King Solomon's Mines

Overview: An exciting adventure that has clearly been a strong influence on many later works. Allan Quatermain leads an expedition to track down a missing man, discovering ancient wonders and righting wrongs along the way. While obviously a book of late 19th Century Europe it tries hard to be forward thinking and really works to be an explicitly anti-prejudice book, with very mixed success.

Longer Review: I've known about this book as long as I can remember, but the synopsis in my head was:

Posh guy heads into Africa, tells some funny natives what's what and grabs some diamonds.

That really did not interest me at all.

Yet again and again I've seen this book listed as a foundation for all sorts of genres, and I really find that reading such foundational works increases my appreciation of later works. So I finally bit the bullet and started reading the posh guy in Africa book.

Straight away I was surprised, the main character is Allan Quatermain, a white British professional hunter in Africa. He actually not all that posh, he's basically the guide for the posh blokes who want to show how manly they are by mowing down the local fauna with hand held artillery.

That wasn't the surprise though, the surprise was when, early on, Allan states quite explicitly that he refuses to use the “N-“ word for Africans. He says a better word would be “Gentleman” as he's met more Africans worthy of that term than white men.

For a book from the 1880s that really surprised me, and suddenly made the book far more interesting - where was this plot going?

Avoiding spoilers, the basic plot is that the Englishman Sir Henry Curtis approaches Allan and hires him to accompany him on an expedition to find his brother who is lost in the African interior. Allan and Sir Henry, accompanied by Sir Henry's friend Mr Good and an African servant called Umbopa head off to find him, travelling into unknown territory across deserts, frozen mountains and braving lost civilisations.

Umbopa at first seems to be a classic “tough native” but rather rapidly develops into a major character who breaks a lot of the stereotypes. The author has Allan (who sees himself as open minded) shocked at various points, but has him come to first respect Umbopa, and then value him as a dear friend.

That's just the spoiler-free first third of the book, things get a bit more epic and the Umbopa character gets even more interesting, but that would be giving away too much.

Instead I will first address the question of how influential I think this book is. I know that people have been asked to write essays on this book, but these are just my uniformed impressions.

All I can say is that there are huge parallels in later works, both thematically and in specific events. In a general sense, the mission into to explore strange new lands, to seek out lost treasure, to find new civilizations and to boldly go where no (white) man has gone before had a big influence on the later “lost world” books, the 20th century “planetary romances” and what we often call “portal fantasies” these days. That's in addition to the obvious 20th century “rip roaring adventures” aimed at young boys in the days when all boys were expected to want to grow up to become soldiers, or at least kill things like civilised gentlemen.

What really stuck me however were the serious parallels with Tolkien. I'll keep it vague to minimise spoiler tags, but you can skip this paragraph if you are sensitive. First up - A big battle involving multiple regiments attacking from different sides taking place in front of a mountain containing ancient mines and secret passages the rightful heir returned to claim his birthright a brave axe wielding hero charging into battle and the main character surviving by being bopped on the head? Holy smokes! Is this The Hobbit or what? This isn't the only part that had me feeling the Tolkien vibes. When they were crossing the misty mountains it felt very Caradhras-ish, then there's the Return of the King (King Umbopa/Ignosi, not Elvis) and of-course the mines are very redolent of Moria, though blessedly Balrog-free. That's how it struck me at least.

Before I get into more serious stuff I have to mention the concept of the truthful English Gentleman that is mentioned a few times. Right at the start Allan spells out that he always tells the truth and that he looks down on people who tells tall tales, but throughout the book Allan lies through his teeth whenever it is useful "Don't touch my equipment, it is cursed", or he finds it just plain funny "That champagne was white man's greatest medicine, you're going to die" - harsh dood. The thing is right at the end there's a big speech in which a key part is that English Gentlemen never lie despite the fact that this is Ignosi speaking who has literally been watching them lie through their teeth pretending to be actual space aliens who can magic the moon into oblivion. Evidence suggests that English Gentlemen occasionally tell porky pies.

Finally I have to ask how this book that opens denouncing the N- word succeeds in being prejudice-free. Is it really anti-racist? I would say it is far less racist than I was expecting, I think the author tried very hard to keep it free of intentional racism. In this I don't count showing some African characters as servants or even servile - that's just a useful reminder of how messed up society was (I'm aware we're pretty messed up today too). What I note is that while Haggard allowed African characters to have the full range of human attributes from noble to cruel, wise to foolish, handsome to ugly, brave to cowardly - just as he does his European characters, he does have unfortunate preconceptions. Possibly it's just semantics, but I was taken aback at how he could describe what are essentially organised towns with planned street layouts and compare them with “civilisation”. Seriously - these “savage” towns have a grid layout. That's town planning. Ever looked at a map of “civilised” London? As for “savage”, try experiencing the M25 at rush hour. I digress. I am impressed that Haggard clearly tried hard to show Africans as equal to any Europeans, but he clearly could not escape the unconscious preconceptions or language of his time.

While we are talking prejudice... These guys walk over Sheba's Breasts and spend the night in the left nipple. They actually call it the left nipple. At length, totally straight and serious. Sheba's Breasts are two misty mountains, the mist being described as her dress or clothing. So these guys effectively walked up her skirt. Seems...just wrong...seriously was this OK even in the 1880s? Just...what? I don't think I need say more.

There are two real issues of prejudice in the book. One is sexism. Haggard doesn't say anything bad about women, but they aren't exactly a major part of the story. Aside from window dressing there are three female characters, these are (I kid not) a maiden, a mother and a crone. Of these the mother exists only in flashbacks and the crone is presented as utterly evil and practically genderless (they are not 100% sure of her species for a while). That leaves the maiden who is presented as intelligent, brave and capable - awesome, except they fridge her. To put it another way, she gets killed off just to help Mr Good's character development. What made it even harder for me was that it seemed pretty obvious that her brutal murder was actually a good thing because if Good had been stupid enough to marry her it wouldn't have gone down well in London society - because her skin was the wrong colour. I'd actually been forgiving any imperfections in the book up until that point because, seriously a mixed race wedding for love in the 1880s in which the woman was a capable intelligent individual? Not to be sadly.

The other example of prejudice was classism. When Umbopa starts speaking to Sir Henry as an intelligent equal, Allan is shocked, but it has nothing to do with the colour of Umbopa's skin, to his credit Allan doesn't really care about that, but Umbopa is a servant and he is speaking to Sir Henry! That this is a class issue, not a race issue is made clear it turns out OK because Umbopa was of noble blood after all, so thats OK then. To Haggard's credit I believe he was trying to say that African nobility is just as good as European, but he did it in a way that says that lower classes should know their place.

I have to wrap this up. What this a fun adventure? Yes. Did it try to be anti-racisim? Yes, it tried. Was it free from prejudice? No, despite the author's conscious intentions has racist preconceptions, examples of clear classism and doesn't involve females as anything other than plot devices. The thing is I really don't think Haggard would have been aware of any of that. This was a “boy's” story, of course there are no significant girls. The girls are all off doing sewing. As for classism, that's just the way things are, doesn't everyone agree that people should know their place?

I think that is the lesson I took from this, and I'm very glad I read this book. I think Haggard was very forward thinking for his time and tried hard to covey that forward thinking in his book. He was let down by the ideas and prejudices he didn't know that he had - because they were so normal they were invisible. Normal does not equal good. Haggard didn't know he was being prejudiced even as he tried not to be.

I don't think I'm prejudiced...

but perhaps it's time to look in the mirror just in case.