Robert Macfarlane: rereading Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male

One spring evening in 2005, my friend Roger Deakin telephoned to propose an expedition. Through his letterbox the previous day had dropped an envelope containing a handwritten letter, a marked-up section of the 1:25000 OS map for south-west Dorset, and several pages photocopied from Geoffrey Household's cult 1939 thriller, Rogue Male. The letter explained that the map showed the likely location of a deep lane in which Household's hero – pursued across Europe by Nazi assassins – goes to ground, and where the novel reaches its extraordinary climax.

The pages included a description of the lane. It was a "sandstone cutting" or holloway that ran over "the ridge of a half-moon of low, rabbit-cropped hills, the horns of which rested upon the sea". The cutting was "a cart's width across" at its base, it was choked with "dead wood" and jungled by shoulder-high nettles, and its entrances were barred by "sentinel thorns". "Nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it," noted Household.

Roger was 62 at the time, but his nature was that of an adventurous child, and he was excited. For him – as for many postwar English schoolboys – Rogue Male had been a formative book that had buried itself in his imagination at an early age. The idea of exploring the landscape in which it occurred was irresistible to him.

So a few months later we drove down to Dorset, and set off on foot from the village of North Chideock. We had map, novel and letter in hand, our rucksacks were packed with billhooks, billy cans and sleeping bags, the sea was hazing blue to our south and the half-moon of hills was sloping green to our north. We should have guessed it wouldn't be a simple matter to track down our hero's bolt hole. We should have known that this classic book about concealment, escape and evasion would not yield its secrets so easily.

Geoffrey Household was as old as his century. Born in 1900, he graduated from Oxford in 1922 with a first-class English degree, and spent most of the rest of the decade working in Romania, France and Spain as a banker and then a banana salesman. But what he wanted to be was an author. Literary success came late, in the form of a novel commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly and published as The Third Hour in 1938. In December of the same year, Household began work on Rogue Male. He wrote it in a matter of months. It was serialised over the summer of 1939, published in full shortly afterwards, as Europe tilted into war, and then issued in a Services and Forces edition as buck-up reading for British troops in the early months of conflict.

The novel is Household's masterpiece: a bestseller that redefined its genre. Ian Fleming's James Bond series, David Morrell's First Blood (the origin of Rambo) and Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal all bear the signs of its influence. It was filmed, poorly, by Fritz Lang under the title Man Hunt, premiering in New York in June 1941 as part of the interventionist campaign to bring America into the war. It has been adapted for TV and radio several times, and the dark-green cover of its 1950s Penguin edition – reprinted on to T-shirts, tote-bags and coffee mugs – has become a lifestyle accessory and post-ironic man gift. I am still awaiting sight of the camp parody, Rouge Male, that has surely, somewhere, been written.

Household described himself as "a sort of bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad", and the literary genealogy for Rogue Male seems clear enough. Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886) began the "hunted-man" genre. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) updated it for an age of geopolitics and aerial surveillance. Graham Greene's A Gun for Sale (1936) extended its geographies and reversed the logic of pursuit, so the assassin became the quarry. From these writers Household learned the skill of pacing and the propulsive narrative power of the chase.

From Conrad, Household learned how to pattern a novel without slowing its story, as well as techniques of restraint and omission. So much of Rogue Male concerns things – actions, perceptions, memories – that occur out of sight or in darkness. Camouflage and cover are the novel's preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling. Even the narrator remains anonymous, only an "I" – as artful at concealing his identity and character from his readers as from his pursuers. Artful, too (it turns out), at concealing himself from himself.

I first read Rogue Male 20 years or so ago, rapidly and unreflectively, pulled onwards by its plot. It was only later, and on several rereadings, that the complexities of its patterns began to reveal themselves. This is a novel of elaborate design. There are paired concepts – "cover" and "open", "surface" and "depth" – that repeat and weave. There are motifs – notably sunken tracks, tunnels, and skins/skinning – that recur dozens of times in different forms. And there is a sustained analogy between land and mind, whereby the narrator's access to his buried emotions is enabled only by means of a literal digging into the Jurassic bedrock of south-west Dorset.

