AdaDavis's Full Review: James Hilton - Lost Horizon: A Novel
Have you ever dreamed of a place
Far away from it all,
Where the winter winds will never blow,
Living things have room to grow;
And the sound of guns
Doesn’t pound in your ears anymore?
From the movie Lost Horizon, 1973
Shangri-La. Utopia; the perfect, lost paradise. People who have never heard of author James Hilton or his book Lost Horizon will recognize the name of Shangri-La. Maybe from one of the movies – good (1937), so-so (1973), or the host of Really Bad Rip-Offs made in recent years. Even the best adaptation simply doesn’t do justice to the original – James Hilton’s book, published in 1933.
Lost Horizon begins in 1932 at Templehof Airfield, Berlin, with the meeting of four Englishmen. In the usual way of small talk, they reminisce about old times and mutual acquaintances. Watching the planes on the runway, their exchange naturally leads to talk of airplanes, airfields, and mysteries tied to them. Sanders, the pilot, refers to a strange incident the year before as they were evacuating Baskul (India, or Afghanistan, take your pick.) One of the small planes had been stolen, along with its four passengers, and neither plane nor passengers were heard from again.
One passenger, Hugh Conway, had been a member of the Consular Service, and an acquaintance of two of the Englishmen – the unnamed narrator and a novelist named Rutherford. Later, Rutherford refers back to the stolen plane, then admits that he has seen and talked to Conway after the time of his supposed kidnapping - in Chung-Kiang, China. Conway had confirmed the story of the plane hijacked at Baskul, then had gone on to relate the strange and fascinating story of what happened afterward. Rutherford, always the writer/journalist, had written down the narrative.
Whether any of it was true, he could not determine. Conway had had “mental lapses” from his time in the trenches of The Great War, and the whole tale just might be a product of his fevered imagination. Rutherford passed his manuscript to our unnamed narrator, a neurologist. Though his reasons are never stated directly, Rutherford apparently wanted a professional opinion on the mental state of Conway, as well as another opinion on the probability of Conway’s tale.
According to the manuscript, Conway’s plane had been stolen at Baskul on the 20th of May, 1931. The four passengers were not even aware that the pilot was an imposter until the plane failed to land at Peshawar. Instead, it refueled at a remote location and headed toward Tibet. Inquiries to the pilot were met with the barrel of a gun, and silence. Somewhere in the vast uncharted region southwest of Llasa, the plane crashed in the mountains, mortally wounding the pilot. Before he died, the pilot directed the passengers to an old lamasery at a place called Shangri-La. Struggling through the snow and punishing winds, the four passengers eventually run into a group of travelers from the lamasery, and are guided through the high passes to safety at Shangri-La.
To Conway, seeing it first, it might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all of his faculties. It was, indeed, a strange and half-incredible sight. A group of colored pavilions clung to the mountainside with none of the grim deliberation of a Rhineland castle, but rather with the chance delicacy of flower-petals impaled upon a crag. It was superb and exquisite. … Hardly less an enticement was the downward prospect, for the mountain wall continued to drop, nearly perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only have been the result of some cataclysm in the far past. The floor of the valley, hazily distant, welcomed the eye with greenness; sheltered from the winds, and surveyed rather than dominated by the lamasery, it looked to Conway a delightfully favored place, though if it were inhabited its community must be completely isolated by the lofty and sheerly unscalable ranges on the further side.
For a supposed Buddhist lamasery, Shangri-La proved to be a mighty peculiar place. With central heating, hot baths in porcelain tubs marked “Product of Akron, Ohio”, smiling attendants, and a vast library of books in dozens of languages, it resembled a luxury hotel more than a lamasery. According to their guide and mentor Chang, the lamasery housed 50 or so full lamas and a number of postulants – Chang included- and some attendants. The High Lama, a mysterious man who was rarely seen by “outsiders”, ruled Shangri-La and the Valley of the Blue Moon below. Here the four hapless travelers must stay until some arrangement could be made for them to leave – possibly with the next group of mountain traders who make irregular visits to Shangri-La. They would be by in a couple of months, or maybe not. They would be willing to take the travelers back with them to China, or maybe not. The reactions of the travelers to this announcement vary.
