Illustrated by Gilbert Gaul
291 pages
Published 1888
Read from September 14 to September 16
Rating: 1 out of 5
Published posthumously, perhaps a decade or two after it was written, this is a Victorian social satire dressed in a guise of antipodean adventure. It’s chiefly notable as an early example of a prehistoric lost world novel, written long before the publication of Doyle’s own The Lost World.
Sadly, instead of dinosaurs, Manuscript’s primary focus is its clumsy satire, depicting a topsy-turvy land where Victorian mores are turned on their head. Poverty is esteemed! People compete to give their riches away! Death is joyously sought after! Darkness is embraced and light is shunned! To be cannibalized is an honor! Women can do things!
It’s never a question of whether an old adventure novel will be horribly racist, but of how horribly racist. A Strange Manuscript is pretty damn racist. Maybe not The Land that Time Forgot levels of racist, but still bad. Our narrator dwells at length on the horror and revulsion he feels upon meeting some brown people in Antarctica. He flees from them, and finds himself among the Kosekin, a vaguely Mesopotamian civilization at the South Pole. Yet even there, in the midst of bird-drawn carriages, tree-fern-lined streets, and majestic pyramids, he’s magnetized by a random white girl he meets in a cave. De Mille proceeds to heap up vile Victorian antisemitism in his profile of the Kosekin.
As for the prehistoric aspect of De Mille’s lost world — the sole reason I read this antiquated volume — it’s incidental at best, a mere curiosity to add flavor to the setting. (To be fair, when this book was written, even scientists weren’t acquainted with many dinosaurs, and even those were fragmentary beasts, poorly understood.) There are a couple ceremonial saurian hunts, one at sea, one on land, which serve only to demonstrate the Kosekin’s eagerness to die.
There is a cool scene where our hero rides on a giant pterodactyl under the light of the aurora australis, which, while it doesn’t erase any of the book’s bigotry, at least makes for a memorable moment. Manuscript has long since been in the public domain, so maybe James Gurney could repurpose the scene for another Dinotopia book.
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