which much critical ink has been spilt. But the operative word is ‘modernist’. This palaver about my this a preoccupation routinely attributed to modernism, perhaps even constitutive of modernism. It is not, however, confined to writers of the modernist canon. This essay considers an instance of mythical writing in the fiction of a writer who, if he finds a place in the history of modern literature at all, is never, as far as I know, grouped among the modernists, the vanguard of modernity. In fact, in many respects John Buchan is just the candidate you might call upon to portray modernism's archetypal and necessary opposite or other.

While it is easy enough to line up those writers who belong to the modernist canon (T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and so on), there is very little critical agreement about where the border actually runs between the modernist enclave and its modern hinterland, or indeed whether such a border really does or should exist. The modernists do tend to be treated, by friends and enemies alike, as the aristocracy of modern literature, and either admired as the highest attainment of the culture or dismissed as an effete irrelevance.