Folio Society Published Works Number 2810
Household, Geoffrey - Rogue Male
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Household, Geoffrey - Rogue Male (Published in by The Folio Society in 2013. Introduced by John Banville. Illustrated by David Rooney. Bound in paper with a design by David Rooney. Set in Utopia. 172 pages. 7 integrated full-page black & white illustrations. Book size: 9" x 6.25". Rogue Male opens, literally, with a cliffhanger. The narrator has just been thrown off the edge of a precipice and is clinging on by the fingertips. He survives the fall and struggles through a muddy stream before climbing a tree, there to hide from the uniformed figures searching below. It transpires that he has just tried to assassinate the leader of an unnamed country with a hunting rifle. There follows a fast-paced cat-and-mouse chase across Europe as the hero struggles to evade the authorities and carry out his mission – 'to do justice where no other hand could reach.' In his introduction, Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville warns against reading Rogue Male on the train, 'for you will surely end up missing your stop'. This is a tense thriller with echoes of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. First published in 1939, the story appears to be a prescient account of an attempt to assassinate Hitler – though the anonymous narrator does not consider himself an assassin but 'a sportsman who couldn't resist the temptation to stalk the impossible.' Born in 1900, Geoffrey Household had a varied career that encompassed working for a Romanian bank, marketing bananas in Spain, and serving with British Intelligence during the Second World War. Rogue Male was his most successful novel, adapted as a film in 1941 by Fritz Lang and more recently for radio and television. To illustrate our edition we have commissioned David Rooney, a leading Irish artist whose portfolio includes the Folio Plutarch's Lives. Rooney employs a scraperboard technique to create bold monochrome images that perfectly convey the rapid economy of the story. In a nod to the cat-and-mouse theme, the artist has integrated his illustrations with the text, giving the effect of movement across the page. Together with Banville's introduction, this is a fine new presentation of a gripping story. )
