The Island of Sheep is a thriller novel by John Buchan. It is the fifth and final novel to star Richard Hannay, who was introduced in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Set roughly fourteen years after The Three Hostages. Hannay and his son Peter John Hannay have to protect the family of an old friend, Marius Haraldsen, from fortune-hunters.
The Island of Sheep contains examples of:
- Action Dad:
- Richard Hannay — he's accompanied by his son, Peter John.
- Valdemar Haraldsen is also this as his daughter Anna is involved. Haraldsen actually becomes The Berserker when he single-handedly captures the main villain and throws him off a cliff.
- The Berserker: In the climactic battle, the usually-mild-mannered Haraldsen goes full-on berserker — not only single-handedly capturing the Big Bad but also throwing him off a cliff. Afterward he immediately faints, and has no memory of the incident when he wakes.
- Boarding School: Anna Haraldsen's father has placed her in a boarding school under an assumed name to keep her from the attention of the villains who are after him. When Lombard goes to retrieve her, one step ahead of the villains, the school is like something out of an Angela Brazil book, and so is she. She becomes less like a school-story character the more time she spends away from the school.
- Character Tics: Near the climax, Hannay begins to penetrate the facade of the novel's master of disguise when he recognises the way he's standing.
- Chekhov's Gun: Peter John has taken up falconry and spends most of the novel toting around his falcon Morag because her training is at a stage where they can't be separated for long periods. Thus when he stumbles on the villains' base near the end of the novel, he is able to send Morag to his father with a warning message.
- Contrived Coincidence: The series is known for its many improbable coincidences; Buchan declares in the foreword to The Thirty-Nine Steps that he regards them as a characteristic and necessary attribute of the genre. At the start of The Island of Sheep, Hannay recalls an old acquaintance, Lombard (who he hasn't seen for years), after hearing his name mentioned in a speech. Guess who's in the same compartment as Hannay on the train home?
- Cut Phone Lines: The villains cut the phone line to Haraldsen's house before their attack, to prevent him calling for help.
- Dead Guy Junior: Peter John Hannay is named in honour of his father's old friend Peter Pienaar, who died heroically in Mr. Standfast before his namesake was born.
- Death by Childbirth: Haraldsen's beloved wife died giving birth to their daughter Anna. Haraldsen treasures Anna all the more because they only have each other.
- Dragon Ascendant: The Big Bad of The Island of Sheep is the most senior surviving henchman from a previous Buchan novel, The Courts of the Morning (though not technically the Dragon, because the Dragon of that novel didn't survive to the end).
- Fictional Counterpart: The Norland Islands, where the latter part of the novel takes place, are based on the Faroe Islands.
- Funetik Aksent: Buchan depicts Scottish accents phonetically. Lampshaded and averted with Jack Godstow's Cotswold accent; Hannay-the-narrator says he's not going to attempt to represent Jack's accent, and paraphrases everything he says instead of reporting it as direct speech.
- Happily Married: Richard and Mary.
- I Gave My Word: Hannay gets involved in the action because, long ago, he swore an oath to Marius Haraldsen that he would protect his son. Lombard, who swore the same oath, is an even better example of the trope — unlike the Retired Badass Hannay he has settled into a comfortable life and has no Gentleman Adventurer experience to draw on, but he is mortally offended when Hannay suggests that nobody would blame him for sitting it out.
- Master of Disguise: Sandy Arbuthnot. There's a scene where Hannay meets him in disguise without having the slightest clue that it's him, even though they're friends and have lived in close quarters for an extended period.
- "Near and Dear" Baby Naming: Peter John Hannay is named in honour of his father's friends Peter Pienaar and John Blenkiron.
- Once per Episode: Sandy Arbuthnot goes off on his own to find out what he can about the villains, disappears without leaving any message, and then an apparent antagonist turns out to be Sandy in a disguise he's adopted to infiltrate the villain's organisation. This has happened in every novel Sandy has appeared in, and on this occasion Hannay actually anticipates the revelation and arranges a private meeting with the villain he suspects of being Sandy in disguise to give him a chance to reveal himself.
- The Promise: Near the beginning, Hannay recounts how, back in his African days, he and a friend helped the explorer Marius Haraldsen fight off treasure-hunters, and promised to help him and his family if they came back for another round. The rest of the plot of the novel is them living up to the promise.
- Retired Badass: Richard Hannay is called out of his comfortable semi-retirement to fulfill an old promise.
- Spell My Name with a Blank: The outward respectability of the criminals is underlined by mentioning that their leader has interacted socially with an important person whose name is represented as a blank.
- Stiff Upper Lip: Richard Hannay and friends.
- Worthless Treasure Twist: The MacGuffin is an engraved tablet left by a dead explorer who was seeking a fabled treasure; one side bears a message with the date of his death and a statement that he had "happily found his treasure", while the other is a long passage in an obscure Asian script presumed to describe the location of this treasure. At the end of the novel, after the treasure hunters have been defeated, Sandy reveals that he's found somebody to translate the second side of the tablet, and it's a Muslim spiritual text.
