2013 read #7: Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
262 pages
Published 1933
Read January 13
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I don't know exactly where I got this impression, but I've always had the idea that Lost Horizon was on its way to becoming an ex-classic. That is to say, it was considered a classic for most of the 20th century, but in the last ten or twenty years there's been a backlash against it, a growing consensus that it really wasn't all that remarkable, and maybe we should all quietly forget about it. Maybe I heard that from one person a long time ago and it colored my understanding of the book all these years. Either way, I find myself kind of agreeing with that imagined zeitgeist. Lost Horizon was a cute trifle. It was an okay read, but not all that special.

Come to think of it, many years ago I felt the same way when I read Siddhartha, which is probably borderline blasphemous. Maybe the early 20th century Orientalist mystic novel isn't my kind of genre.

Amusingly, Lost Horizon describes a White Man's Burden variant of Orientalist mysticism, where "the Nordic and Latin races of Europe" are most suitable for the great white lama's discipline. (Maybe that's why Lost Horizon might be unfashionable these days?) I also find sardonic amusement in the line "We may expect no mercy, but we may faintly hope for neglect," when the Euro-American mythology of the transcendental Eastern mystic -- exemplified in books like Lost Horizon -- has helped bury anything special or worthwhile in the region under hordes of tourists and Beatles and Ivy League students trekking Nepal on summer break. Only Bhutan exercises strict entry control, so naturally travel magazines and agencies advertise its charms as "the last Shangri-La." It's only a matter of time before Bhutan too falls under the inexorable crush of the moneyed nations.

There's ample room here for any number of sociological theses analyzing the intersection of pop culture, pop mythology, and pop mysticism in the West, and the loss of native cultures under the swell of globalization. But honestly, all I could think of when I read this book were the Indiana Jones novels I loved as a kid. The only differences are Hilton's somewhat superior prose and his insistence that we take his pseudo-mystical hokum seriously.