Henry D. Barnard, American: Mr. Barnard has a secret, and is in no hurry whatsoever to get back to “civilization”. The amenities of Shangri-La suit him perfectly, and he easily makes a decision to stay. To Barnard, Shangri-La is a sanctuary.
Miss Roberta Brinklow, Missionary: To Miss Brinklow, one group of heathens is as good as another. Providence, or fate, or a kidnapped airplane has set her down at the Valley of the New Moon, and there she will open a Christian ministry. Chang, and the “powers-that-be” of Shangri-La make no objection to this scheme, and the lady sets to work learning Tibetan. To Miss Brinklow, Shangri-La is an opportunity, and her assigned mission in life.
Hugh Conway, H.M. Consul: To the world-weary Conway, Shangri-La is Utopia, paradise; his idea of the perfect spot to spend a life of quiet contemplation and learning. With no family to miss him, Conway is content to stay in Shangri-La forever.
Captain Charles Mallinson, H.M. Vice-Consul: The 25 year-old Mallinson is deeply suspicious of Chang and the other inhabitants of Shangri-La. He is furious at the idea of being kidnapped, and impatient with the delays getting the travelers back where they belong. His questions get vague answers, or are neatly deflected by Chang. Mallinson believes the pilot brought the passengers to Shangri-La for some nefarious purpose, and that they will not be allowed to leave. To Mallinson, Shangri-La is a prison, which they must escape by any means possible.
While awaiting the arrival (or not) of their possible guide out of the mountains, Conway is summonsed to see the High Lama. He is told the extraordinary history and secret purpose of Shangri-La. But has he been told the truth? Have the travelers been given an unusual opportunity, or are they really prisoners who can never go home? Or does Shangri-La exist at all outside the troubled mind of a man Rutherford found in a hospital in China? Exactly how did Conway end up in China, and where are the other three passengers of the ill-fated plane?
***** ***** ***** *****
At 231 pages in the paperback edition, Lost Horizon can be read quickly. It might take a bit longer to absorb all of the angles and ramifications hinted at in the novel. Much like Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there are a lot more questions than easy answers. Is Shangri-La a paradise, or a prison? You will have to work out the answer to that on your own.
I first read Lost Horizon as a teenager, and instantly fell in love with the wit of the old Chinese lama, Chang. His dialogues with Miss Brinklow are priceless. With missionary fervor, she confronts Chang to “explain what all of you believe in.”
Chang answered slowly and in little more than a whisper: “If I were to put it into a very few words, …I would say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds – even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself. In the valley which you have seen, and in which there are several thousand inhabitants living under the control of our order, we have found that the principle makes for a considerable degree of happiness. We rule with moderate strictness, and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think that I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.”
When Conway noted that the rule of moderation seemed to apply to the valley people, but not to the lamas, Chang responded:
”I regret, sir, that you have touched upon a matter which I may not discuss. I can only add that our community has various faiths and usages, but we are most of us moderately heretical about them.”
Ah, but I loved to hate the angry, whining Mallinson; that worm-in-the-apple who so shockingly states: ”They needn’t worry, these fellows here – nobody will ever threaten them by land. But, my God, I’d give a good deal to fly over with a load of bombs! … Because the place wants smashing up, whatever it is. It is unhealthy and unclean …”
I’ve read the book again a couple of times since, and each reading uncovers nuances that I missed before. At some point it struck me that the four passengers on the plane, and the lama Chang, are archetypes. I have met every one of them a number of times, and have come to appreciate their good points –and bad. Even the angry Mallinson may have more reason on his side than I could see as a teen. In fact, he may have been the only one in the group who was seeing clearly. Or maybe not.
We all have a vision of Utopia, the perfect world; the earthly paradise. The problem is, it is a different vision for each of us. One man’s paradise may indeed be another man’s prison. They are not mutually exclusive.
***** ***** ***** *****
Author James Hilton is perhaps best known for one of his other works, Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Three men and a woman--who are seeking escape from political upheaval in the Orient--survive an airplane crash and find themselves prisoners at first,...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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