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
