Review: Lost Horizon

HILTON, James (Robert Andrew Parker, illus.; Afterword by Warren Eyster), Lost Horizon, Reader’s Digest (New Zealand) Limited, Auckland New Zealand, 1990.

Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards with gilt spine and upper board titles and rules and an upper board decoration; 191pp., with a full-colour frontispiece, a decorated title page and 6 plates likewise. Minor wear. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good to near fine.

It’s good to find the source of things. I’d been after this book for a long time before stumbling across it at the Adventure Bookshop in the Victorian Precinct of Oamaru in New Zealand. I’d been trying to track down a copy that wasn’t too expensive, or damaged, or bogged down by crippling postage costs for awhile and then... I look up and there it is. I didn’t even object to the fact that it was a Reader’s Digest copy – the publications page assured me that it hadn’t been abbreviated, so that was good enough for me.

My interest in the book lay in the fact that it was written in the 30s and was set in China and Tibet, promising all kinds of Oriental strangeness. In this regard it certainly didn’t disappoint but the way in which it accomplished this task was somewhat unexpected.

The story involves four individuals who, while fleeing revolution in Baskul by means of an aeroplane, are sidetracked by the pilot and flown deep into the inaccessible heart of the Tibetan ranges. Crash-landing there, they await a terrible death due to the inhospitable environment, only to be surprised by the arrival of a Chinese lama being carried in a palanquin. He – Chang – takes them to a hidden valley sheltering beneath a massive conical mountain called “Karakal”, or “Blue Moon” in the local patois, and thus they arrive in Shangri-la.

(Obviously, my Mythos radar was pinging at this point, since Karakal is a Dreamlands fire entity, but it transpires that it’s just a coincidence and another indicator that the pulp writers back in the day were borrowing from each other more than just adventure tropes!)

After this set-up, we slowly discover more about our captives in paradise. Conway, whose point of view steers us through the story, is a jaded British civil servant and diplomat, a survivor of the Great War, which had a deep impact upon his psyche; with him is a junior officer, Mallinson, with whom Conway was at school, and who hero-worships the former “head boy”. Along with these two are an American named Barnard and a waspish missionary, Miss Brinklow, and they all respond to their stay in the lamasery in their own unique way.

At this point I was prepared for all the usual manifestations of Tibetan weirdness – levitation, immortality, Tibetan demons and so on. However, for the most part, it doesn’t happen. We see instead, the slow realisation that – with the exception of Mallinson – they all begin to feel as though Shangri-la is the place where they were destined to end up. Conway feels peace and calm for the first time, a beneficent equanimity; Barnard, who it transpires is on the run from the Authorities for certain fiscal indiscretions, feels safe and fired by the prospect that there is gold in the surrounding mountains; and Miss Brinklow, aghast with the “shameful” morals of the Tibetan natives, sees her arrival as Christ’s call for her to browbeat the heathen. Only Mallinson chafes against what he sees as imprisonment in a gilded cage.

Conway, whose outlook on life is Buddhist in all but name, gets to meet the High Lama who tells him the valley’s history. Apparently, the atmosphere of the area around Karakal bestows long-life – not eternality, but extended duration – upon all who dwell there. Conway, he predicts, can look forward to as many as 200 years... as long as he stays put. Time rapidly catches up with those who leave the shadow of Blue Moon.

Of course, there is a girl, and, of course, both Conway and Mallinson fall in love with her. Along with Mallinson’s single focus push to escape the lamasery, this tests the depths of their relationship to breaking point. In the end they both make startling and intriguing choices concerning their situation.

The most surprising thing about this book is that it’s about (mainly) four people thrown together who have to work out how to get along. The background of Shangri-la is vague and nebulous, sketched in broad and diffuse strokes; the focus is squarely upon the people involved and not the stage whereon they walk. There are long conversations which are bright and engaging, never forced or seemingly contrived – I was heartily sick of Mallinson by the end I have to confess, with his constant carping about making a great escape! This probably explains why Capra’s 1937 film version of this tale is so lavish – with little to no descriptive content holding him back, he had carte blanche to let rip with all the visual content he could muster. Sadly, large chunks of the movie have been lost to time and efforts to restore it from re-located prints have left it in much the same state that – until recently – Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” was in: dubbed over still footage papering over the cracks. I guess we can just hope that, like “Metropolis”, the missing pieces will show up at some point and the gem can be restored. In the meantime, there’s still the 1973 Ross Hunter version with Burt Bacharach providing the music (shudder!).

Interestingly, and getting back to my initial point about finding out where things come from, this is the book which introduced the word and the concept of ‘Shangri-la’ to the language. In 1933 America where economic woes were striking hardest, the book became a bestseller as it spoke to the people of that country’s need to be secure with enough to sustain them – not fantastic excess; just comfort, safety and a sufficiency. At that time everyone was looking for their own Shangri-la and between the pages of a book was as good a place to search as any. They all seem to have lost the thread a little nowadays though, unfortunately...

In the final analysis, I was expecting – with no real reason – to find pulpy excitement; what I found was an engaging, literary novel with thought-provoking issues. I had some concerns with a few of the rationales provided – how the kidnap was enacted and how the lamasery was established – and of course, there was a modicum of the casual racism that prevailed at the time of writing, but not enough to sour the taste. I wouldn’t say that this is everybody’s cup of yak’s milk but I’m glad to have finally brought my quest to a satisfying conclusion. Now I’m off to re-watch “The Shadow” and then, on to “Doctor Strange”!

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.