The Power-House: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Power-House, credited to John Buchan, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Power-House by John Buchan. Read in English by Expatriate The Power-House is a novel by John Buchan, a thriller set in London, England. It was written in 1913, when it was serialised in Blackwood's Magazine, and it was published in book form in 1916. The narrator is the barrister and Tory MP Edward Leithen, who features in a number of Buchan's novels. The urban setting contrasts with that of its sequel, John Macnab, which is set in the Scottish Highlands. The Power-House of the title is an international anarchist organization led by a rich Englishman named Andrew Lumley. Its plan to destroy Western civilisation is thwarted by Leithen with the assistance of a burly Labour MP. "The dominant theme of Buchan's fiction is the fragility of civilisation," it has been said in the context of a discussion of The Power-House.[1] What the critic Christopher Harvie calls "perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan"[2] occurs during the first meeting between Leithen and Lumley, when the latter tells the former, "You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass" (Chapter 3). Harvie cites a comparable passage from the second volume of The Golden Bough, where Frazer speaks of "a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society," which, "unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture," is "a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any time be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering beneath." - Summary by Wikipedia

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Power-House
• Author credits: John Buchan
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 9
• Listed recording duration: 3:07:31

Catalogue topics

• revolution
• anarchism

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter 01 — 18:55
2. 02 - Chapter 02 — 20:01
3. 03 - Chapter 03 — 32:32
4. 04 - Chapter 04 — 25:17
5. 05 - Chapter 05 — 20:04
6. 06 - Chapter 06 — 23:29
7. 07 - Chapter 07 — 23:38
8. 08 - Chapter 08 — 17:12
9. 09 - Chapter 09 — 6:23

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.