King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
First published by Cassell & Company, 1885
Category: Classic

I didn’t put it together that I’d picked two books with heroes from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the movie, of course) until I was about halfway through King Solomon’s Mines and reflecting how accurately Alan Moore had depicted Allan Quatermain. Moore is responsible for me picturing Quatermain as Sean Connery despite the fact that he looks nothing like the man; Moore’s said he had Connery in mind for the character long before the movie was cast. For those of you more familiar with the 1985 version starring Richard Chamberlain, that image is even farther from the truth. Never mind Patrick Swayze in the 2004 production. The legendary hunter and adventurer Allan Quatermain is self-described as little, dark, and slender, and either “timid” or “a coward” depending on how positive he’s feeling about himself. It’s the wealthy Sir Henry Curtis who’s the attractive, muscular, courageous warrior-hero. Quite a reversal, considering that Quatermain is the narrator and the main character. King Solomon’s Mines is the earliest African adventure novel and the progenitor of the Lost World subgenre, and still extremely entertaining despite (or, depending on the reader, because of) its sometimes archaic and Anglocentric attitudes.

The novel begins with Allan Quatermain explaining how he came to set down the details of this strange adventure (which somewhat kills the tension of later events, since you know he has to survive). He’s approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to help them make an expedition into the most hostile regions of Africa to try to find Curtis’s estranged brother. This brother was last heard of on his way to discover the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon, which coincidentally Quatermain has a sort of map to. In outfitting the expedition, Quatermain hires an unusual ‘Zulu’ named Umbopo who shows a remarkable lack of respect for his bosses’ white skins, and who is in general much less servile and much more a ‘gentleman’ than the other natives. After traveling for months, losing a number of red-shirted native bearers and nearly dying themselves, the four men find their way to a magnificent land ruled by a cruel usurper named Twala and his hideously ancient bag-of-bones witch doctress advisor Gagool. They make friends with Twala’s half-uncle Infaloos, who tells them how Twala had his brother, the true king, murdered, and drove his brother’s wife and infant son out into the desert. Surprise, surprise, guess who turns out to be the lost son and heir? A short, bloody war doesn’t distract from the main mission, and the trio of adventurers is finally successful in finding both the diamond mines and the lost brother (though by the time I got to the end, I’d almost forgotten about him—that’s how action-packed the book is).

The introduction to my copy says that Haggard wrote this novel on a bet with his brother, who believed he couldn’t write a book as popular and successful as Treasure Island, the big adventure novel of his day. Haggard wrote it in six weeks and then almost didn’t find a publisher, but when it finally sold, it took off like no one expected. The publisher actually had trouble keeping it in print. Haggard’s writing is in stark contrast to his contemporaries, whether literary (Thomas Hardy) or popular (R.L. Stevenson), with a first-person narrator, a lack of flowery language, and some truly bloody scenes. It’s obvious that Haggard knew Africa well and loved the continent, and that Quatermain’s semi-modern attitudes toward the natives reflect his own. Naturally, there’s the sort of reflexive white man’s superiority at times, particularly in portraying the relationship between Quatermain’s companion Captain Good and the beautiful African girl Foulata as impossible because of their skin colors. On the other hand, Quatermain refuses to use the word ‘nigger’ to describe the natives, has tremendous respect for their companion Umbopo and the other warriors of the lost tribe, and even admits his inferiority to these tall, powerful warriors when it comes to battle. I got the sense that Quatermain was about as open-minded as a white man could be in those days, particularly in literature.

The one thing that really threw me was how enthusiastic all three men were about massacring a bunch of elephants for their tusks. I get the thrill of hunting a dangerous animal, I get that the idea of conservation was mostly unheard of back then, but I was still repulsed when I realized that Quatermain’s suggestion that they hunt elephants meant shooting as many of the bulls as they could find, even pursuing the herd after they’d killed the first two. This is definitely not an attitude that’s survived into the modern day.

