Customer Reviews

Lost Horizon

5 star:		(75)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The story of a group of people who survive an airplane crash in Tibet and find shelter at a mysterious monastery is extremely well known, but unlike most novels, Lost Horizon is less about its characters and their siutation--interesting though those elements may be--than it is about their thoughts and ideas. Written as it was on eve of World War II, these thoughts and ideas center upon developing a way of life that preserves, rather than destroys, that which is finest in both humanity and the world in general.

The novel is elegantly and simply written and possesses tremendous atmosphere. Although enjoyable as a purely "fun" read, it is also thought provoking, and the thoughts it provokes linger long after the book is laid aside. I can not imagine any one not being moved by the book, both emotionally and intellectually, regardless of their background or interests. If such a person exists, I do not think I would care to meet them.

Although James Hilton wrote a number of worthy novels, Lost Horizon is the novel for which he is best remembered, a great popular success when first published and a genuine masterpiece of 20th Century literature.

What struck me most about this book is how non-dated it was for having been written in 1933. First of all, the story starts in Afghanistan during an airlift to evacuate foreign nationals during an anti-western revolution. Next, the main characters are essentially skyjacked to an unknown destination against their will for unknown purposes. As for the characters, they seem very familiar and contemporary also: a world-weary and burned-out government bureaucrat, a gung-ho and impatient young military officer, a business man that has stolen over 100 million dollars from investors through stock fraud, and a fundamentalist Christian missionary that believes in one "true" religion and holds all others in contempt. There is also the conviction among several of these characters that globally "the whole game's going to pieces."

However, there is also something hauntingly timeless about this story. It occurs to me that the hidden civilization of Shangri-La is based on the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, where immortal masters live that look after the evolution and welfare of mankind. The great mountain of Karacul that looms over the valley also seems symbolic of Mt. Meru- the axis of the cosmos- and where the gods are reputed to dwell. It is certainly no coincidence that most of the people that find Shangri-La are the world weary- and the journey comes close to killing them. That would seem to be a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. For this is what the lucky and the worthy find in Shangri-La, all the time in the world, or rather out of the world, for contemplation, preservation of all the worthy attainments of the human race, and the pursuit of wisdom. Sounds pretty close to heaven to me....

An interesting side note is the fact that _Lost Horizon_ was the first paperback title ever published by Pocket Books in 1939. This particular edition bears the same classic cover art as the original.

When I was a teenager, I went to see the movie Lost Horizon seven times. During my 74 years, I read the book many times. After I retired, I made four trips to that part of the world, and spent many months each time searching for that wonderful Shangri-La dream. If you have never read Hilton's classic, and you are a person with an optimistic spiritual outlook, then The Lost Horizon is a must for you. If you read it and want to believe it, then you should visit Burma and the temples of the ancient city of Pagon, and then spend time in the three kingdoms of the Himalayas: Nepal, Ladakh and Bhutan, in that order. You will be moved to tell others, or write about your spiritual experience. I was so moved. May your days be filled with the magic of life. Sirrom

When I read this book, I was transformed! I could actually breath the fresh, cold, Himalayan air that Conway and his entourage and the people of Shangri-La breathed. The language the novel is written in is beautiful and picturesque.

When Conway and his companions flee the warring land they come from, (in a way) they find themselves hijacked, whisked away to paradise: Shangri-La, a place where the air is clean and the living is natural and spiritual and, "moderate." Where people live naturally long lives, hundreds of years, in peace, in love, at one with nature. Hilton's book wisely illustrates that some can never be happy in paradise, they must go on and on searching, but too incredulous to ever actually find anything. In Shangri-La the people, the good, natural people await the destruction of the "outside world," which will surely occur at it's own hand sooner or later as long as people rule themselves with war, lack of moderation, hatred, and a lack of regard for the spiritual nature of humanity. Then the people of Shangri-La will spread the paradise to the far reaches of earth. No doubt, James Hilton has read not only the Bible, but many other spiritual books, because I find myself thinking of Buddism, Judaism, Christianity (as opposed to Christendom), Hinduism, and other Eastern religions and forms of spirituality and well as Western religion and forms of spirituality. What an inspiring view.

The "outside" world will eventually destroy itself if humanity continues on the road of "unintelligent leadership," war, hatred, discrimination, excess, selfishness, lack of moderation, lack of respect and care for nature, lack of conservation, lack of respect for self, and lack of respect and care for other human beings and all our fellow animals. The question is: Will there be a "Shangri-La" there to save us? Do we really want to take that chance?

Lost Horizon is the perfect book for a slow day. Just sit outside, with a glass of tea and a fuzzy kitten in your lap. The novel is a slow moving, delightful story, with fully human characters set in a setting of fantasy. It's not a big book but it feels longer - because of the slow pace and detailed, colorful, descriptions.
Four people are kidnapped and taken to the valley of the Blue Moon, where they are offered, in a way, not just a better life but a chance to help in a larger than life project to help the future of mankind (if mankind has a future).
A must for ANY library.