"It's curious how much cover there is on the chalk downs," Household observes casually at one point, "prehistoric pits and trenches, tree-grown tumps, gorse and the upper edge of coverts, lonely barns and thickets of thorn." His novel, likewise, appears to possess an uncomplicated surface, but is in fact riddled with hidden features. It is far more than just a thriller, and more, too, than a parable of moral conflict, self-reliance and Anglo-Saxon survivalism. It is a novel that requires of its readers a hunter's instinct. To discover its profound strangeness, you need to track marks in its terrain, and to watch for disturbances to the expected.

I must be careful about spoilers. But I betray no vital loyalty if I say that the opening pages are a tumult: fast and disorienting in their incidents. Armed with a "Bond Street rifle" our narrator enters a European country (resembling Germany), and over several days stalks a dictator (resembling Hitler) to his country residence. He gets within sniping distance of his quarry, but at the vital moment is overpowered by a sentry. He is interrogated, tortured, then thrown over a cliff. But he falls into a marsh whose softness saves his life. He takes refuge in a larch tree, and then begins, desperately wounded, to make his way towards the coast. His torturers follow: the hunter is the hunted.

Our narrator recounts his terrible suffering with disconcerting calmness. Understatement is his specialism: an English mode of speech that combines self-protection, delusion and modesty. "I had been knocked about very considerably," he remarks. Indeed: he has had his fingers crushed, his nails pulled out ("Shirt buttons were quite impossible"), and his left eye has been smashed at with a tool, then burnt. His fall has ripped skin from his "rump". "I had parted," as he sanguinely puts it, "with a lot of my living matter."

This fleshly maceration is the symbolic preparation for the conversion he subsequently undergoes. It's tempting to invoke the title and suggest that he changes into a hunted animal, wounded and dangerous. But he also becomes a hybrid version of the landscape itself. The mud of the marsh coats him as a second skin. When he descends from his tree, he picks up fallen branches as crutches, and so becomes larch-limbed.

His flight will lead him eventually to Dorset, "a remote county", as he describes it. It is into Dorset's "green depths" that the novel descends for its earthly second half. In the shadows of the holloway, the narrator digs a cave out of the sandstone. This is his fox's "earth", his "safe pit of blackness", and it is out of this womb-tomb that he will eventually be reborn.

The track Roger and I followed into the hills that July day was clearly the beginning of an old sunken lane, harrowed 10ft into the earth. Had we discovered the holloway already, so easily? The lane deepened and thickened with shoulder-high nettles. Blackthorn and hawthorn grew across it, impeding our progress. There were coiled strongholds of bramble. We pushed onwards. Near the summit of the western horn of hills, the lane became so overgrown that we had to scramble up into the bright air of the flower meadow by its side. There we stopped to consult the novel, trying to map Household's account on to the landscape. It took time to understand what we should have guessed: that he had laid a false trail.

Some details corresponded perfectly between page and place. The half-moon of hills was unmistakably the ridge that curled in a crescent around North Chideock. And our holloway was, like Household's, bordered by "an acre of pasture", its hedges were "grown together across the top", and it was waymarked by "dead oaks", each "a paradise of wood-pigeons". In other respects, though, book would not match world. Household's lane ran northwards and "downhill into the Marshwood Vale"; ours ran up the south slope of the ridge.

Further discrepancies emerged. Household had smartly disguised his book's secret, even as he appeared to surrender it. We had been thrown off the scent – and that was itself a kind of teaching. He'd even warned us, we realised: "It is not marked on the map."

Household's own war was not incomparable to that of his hero. Eighteen months after the publication of Rogue Male, he was appointed to Field Security, the department charged with "the defence of the army against the enemy agent," as he put it. He led a unit in Greece as the country fell in spring 1941, impersonated a German spy in the Levant, and negotiated with the Vichy government. His postwar life, by contrast, was family minded, English and writerly. Though his other novels would never enjoy such acclaim, he knew that in Rogue Male he had written a straight-up, stone-cold classic.

After Household's death in 1988, his son decided to scatter his ashes in the Rogue Male holloway. But when he went looking for the lane, he found it impossible to establish its exact location. So he chose a spot near the top of a hill, overlooking the Marshwood Vale. What was it Household's hero had cried? "By God, I want to die in the open!"

• This is an edited version of Robert Macfarlane's introduction to the Orion reissue of Rogue Male, published this month. Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Daniel Richards will be published by Faber in May.