The lost world

By the time Malone had finished describing his first encounter with the extraordinary, blustering Professor Challenger, there was, in my mind, only one actor to play the part. Brian Blessed! Picture him fresh from the set of The Black Adder, ditching his armour and donning his pith helmet, bellow and malevolent glare intact. Blessed was Challenger for me, throughout the rest of the book. A hearty, king-sized actor for a hearty, king-sized character.



And off we tramp into the vast, unexplored jungles of the Amazon, Professor Brian and his gang of intrepid, unfazed, courageous white men with guns (plenty of them), accompanied by the usual Negro servant of giant proportions and unbreakable loyalty, a couple of swarthy half-breeds nursing evil intent, and a bunch of Indian navvies to carry the provisions. What more does one need in a proper adventure story? Well, action of course, occasioned in this case by a bunch of hungry dinosaurs, and some aggressive anthropoids who are eventually rounded up and pushed off a cliff in the name of human primacy. Yay! The humans won! The course of destiny is corrected, and everybody goes home a hero.

I loved this book, like I loved King Solomon's Mines. It made me proud to be a white man of intrepid colonial descent. However I have to deduct a star, if only because the politically correct and culturally sensitive gender-non-specific global citizen of the 21st century within struggles with the idea that 56 (or however many it was) new species of Lepidoptera are worthy of scientific curiosity; but some rather defensive anthropoids are monsters that must be shot, speared and pushed off a cliff. It's all very Cortes. But I suppose in 1913 the sun still hadn't set on Conan Doyle's British Empire.