In purchasing books for my sons' from their summer reading lists, I purchased this, for myself, from the high school recommended reading list. My reading is mostly non fiction but occasionally I like to catch up on a classic I should have read years ago. This is such a book. The story is about four individuals' unplanned trip to the mysterious Shangri-La, located in an isolated location in Tibet. Shangri-La is a place where people live stress free and in moderation. This novel, written in 1933, is highly readible and moves quickly. This wistful tale poses many questions such as "is it better to live stress free with time on our hands or to live in the modern world with it's material opportunities?" Another question is "do we believe things based on trust and hope or solely based upon the credible evidence?" A third question might be, "is moderation in a happy, stress free situation better than a world where we feel great passions but also endure periods of unhappiness?" This wonderful tale is a great antidote to the stress of the modern world.

When we were kids, our grandparents used to take us to Radio City Music Hall for the movie and Christmas Pageant every year. The year I was 12, the movie was a remake of Lost Horizon--my most graphic memory from that night is my horror when the woman suddenly aged after leaving Shangri-La. As it turns out, that version of the movie is pretty dreadful, while Frank Capra's 1937 original is widely considered to be a classic. At any rate, I liked the film enough to read the book and also Hilton's other classic, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and I loved them both. Recently, our library got a restored edition of the Capra film and we enjoyed it thoroughly. So I went back & reread the books.

I assume most folks know at least the rough outlines of the stories. In Lost Horizon, Hugh Conway, a British diplomat, is skyjacked and he & his traveling companions end up in the Himalayas. Eventually they are lead to the hidden Valley of the Blue Moon and the city of Shangri-La, where folks do not age and the powers that be are collecting all of the world's knowledge and greatest artworks, so that it will be safe from the turbulent political storms of the outside world. Eventually, the high lama reveals to the diplomat that he has been chosen to take over leadership of Shangri-La and after an abortive attempt to leave (at the insistence of one of his fellow travelers), Conway returns to assume his destined place in Shangri-La.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips, on the other hand, is about an eccentric but lovable British schoolmaster, Arthur Chipping (Mr. Chips). Seemingly destined to be a bachelor for life, he meets and marries a young woman who loosens him up quite a bit, before dying in childbirth. Chips is left alone, except that is for the succeeding generations of boys who pass through Brookfield School. After decades at the school, he retires, telling the assembled alumni, "I have thousands of faces in my mind. ... I remember you as you are. That's the point. In my mind you never grow old at all", only to be called back during WWI, at which point he becomes acting headmaster. One of his duties is to read the list of the school's war dead; for everyone else they are just names, but for Chips, each name has a face attached. After the War he reretires, after 42 years teaching Roman History and Latin at Brookfield.

On the surface, these two stories couldn't be more different, but reading them now I realize how similar they actually are. Shangri-La is an oasis of civilzation in a world that was after all between two World Wars. It is a place where the great achievements of our culture will be preserved, even if war consumes the rest of the World, which for much of this Century seemed like a possibility. Mr. Chips, meanwhile, is the living embodiment of institutional memory. The classes of boys, the teachers and headmasters, even the subjects and teaching methods, come and go, but Chips has remained throughout. He "still had those ideas of dignity and generosity that a frantic world was forgetting." He embodies the pre-War world and its values. In his book Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, Greg Dening says that: "Institutions require memory. A memory creates precedent and order." In the very midst of an epoch that was witnessing an unfettered attack on all of the West's institutions and values, Hilton created Shangri-La and Mr. Chips; both represent the conservative ideal--providing a bridge of memory to all that is beautiful and good and decent in our past, lest, in our zeal to create a perfect world, we forget the qualities and accomplishments which bequeathed us the pretty good world in which we live.

These books are unabashedly sentimental and I'm sure some would even find them mawkish. But I love them and I appreciate the subtley non-political way in which they make the most important of political points: even as we move forward we must always preserve those things and ideas of value in our past.

Mr. Chips GRADE: A+

Lost Horizon GRADE: A

The Lost Horizon, by James Hilton, is possibly the best book that I have read in the past year. Published in 1933, it remains relevent and provocative to this day.

The Lost Horizon, much like Catch-22, is part of an elite group of books whose name or central characters have become a permanent part of the English vocabulary. In this book, this was done with Shangri-La, the land high in the mountains of Tibet where a group of worldly men and women stumble upon a valley of mystery and matchless beauty. A quick search on dictionary.com reveals that it means
1. An imaginary remote paradise on earth; utopia.
2. A distant and secluded hideaway, usually of great beauty and peacefulness.
While the term Shangri-La is famous, the book is not nearly as wide-known or wide-read in recent years. Countless books by countless authors depicting utopia have been published, but only a couple has grabbed the attention of and lingered in the imagination of the public long after its initial publish. So what is special about Shangri-La, the valley of the Blue Moon? Read to find out.

