Lost World Professor Challenger

Interesting, well-formed characters carry the plot through some lulls in the beginning, but the pacing picks up as the novel progresses. A few conspicuous points date the novel, but overall its a quick and interesting read, the prototypical action/adventure that set the tone for the genre that emerged from it.

Malone, the young, lovesick narrator of the story, seeks a great adventure to win the heart of his beloved and advance his career as a journalist. His search for adventure leads him to the bombastic Professor Challenger, one of the most vivid and interesting characters in science fiction. In an effort to corroborate Challenger's claim of a lost prehistoric world hidden deep in the Amazon; Malone, Challenger, bold adventurer Lord Roxton, and contentious skeptic Professor Summerlee embark on an adventure into the unknown.

Like many novels of its period, many aspects are problematic when viewed through the lens of our current cultural sensibilities. Women seem to be largely absent from the novel, save Malone's object of desire--the motivator for the whole adventure--who is flighty and inconstant. The local Amazon guides ("Indians," "half-breeds" and the "faithful Negro") are given the expected treatment, and the warring red-skinned "savages" on the prehistoric plateau face supposedly equal opposition from the "ape-men," missing link figures that the expedition encounters. While it's important to maintain cultural relativity in understanding the period in which the book was written, a modern audience might find these points occasionally jarring.

Still, even if the cultural attitudes and scientific practices (and for that matter presumptions of how dinosaurs look and act) are questionable today, the vivid and timeless personalities written into the main characters make up for it. Each is, in his own way, larger than life such that they should all be unrelatable, but somehow it works in the context of this fantastic setting.

Once the action got going, I found it a hard book to put down.

I went between giving this two and three stars. I settled for three, for in the end I like the concept. It turns out I had read this before years ago; I was probably a teenager when I did it, so remembering back to those days was interesting.

This particular edition collects the Professor Challenger stories written by Conan Doyle. The Lost World is likely the most well-known, and it has been the basis (loosely or otherwise) of other works from Indiana Jones to Crichton's Jurassic Park. If you enjoy those works, you will likely enjoy this book. However, I will say this book is closer in feel and appeal to the works of writes like Jules Verne (for instance, Journey to the Center of the Earth), H.G. Wells, and H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines). If you enjoy those writers, you will like this book.

The novel is kind of slow in the beginning, so it took me a while to get into it. Once you get into the adventure itself, it moves along like any other adventure yarn. Professor Challenger is quite the obnoxious genius. Brilliant, but not like Sherlock Holmes in terms of personality. This may irritate some readers, but overall, Challenger is a strong character readers will enjoy. I know I did, and I even had a small smile of amusement or two as I read. More irritating to me was the idea of Malone, the reporter, who goes on the expedition with Challenger to impress a woman (and I will not say more of that woman to avoid potential spoilers). I suppose it does show a certain Victorian ideal, of the man going into the wilderness to conquer something and put his name on it, but Conan Doyle could have left her out and the story would have been fine.

So, this is a pretty good book, but it is not a great one. I personally prefer H. Rider Haggard's works for this kind of tale, but this is a good example of the science fiction, or science romance, genre, and thus it is worth reading.