It really is a thrilling and often bloody adventure. There’s an early scene where one of the servants throws himself in front of a wounded bull elephant to save his master’s life and gets torn in half, very graphically. As with other classics, King Solomon’s Mines may not be as overly gory as contemporary novels, but it’s fun to imagine how grossed-out readers of the late Victorian era would have been by it. I won’t rush out to get any more of Haggard’s novels, but I certainly enjoyed this one.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Macmillan, 1933
Category: Modern Classics

My copy of Lost Horizon very amusingly has the words “First Paperback Ever Published!” below the title on the front cover. At first I thought it was just absurd–how could that possibly be true?–and then I decided to look into it. Turns out it’s almost true–the Pocket Books paperback 1939 edition of Lost Horizon was the first of many “pocket books” produced in the US, but the actual first was a proof-of-concept edition of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, created by Pocket Books in 1938 to prove such a thing could make money, but not as widely circulated. This has been Melissa’s Useless Book Trivia for today.

Lost Horizon may be one of those books that has sunk so deeply into the mass consciousness of the Western world that many who have heard of Shangri-La don’t even know where it came from. It’s certainly one of those books that to a modern reader has lost much of the oomph it must have had when it was originally published, the way callow teens read The Lord of the Rings for the first time and think Tolkien ripped off Dungeons & Dragons. As a novel, it’s fairly slight; most of the story is just a lead-in to the shocking revelation of the truth about Shangri-La, and the denouement comes quickly on its heels. Hilton’s character studies interested me more than the story. Conway, the main character, is very open-minded for his day and age, but the three other unwilling recruits to Shangri-La are typical of the mid-1930s while not being straw men for Hilton to tilt at. I get the feeling that Hilton believed Conway would be a hard sell to his audience, because he keeps coming back to the man’s emotional landscape as if he wasn’t sure he’d really described it accurately. One passage caught my attention enough that I decided to reproduce it here in full, rather than paraphrasing:

It was a pity, of course, but Conway had grown used to people liking him only because they misunderstood him. He was not genuinely one of those resolute, strong-jawed, hammer-and-tongs empire builders; the semblance he had given was merely a little one-act play, repeated from time to time by arrangement with fate and the Foreign Office (p.82)

To Hilton, Conway is an anomaly, but how apt a description is that of many people? Haven’t you been drawn to someone for what you think they represent, only to find the reality is a disappointment? Conway is the epitome of the Shangri-La philosophy of moderation–he never gets excited or upset about anything, springs to action not because he’s afraid but because it’s necessary, finds a passionless love in the image of the beautiful Lo-Tsen but has no desire to act on it. Hilton seems to admire all of this, to put Shangri-La up as a shining example of what the world ought to be striving for, but there’s enough counter-subtext to make me wonder if he wasn’t actually saying it was an impossibility, and that was actually a good thing. I’m more on the side of the hot-headed young English sahib Mallinson, who calls Shangri-La an evil place full of crouching spiders waiting to devour anyone who falls into their trap. Conway and his two other companions, the American mystery Barnard and the missionary Roberta Brinklow, are happy enough to be waylaid, but that coincidence doesn’t excuse the fact that the lamas of Shangri-La feel perfectly justified in hijacking people just to keep their way of life going.

Speaking of Barnard…. Hilton, I have some advice for you. If one of your protagonists is a total caricature of the loud American (all of whom, apparently, speak like Texas), it sort of undermines your street cred as an open-minded guy who can create an abnormally non-bigoted main character like Conway. I know you’re an Englishman, but you could at least make some effort to meet a few real Americans before you write your book. I’m just sayin’.

Lost Horizon remains fairly readable to a modern audience, though it will seem dull to many readers. I think its main virtue now is its role as a bellwether for the lost civilization trope. It may also be the godfather of the wrinkled-old-man-of-enormous-wisdom-who-can-kick-your-butt trope, but if you care about that, you’re better off reading Bridge of Birds instead. Or watching Remo Williams.

The Woman in White  by Wilkie Collins
First published 1860
Category: Classic

Wilkie Collins’ novels are considered the forerunners of today’s mystery and detective novels.  What this usually means to the modern reader is a book that seems dull, cliched, with an easy to predict plot–because all the mysteries we’re used to have developed beyond the originals, and what was new and fresh a century and more ago has now been done to death.  This is definitely not the case with The Woman in White.  It’s suspenseful and gripping and had me unable to stop reading until all its secrets were revealed.

