Michael Palin, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, pretty much ruined the term “ripping yarn” with a satirical TV series he did, years back. In spite of him, though, there is such a thing as a ripping yarn, and The People Of The Mist
As I read The People of the Mist, the thought that kept recurring to me was, “Why hasn’t this book ever been made into a movie?” The author’s most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, has been filmed numerous times, but TPOTM contains pretty much all the elements that made KSM so exciting, with the addition of a girl in the original story (movie versions of KSM generally insert one). Not only that, her relationship with the hero is one of those love/hate, “you make me so mad I could kiss you” affairs that filmmakers love. Plus there’s spectacle aplenty.
Leonard Outram, the hero of the story, is one of a class which was presumably pretty common in the days of the British Empi-ah, a penniless Englishman out to make his fortune. When his family’s ancient estate was lost to him and his older brother following their father’s disgrace and suicide, the two brothers swore an oath to find a fortune—somewhere—and buy their estate back, or die trying. At the same time, Leonard’s heart is broken when his intended wife, the daughter of the local curate, is forbidden by her father to see him again. The father wants the girl to marry the son of the Jewish businessman who just purchased the Outram estate. (This seems theologically odd, even in a bad curate, but perhaps the businessman had done a Disraeli and converted to Christianity.)
Leonard’s brother has just fulfilled the second part of his oath, by dying in the wilds of Africa, when the real action begins. Leonard’s servant, a Zulu dwarf he calls Otter, discovers a sorrowing old woman who tells a story that her mistress, a white girl named Juanna, has been kidnapped, along with all the Africans on her father’s estate, by Portuguese slavers. She tells Leonard that she herself was born in an undiscovered place where rubies and sapphires may be found in abundance (she shows him one as proof), and promises to lead him there if he’ll first find a way to rescue Juanna.
Leonard agrees, and so the fun begins. There’s a successful raid on the slavers’ camp, followed by a difficult trek across the African plains. They manage to climb up a cliff face into a “lost world” inhabited by an ancient civilization dominated by its priesthood, which glories in human sacrifice. The travelers are welcomed as gods (always a mistake), and one trouble leads to another, all the way through to a thrilling, cinematic escape, and a resolution which (admittedly) is a bit of a deus ex machina, but is cushioned by a heavy layer of irony.
The whole things’ quite preposterous in the manner of an Indiana Jones movie (Haggard’s work was an inspiration for those films), but it’s roaring good stuff, rousing enough to keep you turning the pages in spite of the slightly dense Victorian prose (Haggard takes paragraphs to say things a modern writer would handle in a sentence. Or a word). But for those willing to take such a book on its own terms, this is a hoot.
Haggard’s portrayals of Africans seem to me relatively enlightened for his times. There’s no suggestion that black people are inferior in terms of intelligence. Some black characters are good—even noble—and others are evil, for understandable reasons. They generally speak poetically, when they’re using their own languages. The author doesn’t hide the nature of the resentments some of them hold against whites, as when Otter says this to Leonard after they’ve observed some slavers disposing of a dead slave’s body by dumping it into a canal for the crocodiles:
“Ah! Baas,” he said when they had reached the ground, “you are but a chicken. The hearts of those who have dwelt in slave camps are strong, and, after all, better the belly of a fish than the hold of a slave dhow. Wow! Who do these things? Is it not the white men, your brothers, and do they not say many prayers to the Great Man up in the sky when they do them?”
(“Wow,” by the way, seems to be a Zulu expression, and does not have quite the meaning it has for us today. It’s more negative. I wonder if this book is the source of its use in English.)
Otter, incidentally, though in many ways a comic character, is the true hero of the book in terms of courage, strength and achievement. His fight with a giant crocodile is fully worthy of Conan of Cimmeria.
This is not to say that there isn’t a level of condescension toward the Africans. This seems to me mostly expressed in the author’s assumption that Africans naturally see white people as nobler and more beautiful than themselves, and that they find their highest happiness in serving white people, like pets. In Haggard’s defense, I suspect he probably sincerely believed that a good arrangement for all concerned.
In sum, this is H. Rider Haggard at the top of his game, and I recommend The People of the Mist highly. Especially if you’re a movie producer. I got my copy free, to read on my Kindle.
I’m delighted to see someone reading good old Haggard!
His Allan Quatermain stories are usually dependable. (King Solomon’s Mines was the first, though not the first “chronologically,” as these things have been worked out by fans.) I haven’t got on with the late pair of The Ancient Allan and Allan and the Ice Gods (as I recall, both are ones in which he snuffs up smoke of some drug and goes back to an earlier incarnation).
