'Lost Horizon' by James Hilton (1933)

The great Dennis Wheatley (stop laughing) gives a brief mention of Lost Horizon in his own lost race novel The Man Who Missed The War when he says about that book's mythical Antarctic kingdom: 'No, this is not Shangri- La. There are no temples here, no wise men seeking to preserve all the accumulated beauties of our civilisation from destruction ...'

This is a lovely edition. Wouldn't mind one of these. Looks like a Bond movie.

Which seems to show that old Dennis, by 1945, had read and remembered Lost Horizon as most of us probably do - as one of the great 'Lost Race' novels, a rousing bit of late-era Imperial adventure fiction, with doughty English adventurers finding perils and wonders in a place which has since become a by-word for mythical lost locations: Shangri-La.

That is more or less how I remembered it before giving it a reread this past Christmas (over a couple of drams of Elijah Craig bourbon). It's the eve of a great storm as I sit down to pen my thoughts here at the Explorer's Club. I'm confident in saying Lost Horizon should rightly be held as one of the finest, and most important, shapers of the Lost Race archetype (if a late addition, being published in 1933, the year of another great Lost World, King Kong). Returning to the book, I was surprised to find that it has a surprisingly snarky anti-imperial edge to it. Our hero, 'Glory' Conway, is seen by others as a typical strapping young Hero Of Empire, the kind of boy who proves his mettle on the playing fields of Eton, and goes on to bravely man the outposts (and defend the boundaries) of British interests in far-flung parts. We first learn of Conway from three friends who meet by chance in an unspecified central European capital. They knew each other at Oxford, and they all knew Conway too, thinking him a bluff, plucky type of character.

... during those final difficult days before the evacuation he had behaved in a manner which (he reflected wryly) should earn him nothing less than a knighthood and a Henty school-prize novel entitled 'With Conway at Baskul.'

Love the dig at Henty there!

Play up! Play up, and play the game!



WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS

Unlike plenty of other books you'll see on this site, Lost Horizon is the kind of book that I think normal people would enjoy. I highly, highly recommend that you actually read it, and if you might, then stop reading here.

The reader meets Conway during a plucky escape from a native uprising in a city named Baskul (implied, but not specified, to be somewhere in India or perhaps Persia) back in 1931. Conway leads a small group of Westerners safely away from this Indian Mutiny-type scenario and they leave Baskul in an aeroplane.

But Conway, once we become privy to his internal monologue, is not your typical British Empire hero.


...he was far from fond of risking his life. Twelve years earlier he had grown to hate the perils of trench warfare in France, and had several times avoided death by declining to attempt valorous impossibilities.

Not only is Conway cynical about bravery and military glories, he's even doubtful as to the value of action and activity. Sure, the European Empires scramble around the world with a great deal of activity, but to what end? But even worse than harbouring this proto-Buddhist thinking, Conway:

...had no race or colour prejudice, and it was an affectation for him to pretend, as he sometimes did in clubs and first-class railway carriages, that he set any particular store on the ‘whiteness’ of a lobster-red face under a topee. It saved trouble to let it be so assumed, especially in India.

Alone amongst the small Western party, Conway has a respect for Easteners, and the Chinese in particular. Which is good, as the plane the group is on gets hijacked by a man who appears to be a Tibetan. They're taken far across the Karakoram Mountains, towards an unexplored corner of Tibet. And here, of course, they find the mythical Tibetan monastery of Shangri-La.

For a modern edition, I quite like this one.

In case you were wondering, yes, Hilton did come up with the name. However, he almost certainly nicked it from Shambala, which is the Buddhist concept of a hidden spiritual kingdom. By the 1930s, Westerners' ideas about Shambala would be heavily filtered by Theosophy and Victorian occult thinking, which contained an entire ecosystem of secret kingdoms of this sort hidden in mountains, underground, etc.

Land Of The Lost

Shangri-La, as Dennis Wheatley pointed out at the top of this post, is a treasure-trove of all mankind's greatest artistic and intellectual treasures. Its monks, made up of Tibetans, Chinese, and (most astonishingly to our interlopers) several Europeans, practise some kind of radical slowness and inaction. It's a kind of fetishised parody of Buddhism, I suppose, but it suits Conway's manner of thinking rather well. The book's sense of world-weary interwar gloom (very rare in lost race adventure fiction) is perhaps summed up by Conway, when he explains to their Chinese host, Chang:

I don’t know whether you classify the people who come here, but if so, you can label me “1914-1918’. That makes me, I should think, a unique specimen in your museum of antiquities. I used up most of my passions and energies during the years I’ve mentioned, and though I don’t talk much about it, the chief thing I’ve asked from the world since then is to leave me alone. I find in this place a certain charm and quietness that appeals to me ...

So it seems the horrors of the First World War have taken 'Glory' Conway, who should have been a 'Boy's Own' Hero of Empire(TM), and hollowed him out so that he's an ideal addition to this strange society that prizes intellect over passion, and the suppression of emotion.

If you're picking up a note of Last Of The Mohicans /Last Samurai here, well, put a pin in that. Lost Horizon is both very much the kind of novel that fetishises non-European cultures, then has a white guy be immediately better at their culture than they are - and totally not. It's bizarre. And the way Shangri-La is presented, with its cold, centuries-long unconsummated love affairs, its repression of feelings, is such that I'm never really sure if Hilton wants us to think it's truly a good place.

Pans are always lovely, aren't they?

To this end, when Mallinson, who is young, hot-blooded, and the least satisfied at the idea of staying in Shangri-La indefinitely, makes the case to Conway that the place is less a place of wonder, and more of a prison, his case comes across as pretty convincing to the reader.

Unbeknownst to Mallinson (but knownst to us), Conway has been in secret talks with the Abbot. This mysterious old man is a Portuguese, and claims to have founded Shangri-La itself ... in 1734.


And Conway answered, shaken with an emotion for which he knew no reason, and which he did not seek to conceal: 'That you are still alive, Father Perrault.'

This is quote which pops up in some odd places, including Robert Silverberg's very very odd quasi-lost race novel The Book Of Skulls.

It appears that something about the landscape of Shangri-La slows down the process of aging. Its inhabitants are drawn from occasional visitors who have chanced upon the monastery over the centuries. It seems than nobody ever leaves - something Conway has less trouble accepting than Mallinson.

One wouldn't exactly call Lost Horizon 'progressive' up to this point, but Conway's cynicism towards pip-pip British Imperialism and white superiority is honestly rather flabbergasting for a main character in an adventure novel of this era. I read a lot of this stuff, and this take is very very refreshing.

Aaaaand yet. And yet, for all the respect shown towards Chinese and Tibetan culture and the benefits of life at Shangri-La, we learn that it's a Portuguese who is in charge. Even here, in a Tibetan lamasery, it requires a European to make things happen. And shockingly, a bizarre kind of biological determinism is baked into the plot: the life-extending effects of the secret valley work best on people from far away, especially Europeans. It's not just Conway's attitude which makes him an ideal fit for the colony, it's his race. The Abbot goes as far as asking Conway to inherit the running of the monastery after his own death. Which very much is the sort of thing that happens to fellows like Conway in novels like this. It's just that we were hoping for ... something else. Oh well.

Look, Lost Horizon is still great. And you should read it. It does work as early 20th century adventure fiction, and it is a classic of the lost world genre. It's very well written, and its characters are surprisingly believable. As far as I know, the book isn't based on anything that happened to Hilton in his lifetime, not inspired by anywhere he travelled personally. Despite this, there's a great evocation of faraway places in the book, as well as the (now faraway) time of the last-gasp-of-empire 1930s.