This is another one of those semi-epistolary novels of the 19th century–a style I love to see reconceived in the 20th and 21st.  The conceit is actually more of a collection of testimonies that taken as a whole recount a very strange story.  The main narrator, Walter Hartright, mentions occasionally how he managed to get verbatim records from the different people who tell the story, including how one of the first chronologically was the last he took down.  It’s a very effective conceit that allows for different perspectives without stretching belief.

The story itself verges on the Gothic just enough to make it creepy, but not totally unbelievable.  Hartright is engaged as a “drawing-master” for two young women, half-sisters, who live at the Limmeridge estate with their sort-of guardian, Mr. Fairlie.  Marian Halcombe is dark, unattractive in face, and poor; Laura Fairlie is fair, beautiful, and an heiress.  Marian is the clever one, and Laura is sweet and innocent.  Guess who Hartright falls in love with?  That’s right.  Jane Austen had something to say about this–about how an unaccountable bias toward a pretty face often leaves a man married to a very silly woman–but Laura is at least an honorable, decent girl. Unfortunately, she’s engaged to someone else, and Hartright is too poor to marry her anyway, so tragedy ensues.  Complicating matters is the occasional appearance and disappearance of the “woman in white,” the mentally unstable Anne Catherick, whose instability is either more or less than we realize, and who has a remarkable resemblance to Laura Fairlie.

That’s the setup.  I would be doing you a serious disservice (see, Collins’s prose has infected me!) if I said anything else about the plot, because from this point it becomes a true mystery.  Who is Anne Catherick?  What Secret does she know about Laura’s fiancee and later husband, Sir Percival Glyde? What power does his strange Italian friend Count Fosco hold over him?  Collins sets things up so there are obvious answers to these questions, but they’re all the wrong ones; and even when you think you know the real answers, you still don’t know the why of anything.

Collins isn’t any better about gender than any man writing in his time.  The book is full of crap about “women’s gentler natures” and even Marian, that strong-minded heroine, says derogatory things about her own sex and their weaknesses. And, of course, Marian’s mannish face and wits condemn her to a life of being her sister’s companion rather than having a family and life of her own.  I wonder only that any intelligent woman of that era could bear the condescension without hauling off and punching someone.  It’s a stark contrast to Bram Stoker, writing barely forty years later, who idealizes his female characters but also allows them strengths they don’t have to apologize for.  Still, I’ve always had a hard time criticizing writers simply for being a product of their environment; I’d like to think that a writer would be able to see past the fog of societal convention, but they’re just human, after all.  And Collins is a Romantic as well as an early Victorian (middle Victorian?), so the overflowing of emotion everyone has is almost as annoying to me as his editorializing about What Women Are Like.

Go read it.  Read The Moonstone, too, for another great example of early detective fiction.  It is, like Dracula, a kind of prose we modern readers are unfamiliar with, but the payoff is worth the struggle.

Dracula  by Bram Stoker
First published 1897
Category: Classics

I think the reason I never read this book is that I was so very, very bored by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I mean, Frankenstein–Dracula–famous monsters–same era–had to be the same, right?  I never examined that assumption even though I knew full well that Mary Shelley was deliberately trying to Make A Point with her novel, hence the high levels of philosophizing.  And, yeah, I read Frankenstein when I was a teenager and still developing as a reader, so maybe I’d like it better now….

Anyway.  This review is about Dracula,  which is thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written.  I admire the epistolary (is there a word for novels told through journal extracts?) method Stoker uses, which absolutely would have had his contemporary readers on the edge of their seats.  The story of Dracula is so well-known today that much of the suspense Stoker built through the mystery of the Count’s true nature is simply gone, and yet the book retains a high level of creepiness and horror.  Jonathan Harker trapped in the Count’s castle with the ghastly women, the final death of Lucy Westenra, the creeping transformation of Mina Harker…modern horror writers are free to use shockingly graphic details of violence, but Stoker’s quieter, insidious details still send a chill up your neck.  (There’s also the further engagement of the reader in the many, many times you want to reach into the novel and shake Van Helsing and crew by the neck, screaming "MOVE HER TO A WINDOWLESS ROOM!")

