Customer Reviews

The Lost World (Modern Library MM)

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This book is vastly entertaining. The characters are enjoyable, the plot is great, and I especially love the illustrations throughout the book. This book is the epitome of adventure and intrigue. Read it.

Edward Malone, reporter for the Daily Gazette, finds himself caught up in the claims of the eccentric Professor G. E. Challenger to have found a South American plateau where dinosaurs still live. Malone volunteers for a fact-finding mission, along with the dubious Professor Summerlee and the fearless big game hunter Lord John Roxton. The band voyages to South America, journeys to the plateau, and finds it filled with plants and animals for many different epochs. Finding themselves marooned on the plateau, the team faces many dangers and adventures.

While somewhat dated, this book is well written and exciting to read. As a matter of fact, part of the book's charm is its pre-Great War feel. If you like adventure stories, Arthur Conan Doyle, or big game hunters, then this book is for you!

This is a fascinating novel, almost more from an anthropological point of view than a literary one. The novel follows in the footsteps of H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in providing a ripping yarn. Fantasy and SF has come a long way since 1912, the date of THE LOST WORLD's publication, but this still manages to be a highly entertaining tale.

The book shows its age. The anthropology is pre-Evans-Pritchard, who managed to dismantle the notion of "primitive" peoples to show the internal and substantial logic driving the thought of so-called primitive peoples. The world view is intensely patriarhical, with the four men investigating the lost plateau viewing everything through an Edwardian filter.

Just a few examples of the white paternalism through which all of the characters view the world. Gladys, the object of the affection of Malone, the book's narrator, states bluntly that she would only marry a man who had gained great fame (it apparently being something that she could not herself consider achieving). The pterodactyls were described as being exceptionally patriarchal, with the males perched upon high, overlooking the females and the young that they cared for. Another small group of dinosaurs were described as no less than a nuclear family, with mother, father, and brood of young. Throughout the story is the stock faithful negro, given no less than the name of Zambo, who apparently has any desires of his own, apart from the desire to serve and please his masters. The attitudes of the four explorers to Zambo is very much that of humans towards a pet dog. When the explorers meet Indians on the plateau, the virtually worship their white delivers, and they have a strong sense of private property (which in most anthropological studies are shown to arise with agricultural societies, not in herding and hunter/gatherer societies). There is also the disdain of other racial groups, especially those who are ethnically mixed; the most villanous character in the book is, not unexpectedly, a "half-breed." In other words, wherever you go, there you are. That is, wherever they go, they find perfect representations of Edwardian British society.

Despite all this, and despite the rather stilted prose in which the book is written, the book is a lot of fun. It is not only the romantic adventure story that is appealing, but the now-quaint portrait of upper class British society in the last days before the First World War. All in all this is not a great novel, but it is for all that a most enjoyable one.