The Lost World Book Review.

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Title: The Lost World.

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Gene: Classic, Adventure, Fantasy.

Plot: Twenty-three year old Edward Malone is in love. Deeply, hopelessly in love. Only problem is that the girl of his dreams doesn’t love him, she loves an adventurous, stern man whom she has never met before and urges Malone to become that man for her. “There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done,” she says and with this ringing and dancing around inside his head Malone bounces down to his office at the Daily Gazette to ask his boss for a risky story to cover. He leaves the office with the assignment to interview Professor George Challenger, a black bearded man of great strength who just returned from a mysterious trip to South America and has lately gotten into the habit of assaulting ‘people who ask questions’ and throwing reporters down the stairs. Not a very pleasant person to interview on a normal bases but Malone is too young and dumb to know any better and hunts up his bacteriologist friend Tarp Henry who provides him with some more up to date information in the scientific world on Challenger and a letter requesting an interview is sent off almost at once.

Surprisingly to Malone’s friend, the letter is answered and the interview granted, unfortunately for Malone, however, Challenger sees right through his weak lie and throws him out the door, managing to give him a black eye at the same time. Challenger though, seems to take a liking to the foolish lad and drags him back inside to talk his ear off about his amazing adventure he had and tells Malone to show up at the Zoological Institutes’ Hall for a meeting being held there the next day. Malone agrees to go, reports to his boss and gets Henry to join him at the meeting all in one day. The meeting {mainly due to Challenger of course} is very loud and energetic, the goodly number of students in the audience providing most of the uproarious noise; Malone takes plenty of notes the whole while and when, at the climax of his speech, Challenger requests volunteers to accompany his skeptical colleague Professor Summerlee on a trip to South America, Malone pops up out of his seat and volunteers to go. Joining the group is Lord John Roxton, the cool-headed plucky sportsman who’s been to South America and up the Amazon before and who seems to enjoy a good adventure whenever he can get it. Roxton and Malone become good friends and spend a good amount of time during the entire trip in keeping the two Professors from canceling the expedition prematurely due to their frequent and rather amusing arguments.

When they reach their destination the four adventurers are unexpectedly stranded on top of an unexplored, completely unknown plateau when their bridge is knocked down. Undaunted the foursome deal with the land’s strange inhabitants, beginning with giant blood sucking ticks followed by nasty pterodactyls, huge carnivorous dinosaurs and weird, savage ape-men who capture two of their party. These are forever locked in frequent battles with the Indians who live in caves all the way on the other side of the above-ground-island and who, with the help of the adventurers’ deadly guns, drive a good many of the ape-men over the cliff edge to their destruction and kill off a deal more with spears before giving refuge to the foursome in one of their caves. The companions’ minds turn to the question of how to return to civilization at this point and Challenger’s scheme of hot air balloons is rejected over the more favorable course of a map given to them by a friendly young chief which shows the direction to a tunnel in one of their caves that leads straight through to the other side.

Safely back in England the findings of their expedition are published and a second trip is planned by Roxton and Malone, who’s Lady Love married another in his absence. A fine, well written adventure story filled with all the excitement one could wish for when one reads the title of The Lost World, this book is worth having on your shelf and you won’t be able to easily put it down till you’ve read it straight through.

Likes/Dislikes: The ape-men might be considered the “missing link” of the evolutionary mindset but as they are portrayed as the villains this shouldn’t be too big of a deal. Malone’s girl seems to be rather idiotic to me, saying that she’ll the adventurous man’s deeds, not the man himself and then ending up married to a clerk. All in all a very good book.

Rating: PG-13 and up mainly because of the reading level.

Date Report Written: April 16, 2010.