dward Malone has a problem. He's dreadfully besotted with Gladys Hungerton, dreadfully infatuated with her physical charms. When he declares he would do anything for her, she is thoroughly unmoved. The man she would marry is someone heroic, a man of danger and reckless action. Malone swears he will prove himself such a man.
As a reporter, his chances for grand adventure are few, but he begs his editor for something -- anything. He is sent to cover a bit of academic hullabaloo. It seems a Professor Challenger is making grand claims about living dinosaurs, a lost world somewhere in the remote wilds of the Amazon. Challenger's scholarly peers call his bluff, and an expedition is hurriedly organized. Malone jumps on this fast-moving train and soon finds himself in South American jungles with native guides and three companions: Challenger, Professor Summerlee and millionaire-adventurer-aristocrat Lord John Roxton.
After some search, the party discovers Challenger's inaccessible plateau. To enter the unknown, they fell a tree to bridge the deep chasm that separates the plateau from an adjacent pinnacle. Just after they cross, they are betrayed by one of their guides, who dislodges the tree, sending the bridge into the gorge. They now have the rest of their lives to explore the lost world, for there is no way back. With some courage and much excitement, they press on. But this is not their world, and they must fight to survive.
Happily lost
For a novel that is more than 80 years old, The Lost World has some kick. Unlike many exploration adventures, it has a bonafide plot, reasonably well-developed characters and more than a soupçon of action. Conan Doyle must have had his contemporary readers in the palm of his hand, for the novel binds all the elements of the classic explorer tale with the pacing of a good mystery.
Although his novel might have impressd his contemporaries, it will win him no great audience today. Conan Doyle's characters do all the things that must have seemed proper and exciting in his day, but have the tang of odiousness now. They are condescending to their native guides, they massacre and enslave the ape-men, and clumsily and possessively name every new thing they see (e.g. "Lake Gladys"). They also commit what might be interpreted today as murder; of course, back then, killing "half-breeds" was a less troublesome matter.
Even more so than the 1925 film that it inspired, The Lost World captured here is that of the Euro-centric, white, classist male, who placed every new discovery in an ordered hierarchy of superiority, himself at the top. Conan Doyle's characters are so insufferably racist, specist and sexist that readers might long for them to tumble into the tarpits so as to leave no trace of themselves, their cigars, their mosquito netting or biscuit tins. Because it captures its era, the novel is, ironically, legitimately disturbing, for this type of explorer-exploiter is no more, but he certainly has modern-day heirs. The Lost World has lost all its original relevance, but in exchange has gained importance as a mirror for our own failings.
