2023 read #54: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle*

163 pages

Published 1912

Read May 16

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I used to read and reread this book obsessively as a tween and teen. It was a foundational adventure novel for me at a highly impressionable age. Who could ever forget the canoe passage up the hidden river, the first iguanodonts in the glade, the moonlit megalosaur chase? But unlike Jurassic Park, which I reread as recently as 2011, or Dinosaur Summer, which I revisited just last year, I haven’t returned to Doyle’s Lost World since my youth.

Its virulent racism certainly played a part in my unwillingness to check it out again. It is, straight up, an imperialist adventure; imperialist shittiness is drawn in bold lines throughout its blueprint. (Revisiting it now, I also discovered a deep reservoir of Edwardian misogyny, which I hadn’t picked up on in the past.) There’s also the general mustiness of a hundred-and-eleven year old boys' adventure novel, especially one that short-changes us on the dinosaur action we came here to read. Like so many novelists after him, Doyle quickly gets bored of his ancient saurians. After taking half the book to bring us to Maple White Land, we get just a couple memorable scenes of early dino encounters before they're shunted off to the background; almost immediately Doyle tangents our heroes off into a colonialist intervention between “ape-men” and indigenous humans on the plateau. The book would have been better with more iguanodonts and stegosaurs, and fewer white saviors.

As an adventure novel, though, The Lost World has the gift of sprightly pacing and plenty of dry Edwardian humor, much of which went over my head when I read it as a youth. The way Professor Challenger is built up as this larger-than-life figure for two chapters before we even meet him is a splendid example of character-driven exposition, one of Doyle’s strengths as a pop fiction author. I love the cattiness of the rivalry between Challenger and Summerlee, almost — but not quite — enough to make me want to write my own stories of Edwardian scientist rivals-to-lovers.

This book doesn’t come close to the charms of its semi-sequel Dinosaur Summer, but it’s a fine enough boy’s-life adventure for its time. Just expect a ton of racism along your way.

(And yes, I know the Edwardian era technically ended in 1910. But much the same way that the cultural 1990s lasted until 9/11, I think it’s fair to lump the pre-war 1910s in with that Edwardian vibe.)