Background

James Buchan was born on June 11, 1954. He is the son of William Baron Buchan and Barbara Howard Buchan.

Education

James first attended to an independent Eton College, before going to Magdalen College in Oxford, where he received a degree of Master of Arts.

Career

James Buchan began his career as a Financial Times correspondent, writing from the Middle East, Germany, and the United States from 1978-84, and as columnist till 1986. In 1990 he continued his career in Spectator as a chief book critic.

His first writing was A Parish of Rich Women. The book, set in Beirut and London, presents a glimpse into the adventures of a group of dissolute jet setters. Adam Murray, a young reporter stationed in Beirut, returns to London only to find that his old school friends have become part of what New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called the “demi-monde where aristocracy and bohemia meet.” Their lives, Kakutani noted, are “vapid, snobbish and carelessly decadent,” and Adam is soon bored. He is drawn back to Lebanon partly to report on the war, but also to look for his friend Johnny, who has disappeared after arriving in Beirut three months earlier. There, Adam encounters various dangers and intrigues against the backdrop of car bombings, terrorist violence, and rocket attacks.

A huge critical success in Britain, where it won three awards, A Parish of Rich Women drew mixed reviews in the United States. Richard Ben Cramer, in the New York Times Book Review, enjoyed the novel’s swift narrative pacing but felt that its sketchy characterizations left readers with little sense of real psychology. Kakutani found Buchan’s treatment of the political situation in Beirut to be overly confusing but appreciated the “glittering, staccato takes” with which Buchan describes London and the expertise with which he writes about Beirut.

In his second novel, Davy Chadwick, Buchan takes the disappearance of a child as his theme. With The Golden Plough, however, he returns to the political thriller. The novel, published in Britain as Heart’s Journey in Winter, was deemed “an intricate (and frankly baffling) cold war thriller,” by Michael Upchurch in the New York Times Book Review. The novel focuses on British spy Richard Fisher, who, while stationed in Germany during the early 1980s, must help defuse a crisis when the Soviet Union alarms NATO by deploying mid-range nuclear missiles in Europe. The ensuing intrigue involves Fisher, German politician Sebastian Ritter, and the beautiful and dangerous American operative Polina Mertz, with whom Fisher falls in love and who alone can foresee the collapse of Soviet power and the new world order ahead. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly considered the novel both dull and confusing and observed that readers would need footnotes and scorecards to keep track of the action. Booklist's Alice Joyce, however, deemed it an “uncompromisingly literate spy novel” that fans would find “mesmerizing.” The novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was included in the list of Times Literary Supplement International Books of the Year.

High Latitudes: A Romance sets a tale of corporate intrigue against the backdrop of the environmental and fiscal crises of the 1980s. Its central character, divorcee and reformed heroin addict Jane Haddon, is a successful businesswoman whose desperate attempts to salvage a threatened Glasgow textile mill lead her into dangerous situations. These exploits take Jane from New York City to the “high latitudes” of the book’s title and involve her with everything from a major stock market crash and labor disputes to a disastrous oil spill. “There is something both exhilarating and appalling about her risk-taking,” observed Upchurch, who enjoyed the contrast that Buchan creates between Jane’s dark past and her present position of power. Upchurch praised Buchan’s expert plotting as well as the “arresting gallery of fellow wayfarers” who populate the novel, including “a cantankerous Trotskyite lecher and a happily bankrupt operator of commercial flights to Antarctica.” Acknowledging that High Latitudes comes close to the conventions of the potboiler, Upchurch argued that Buchan exploits conventional melodramatic elements for his artistic purposes. Though a Publishers Weekly contributor deemed the book “a sort of upmarket fairy tale” and the work of a “showy writer” who strives to create a literate thriller out of “the sort of characters who people sex-and-shopping potboilers,” Upchurch suggested that to read the book as merely a thriller would be to overlook “the subversive humor and sublime surreality of its best moments.” To his mind, these include a scene in which Jane’s ex-husband encounters 41,000 penguins. “The teens on which Mr. Buchan writes are his own,” Upchurch concluded, “and he uses in-your-face artifice to create a brilliant and supple illusion. Even at its most mannered or enigmatic, High Latitudes feels like wizardry.”

