NB: This essay is about the original, not Michael Crichton's 1994 Jurassic Park sequel, for which he somehow was able to use the same title in some monumental generic cash-in. Presumably a lot of money changed hands.
Reviewing a book that's 111 years old seems like redundancy at best, but there are always new things to be said, and from my perspective it's more than interesting to read other works by the same hand that created Sherlock Holmes.
I read a copy that has been in the house for a very long time, the Pan paper back of 1977. It's in surprisingly good shape, only the spine is faded somewhat. The cover design is reproduced above. The first thing that struck me was that Conan Doyle's style is as distinctive as a fingerprint, not simply in the usage of terms and forms which are no longer found in the language, but his very way of putting words together. It's a dynamic style, to be sure, forward-moving, and the writer strikes an excellent balance between suspense and the implied knowledge of what's to come.
The Lost World was published in 1912, the same year as A Princess of Mars, and for the reader of embryonic science fiction it must have been an exciting age, with names like Doyle, Wells and Burroughs actively producing, and Verne as the Old Master of the genre. This is of course the first outing for Doyle's other larger-than-life character (created some 25 years after Sherlock Holmes), the irascible Professor George Edward Challenger, that polymath of the Herculean physique and the pompous, arrogant, overbearing and didactic nature.
Certainly this aspect of Challenger's character I felt may have been ever so slightly overstated in the first third of the book, such that one felt him rather a caricature, yet from most of the description one also cannot help seeing the mighty Brian Blessed in the role: the booming voice, the stature, the beard of Assyrian proportions—he was born for the role, yet was never cast in any production. (As close as he came was Professor “Atlantis” Atticus in Lost Secrets of Atlantis, first of the two MacGyver TV movies from the early 90s. The character was, in most ways, Challenger without the aggravation.)
Conan Doyle was clearly well-read on the scientific views of his time, including the vitriol and competition between dignified specialists, and public reaction to same. The 19th century was the age of public debate of scientific discourse, epitomised by the epic battles waged by Huxley on behalf of Darwin (see, for instance, Stephen Jay Gould's essay Knight Takes Bishop? from Natural History magazine, which can be found in his 1991 collection Bully for Brontosaurus), and Doyle gives us two such confrontations. They make for a wonderful arena in which big egos can clash, with much elegant oration in the process.
The concept, that isolated populations can exist without pressures which would change or destroy them, is entirely valid. Here, Doyle placed his survivors of the distant past into a closed ecosystem atop a towering plateau, quite inaccessible before the age of flight. It is based on the real-world Mount Roraima, in Venezuela, though magnified many times in size and placed in Brazil. The real mountain does indeed feature unique forms of life on its summit, though no dinosaurs, sadly.
The next thing that strikes the modern reader is the unfortunate schism between the frames of reference of then and now. The text is both racist and sexist by modern standards, with its frequent references to blacks and Amazonian Indians in derogatory or patronising terminology, and sometimes explicit reference to the Europoid male as the pinnacle of evolution, which is both racist and sexist on one package. There is only one female character, who appears as a motivating device in the first chapter and as an irony in the last, her behaviour a general dismissal of females in general, one might feel. Thus this dimension to the tale is something which must be placed firmly in its historical context, and left there.
This is likely also the fundamental reason that the book has never been filmed as it was written. Productions have always hit the high points, the gist of the story, but no production has ever been without female characters, whether a female member of the explorers' company, or the fur-clad cave-girl encountered on the plateau (which, as I recall, was a device of both the Irwin Allen 1960 movie, and the Canadian TV series from about twenty years ago). No such character exists in the book, indeed there are no “cave men” as such, but a tribe of Amazonian Indians who migrated onto the plateau by a secret path and made a home there, eternally at war with the “ape-men” who form the principle enemies of the book, other than nature itself.