But Allan and the Holy Flower, The Ivory Child, and Heu-Heu were pretty fair, as I recall, as were some shorter works such as “Long Odds.” The problem with She and Allan was that Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed, has lost her mythopoeic stature by then. In fact, I wish Haggard had written no sequels to She, not Ayesha: The Return of She, which I have read, nor Wisdom’s Daughter, which I haven’t, but which inspired C. S. Lewis’s quip that, if Ayesha really were Wisdom’s daughter, she didn’t take after her parent.
As I recall without checking, Allan Quatermain is a key figure in Marie, the middle book of Haggard’s Zulu trilogy (the first being Child of Storm and the third being Finished). I think some readers would say that that trilogy, and perhaps its blood-soaked predecessor Nada the Lily, would be the ones to read after KSM and She as his two best. Nada the Lily would probably be one to recommend to fans of Robert E. Howard’s fiction. The villain is a bloodthirsty monster of a chieftain. Interestingly, he was a really person: Chaka, Shaka, Tchaka, however it’s spelled. From my reading of 20 or so of his novels, I would say Haggard’s stories about Africa are usually pretty good. Two Latin American romances, Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World, may, I believe, have influenced Tolkien, and are quite good. But in his Egyptian stories he really lets himself go with the reincarnation stuff, etc., if I’m not mistaken.
Inspired by the movie, which I adored, I read “She” as a youngster. How it made me laugh when the author used the word “ejaculated” as a synonym for “suddenly shouted out.” Word usage can change a lot in a century.
I’ve just ordered TPOTM. Not having a Kindle, I couldn’t get it for free, but at least I used AmEx membership rewards points.
Texan and others,
This list
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/16/mullen16bib.htm
is useful.
Pretty much all of Haggard’s fiction may be downloaded at Project Gutenberg or Project Gutenberg of Australia. I have copied these texts, selected a type font and size that I liked, printed the stories, bound the sheets with large staples, and enjoyed reading them in the bathtub, free of anxiety about damaging a valuable book.
Oooh, I’m going to have to read that, I love Haggard!
Do you read Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books? There’s a wonderful Haggard joke hidden in the 5th book, First Among Sequels. A member of the ChronoGuard, a sort of time-traveling police force, is explaining his job, and tells his audience about the Standard Historical Eventline, or SHE. A page later, he insists that while changes can be made to the past or future, SHE must always be obeyed. I was probably one of very few people who got the joke, but it made me laugh so hard I had to leave the bookstore!
No, I’ve never tried Fforde. Thanks for the suggestion.
I learned of Fforde here at Brandywine Books last fall. My kids have fallen in love with Thursday Next. However, as a pastor I have trouble recommending Fforde to anyone outside my family. Reading to my teens, we can stop and discuss how Fforde’s occasional use of rather crude language detracts from the storyline and how his portrayal of a Global Standard Deity replacing all religions reflects a cynical worldview. We can use this as a jumping off point for discussing the merits and outcomes of different worldviews. On the other hand, were I to recommend Fforde to many of my people, they would take it as a full endorsement of the entire content.
Just my 2c.
I love Fforde, but couldn’t get through the Thursday Next books. The first one had some fun concepts (Richard III replacing The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a cultural phenomenon was brilliant), but it got too zany and artificial feeling for my tastes.
His hard-boiled fairy-tale mysetery series, on the other hand, seemed to be a bit less zany, and seemed to provide his characters with more comprehensible struggles and more emotional depth.
I didn’t have Greybeard’s problems with his worldview because I assume that most authors’ (and filmmakers’) worldviews are going to be rather different from my own; finding points of commonalities and difference is part of the fun of reading. At the same time, the fairy-tale mysteries seem less cynical than the Thursday Next books, if only because the private-eye genre, like its protagonists, tends to wear an armor of cynicism but have a heart of genuine, weary, uncynical compassion for human beings.
From my (somewhat limited, but I think significant) reading of both historical sources and historical novels set in Colonial Africa, I don’t sure I’d use the words “nobler” or “more beautiful” to describe the way Africans viewed Whites, but “superior” or “innately worthy of respect” wouldn’t be very wrong.
I’m not saying that Whites were worthy of that respect, or in any way superior as human beings, but I think the combination of the impact of 19th C European technology on essentially Iron Age cultures and several generations of Imperial propaganda to that effect had made that belief common amongst Black Africans by the later 19th C.
My copy came a couple of days ago. I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying reading it now.
Nice to hear.
Just finished reading it on my iPad.
Good resource here for eVersions:
http://www.epubbooks.com/book/563/people-of-the-mist
Now reading Doyle’s The Lost World
Interesting reading 100+ year old books on an iPad.
Happy reading.
jw