Similar praise surrounded The Persian Bride, published in Britain as A Good Place to Die. The novel centers on the adventures of John Pitt, an English teacher in Iran during the mid-1970s who falls in love with the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Shalt’s military advisor. The pair elope and have a daughter together, but are eventually discovered and John is thrown into prison during the Islamic fundamentalist revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the novel stylistically awkward, though often “brilliant and powerful.” Richard Lloyd Parry, in the London Review of Books, acknowledged Buchan as “a demanding and unconventional novelist” whose descriptions are “written with unfaltering authority and conviction.” But the critic added that, though John’s adventures are “individually brilliant, they are cumulatively absurd.” That the hero should live through a firing squad, torture, imprisonment, gun fighting, a tank battle, an amputation, an excursion through a minefield, a shooting, and about of alcoholism all in one book, Parry suggested, is over-saturation. “The novel ends in a blaze of giddy emotion with a family reunion which might be fantasy or might be real,” he concluded. “It is sentimental, impressionistic and moving, but it cannot obliterate the frustrating sense that, after 343 pages, twenty-five years, and thousands of weary miles, the travels of John Pitt have taken him almost nowhere.”

Others, however, expressed more enthusiasm for the book. James Urquhart, in New Statesman & Society, wrote that Buchan “makes his fiction gleam with the luster of effortless conviction.” Urquhart admired The Persian Bride's sense of Iranian society and its “beguiling” love story, and praised Buchan’s skill in threading “passionate loves into the complex weft of political upheaval Land] espionage.” And Entertainment Weekly contributor Megan Harlan found the novel an “utterly transporting” and “dazzling” love story that is all the more enhanced by Buchan’s “elegant prose and scathing wit.”

Buchan has also received significant attention for his nonfiction book, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money. Deemed “an eclectic history of what has been said and thought about money” by David Brooks in Commentary, the book traces attitudes toward money from the classical age to the present and presents a sharply critical view of capitalist systems, especially the United States. Indeed, Buchan observes that the framers of the U.S. Constitution “resolved not to be free but rich, not good but rich, not equal but rich.” And contemporary American society, in his view, is marred by greed and financial corruption on a grand scale.

Reviewers found Frozen Desire's mesh of history, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, financial scandals, and exposition both fascinating and provocative. “James Buchan is a magnificent writer and a man of strong feelings,” wrote John Laughland in the National Review. “His Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money is in many ways a brilliant book, filled with horror at money’s brutal capacity to rend society asunder.” But this very horror, Laughland went on to suggest, “leaves [BuchanJ lunging at imaginary and real monsters alike,” failing to see legitimate purposes for money in a just society. “At bottom,” Laughland concluded, “Buchan is deeply wrong” to condemn money as the root of all evil. A contributor to the Economist also considered Buchan’s thesis “moralizing” and “airy,” and pointed out that the author is too dismissive of economists and the role of money. Nevertheless, the reviewer admired Buchan’s ability to make “dazzling, unexpected connections” and to express outrage poetically and powerfully.

Buchan’s articles have appeared in the Financial Times, for which he reported from the Middle East, Germany, Central Europe, and the United States. His short stories have been collected in Twenty under Thirty-five.

Achievements

• With the publication of debut novel A Parish of Rich Women, James Buchan won critical recognition. Due to his success, James received Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for hist first novels also.

Works

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  • Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World

    (How in the eighteenth century did a notoriously poor, alc...)

    2003
  • High Latitudes: A Romance

    (Jane Haddon is resigned to personal and professional lone...)

    1996
  • Heart's Journey in Winter

    (A novel from the author of a Parish of Rich Women, which ...)

    1995
  • The Persian Bride

    (At once a great love story, a riveting political thriller...)

    2002
  • A Parish of Rich Women

    (Upon his return home from Palestine, Adam Murray feels al...)

    1984
  • Davy Chadwick

    (This literary thriller is set in southern Italy, where an...)

    1987
  • The Golden Plough: A Novel

    (A thriller about the last major crisis of the Cold War fi...)

    1995
  • Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

    (Novelist Buchan, a former correspondent for the Financial...)

    1997
  • The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas

    (Celebrated author James Buchan breathes new life into Ada...)

    2006
  • Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind

    (In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh was a filthy b...)

    2004
  • John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century

    (At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous ...)

    2018
  • Slide 1992
  • A Good Place to Die 2000
  • Gate of Air 2008

Membership

James Buchan was elected as a member of the Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001.

• 

  Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature , United Kingdom

  2001 - present

Connections

James Buchan has married Evelyn Rose Phipps in 1986. They have two daughters and one son: Elizabeth Blanche, Rose Barbara Averil, and Nicholas Adam.

Father:

William Baron Buchan

Mother:

Barbara Howard Buchan

Wife:

Evelyn Rose Phipps

Daughter:

Elizabeth Blanche

Daughter:

Rose Barbara Averil

Son:

Nicholas Adam

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields
  2010