172 pages
Published 1926
Read from January 18 to January 19
Rating: 1 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
Keeping with this month's theme (at first accidental, now a bit deliberate), The Land of Mist is the third book in its series, coming after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. It is a shameless document of religious proselytizing, taking Doyle's beloved characters Professor Challenger, Lord John Roxton, and so forth, and pressing them into the service of Spiritualism. I never thought I'd read it again. But it's bundled in the same volume with the other Challenger stories, and I felt a certain resigned momentum after I finished The Poison Belt.
I was maybe 12 years old when I first got my hands on the collected Challenger stories. Naturally, I wanted the volume for The Lost World, but I didn't have access to many books growing up, so I was almost as eager for the other stories packaged alongside it. The title of The Land of Mist intrigued me. With all the brooding angst of a '90s adolescent, I imagined it would be a darker, more serious followup to The Lost World (which ends, after all, with hunter Roxton and narrator Edward Malone planning a return visit to the plateau). Would our friends get trapped in a remote realm of ensorcelled weather patterns? Or would London itself become mired in an apocalyptic miasma?
Instead, we get an evangelical Doyle in full-on “Ghosts are totally real, you guys, as was proven to me by my very good friends, the mediums, who only took a little of my money for the privilege” mode. Every Spiritualist character is noble, self-sacrificing, and decent, if not an outright martyr; everyone against them is a discount Dickensian villain, squalid and evil. There’s a protracted subplot about a saintly medium who has a villainous brother who thinks it’s all a trick for money; we get extended sequences of this brother abusing his wife and children after getting warned out of the fake medium business. Because that’s the kind of book this is.
I lost count of the number of times that a character’s phrenology was used to attest to their “solidity” or “honesty.” Perhaps that’s how Doyle, major league racist, was duped into Spiritualist belief in his own life. His racism certainly shows up here. To modern readers, many of the séance scenes read like goddamn minstrel shows. Blackface, Redface, Yellowface, you name it — Doyle’s mediums do it all.
Doyle’s usual ability to spin a good yarn is lost, crushed by the heavy-handedness of his evangelism. He even retcons Challenger with wild abandon. His daughter Enid has been here all this time! The Lost World and The Poison Belt, the only reasons we'd ever cared about Challenger, were fictions from a “daring” author! It feels like Doyle was assassinating his own characters, dangling them to get eyeballs on his religious shit while also downplaying their fantastic prior adventures to make sure everyone knew Spiritualism was totally grounded and legit. Maybe he knew people would riot if he wrote a novel where Sherlock Holmes deduces that psychic research is the one true path. (Maybe there was a story like that, actually, late in the canon. I haven’t read Holmes since I was a teen.)
Not everything was terrible. I enjoyed the character of Enid Challenger — smart modern girl in a flapper dress, writing articles for Fleet Street, all the while a latent medium — but she only appears in 25% of the story. The chapter in which Malone and Roxton investigate a malevolent haunting was mildly entertaining. But it wasn’t enough to bump up my opinion of the book.
On an abstract level, it’s interesting to compare Mist’s postwar preoccupation with spiritual evolution with New Wave sci-fi’s obsession with drugs and psychic powers: both seem to grow from modernist anxieties of scientific progress and spiritual decay. Just another way that the 1920s seemed to prefigure the 1960s. That’s grounds for an essay, if anyone wanted to get into it.
The Land of Mist itself, though? Not worth the time.
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