And once more, we find an element that could not be introduced to an adaptation—the war between the humans and their savage, cruel, pre-human cousins, in which the Europeans join to exterminate the ape-men as a force and consign the survivors to slavery—as if that were the natural and correct order of things. Modern sensibilities choke first of all at the thought of largely killing-off a unique species, and then at the creation of a subjugated menial class. But in 1912 such things were viewed differently, and one can only remember this as an academic reality. New Sherlock Holmes fiction tends to be sanitised in such respects, so we can more comfortably view Victorian times trough modern eyes.
The Lost World is a classic example of what is today referred to as epistolary fiction. The lead character, Edward Malone, is a journalist, sent along on the expedition to report every foot of the way, and the text, told in Doyle's usual first person style, constitutes his account. Most of the chapters are framed as the letters Malone sends back to his editor in London, describing their adventures. This is a clever way to tell a novel and works well.
Doyle's descriptive skills don't often get a workout in his Sherlock Holmes stories on account of the need for brevity in the short format, indeed I can bring to mind only one stand-out example, from the only proper novel in the cycle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, being the pages describing the journey to Baskerville Hall. In The Lost World he has the chance to wax lyrical in his descriptions of the Amazonian jungles and waterways, and finally of the plateau itself, which constitutes delicious world-building. A writer inevitably hears some faceless first-reader's carping complaint that “all this exposition is unnecessary, this book could be a whole chapter shorter,” as if conciseness were some goal in itself. I would rather think that beauty of language and immersion in topic were equally worthy objectives, especially when one has room to move in long-form composition.
The Lost World has been filmed on at least six occasions. The 1925 silent production was the showcase for the first real outing of stop-motion special effects by the great Willis O'Brien, mastermind behind the FX of King Kong several years later. It wowed audiences so profoundly that the film was lengthened by a few reels of soap for some reason, yet audiences had no problem sitting through that lot to get the FX sequences. The test reel of the dinosaur material was presented by Conan Doyle at a meeting of professional magicians, at which he invited them to figure out that particular magic!
The next time it was filmed, Irwin Allen did the honours, early in his career, before his TV science fiction opus of the 60s, or his disaster movies of the 70s. He gave us a highly derivative version of the story, moved up to contemporary times, lizards with rubber appendages, filmed in slow motion to appear huge, cavegirls, and, if memory serves, even a volcanic sequence at the end. Claude Rains played Challenger at the head of an all-star cast. The great Michael Rennie, of The Day the Earth Stood Still, played Lord John Roxton, the big game hunter and all-round adventurer of the piece.
1992, just before the coming of Jurassic Park and its revolutionary digital dinosaurs, saw a film production, with John Rhys-Davies as Challenger. Another film version with Patrick Bergin as Challenger appeared in 1998. I can say I know nothing at all of these productions!
The BBC made a TV production in 2001 with closer adherence to the book in many ways, including the pteradactyl brought back to London and presented to the Zoological Society at the end. They used their brilliant CGI shop to generate the dinosaurs, springing off their ground-breaking series Walking With Dinosaurs, which launched so many other productions.
The most recent production (to my knowledge) is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, a three-season (1999-2002) TV version from Canada, which lodged the explorers permanently on the plateau, and introduced tribes with which they could interact, and of course female characters. Their digital dinosaurs were notably poor, though about ten episodes in they could afford a better T. rex model than the rubbery one they began with.
The story remains eternally fascinating, and one can only imagine the impact it had on the post-Edwardian world. To present living dinosaurs was a thoroughly new and catchy idea, and to do so through the lens of contemporary science, rather than some fantasy scenario, was most compelling, as witnessed by its notable and ongoing success in print. A century later the book can be enjoyed at many levels—as grand adventure in the steps of Ryder Haggard and Talbot Mundy, certainly, definitely as a window onto its times, and lastly as its own self: the pioneering vision of a brilliant writer who combined the real with the not-real in a way that made it seem possible. And that could be said to be the real goal of all speculative fiction.
Mike Adamson