What impresses me is the unique regard Stoker has for his female characters, particularly Mina Murray Harker.  She organizes everyone’s records, puts together clues from different sources, and is basically the core of the entire group–Van Helsing gives her the backhanded compliment of having a brain "like a man’s", thank you Victorian sensibilities, and all the men look to her for direction.  Then comes the point where they all decide to protect her by keeping her in the dark about their hunt for Dracula.  It’s a completely unexpected and sexist turn on their parts, and one that directly leads to Mina becoming Dracula’s next victim.  This is where I have a huge amount of respect for Stoker, who uses this plot twist to subtly speak against that sort of reflexive sexism; the men’s attempt to shield Mina through ignorance actually puts her in danger, and not until they change their position are they all able to finally defeat Dracula.  Mina remains the strongest of the bunch, even partially under Dracula’s sway.  In some feminist circles, this portrayal of the feminine divine is considered a particularly nasty form of sexism, but I see Mina’s character as better representative of a rebuke to the prevailing Victorian attitudes about women’s strengths and (more abundantly) weaknesses.  I can see now why Alan Moore made Mina the leader of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the real one, not the movie version) though the novel makes it unlikely that she would have joined under the circumstances that she did.

Very good book.  Very worth reading.  The prose is, naturally, as alien to modern readers as any 19th century novel, but familiarity with the story should make it easier for most people to get past that little stumbling block.  Though I did not read it for Halloween, I did finish it on St. Patrick’s Day, and since Bram Stoker was working in Dublin when Dracula was written, I call that pretty good symbolism anyway.

Flipped  by Wendelin Van Draanen
Knopf, 2001
Category: Young Adult

I’m familiar with Wendelin Van Draanen from her delightful Sammy Keyes mysteries.  Despite being juvenile literature (side note: "Juvenile" in literature is not derogatory; it means books marketed to the 8-12 year age group.  The first Harry Potter books are considered juveniles, and you know how many teens and adults are addicted to those)–anyway, despite the juvenile tag, the Sammy Keyes books are well-suited to readers of any age.  I especially like the characterization and the way in which adults figure into the main character’s life; sometimes the near-mandatory erasure or stupidification of adults in juvenile or YA fiction gets tedious.  (Stupidification is my new word for the day.)

On the other hand, I’ve never read any of Van Draanen’s YA work (YA=books marketed to 12-17 year age group.  I know you were wondering) and you’d be surprised how often this happens to me even with authors I like.  I loved the Kitty Norville books, but did I go out of my way to pick up Carrie Vaughn’s young adult fantasy?  No.  Big fan of the Alcatraz Smedry books, but The Way of Kings languishes unread on someone else’s nightstand…no, wait, that’s because it’s over a thousand pages long.  Never mind.  The point is, often when I enjoy an author’s books in a particular vein, I’m reluctant to see what they do with a different genre or age group.  It’s not all that uncommon for an author to be good at one particular type of story and one only.  What if they suck at the new story type?  I don’t *want* a favorite author to suck.

I shouldn’t have worried.  Flipped is a brilliant, easy to read book that has more substance to it than it seems.  Told in alternating voices, Bryce and Juli grow from children to almost-teens together.  Juli loves Bryce because he is so gorgeous, even as a child, with dark hair and amazing blue eyes; Bryce dislikes Juli because she’s weird, with her loud habits and obvious attraction to him.  Over the course of the novel, Juli learns to see Bryce for who he is–cowardly, shallow, unthinking–and Bryce discovers that Juli’s odd behaviors and strong convictions make her a truly amazing person he would be lucky to call his friend, or more.

The alternating voices are Van Draanen’s first brilliant move.  Bryce tells his story first, and then Juli tells the same event from her perspective, which always has the effect of revealing facts Bryce doesn’t know and how his behavior really appears.  This allows us to see Bryce’s selfish characteristics without completely losing sympathy for him–necessary, since this story is ultimately a romance.  As with the Sammy Keyes books, Van Draanen makes adults a necessary supporting part of the book, particularly Bryce’s grandfather Chet, who sees in Juli the same spark his wife had, and Juli’s father, a landscape painter who goes from being perceived as a layabout to being someone who has sacrificed probably too much for his family.

As easy and entertaining as this is to read, it’s got a level of truth to it that a less skilled author would have tried to hammer home.  By focusing on the story, Van Draanen lets the truth speak through her characters’ actions, which gives Flipped a staying power rarely found in such a non-ponderous book.  Find it, read it, give it to your children, and let them see it for themselves.