I could not put this book down. I had an mid-term exam the next day, but I stayed up to read the book past midnight. The basic plot of the book can be found by a simple glimpse of the editorial write-up on this site. The actions are fast-paced, the characters intriguing in their peculiarities. Yet this book has a philosophical edge that distinguishes it from a mere thriller. The true center of the book is ideas and thoughts rather than actions. Much thinking is done by the characters, trapped in the monastery of Shangri-La by the mountains and the snow. When Mallinson, the hot-blooded young captain who is desperate to get out of Shangri-La and return to Britain, snaps 'Well, if you happen to like prison,' to Barnard who was observing the beauty of the landscape, Barnard remarks that 'My goodness, if you think of all the folks in the world who'd give all they've got to be out of the racket and in a place like this, only they can't get out! Are we in the prison or are they?'

In Shangri-La, the appreciation of beauty and the pursuit of wisdom is valued above all else. Rejecting the virtues of hard work and ambition, they adopted a philosophy of moderation in all things, 'avoiding excess of all kinds - even excess of virtue itself.' The author, Hilton, was not merely creating entertainment (although this he does) in this book. He was concerned about the future of England and all mannkind. Written after the aftermass of the destruction of the WW1, and the whole of western world being driven to a state of pessimism and despair by the worldwide economic condition, Hilton was concerned with another dark cloud that gathered on the horizon, namely the first signs of WW2. The lamesery of Shangri-La was imagined to be a living, breathing time capsule designed to salvage a gentle, civilized way of life from the destruction Hilton sensed had been unleashed by the Great War. Above all Hilton hated wars, which had the potential to 'destroy the fragile beauty and learning, accumulated over centuries of humanity, in the matter of a second.' With the invention of the atomic bomb after his time, this could now literaly come true. Out of the barbarism of the war rose Shangri-La, even if only in the imagination. In an age where the Western and the non-Western world alike engage in meaningless wars and acts of terror, this book is more relevant than ever in this century than ever before.

Buy this book and read this book. The 7 bucks or so that you pay for it is more than worth the price of admission into Shangri-La.

In the depths of the worldwide economic depression as the war drumbeats began in Germany, James Hilton wrote a quirky, imaginative book about the potential to escape the harsh reality. In so doing, he caused each reader since then to wonder what the right balance of tranquility and challenge really is. Like the best books about possible utopias, Lost Horizon leaves much to the reader's imagination. Undoubtedly, you will conjure up solutions to the riddles left open by the author that will be especially pleasing to you.

Although the book is clearly set in the 30's with a British perspective, many of the themes struck me as universal. As the book opens, there's an intriguing prologue that sets just the right tone for the story. You are to read a manuscript about the experiences of one Hugh "Glory" Conway, H.M. consul. The manuscript opens with airplane hijacking that seemed all too realistic. Quickly, the hijacking turns into a surprising adventure as the passengers unexpectedly arrive in a little known part of Tibet and are escorted to Shangri-La, a lamasery sitting atop a hidden valley of peace and tranquility. While there, they await an opportunity to arrange passage with the bearers who are bringing a shipment that is expected in 60 days. Conway, however, learns the secrets of Shangri-La and finds himself faced with an extraordinary set of choices.

To me, Shangri-La is a metaphor for the mental tranquility that many spiritual practices can bring. For anyone who has enjoyed these practices, you will know that it can be tempting to withdraw totally into them. To do so can be delicious, especially for the frazzled soul. At the same time, we are made of flesh, blood and boil with emotions that seek their venting through action. How can the two instincts be reconciled? You are left to come to your own conclusions, and that's one of the great beauties of this fine book.

The book has several weaknesses that will bother most readers. Except for Conway, the character development is minimal. The book is too conveniently filled with people in Tibet who speak perfect English. Morality is held a little bit too much in suspense for the book to be as spiritual as it had the potential to be. There's a heavy overlay of British Empire perspective that will seem remote to current readers as well.

The ideal reader for this book is someone who enjoyed Butler's Erewhon or H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.

I was left thinking that we each need our own personal Shangri-La today more than ever. May you find a way to carry it with you!

Since Heinrich Harrer's "Seven Years in Tibet" (based on author's true story) and "Return to Tibet", I had caught myself in a reading spree on everything related to Tibet, whether fiction or non-fiction. Tehn I came across James Hilton's "Lost Horizon". I had to admit that the book caught my attention with an engaging plot that four people brought against their will to mysterious Shangri-La, set in the hidden mountains of the Blue Moon, a place where nobody ages. The mysterious and suspending plot is what makes this Hawthornden Prize-winning novel catchy and was made into motion pictures several times.

Despite the splendidly written text, the storyline itself was not developed very extensively. Most of the text describes the story of Hugh Conway, who was trapped by the fascination of eternal life. The sudden and abrupt ending of the novel was somehow disappointing to me.