H Rider Haggard

I must have read a few H Rider Haggard books when I was a young bloke at school - I was an avid user of the local library. Sometimes you just want to chill out with an easy to read ripping yarn, so in March 2020, I decided to revisit the author and downloaded the ebook version of She from Gutenburg and read it on my iphone over the course of a couple of weeks, when I had free moments. 

Here's what wikipedia says about the author.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was an English writer of adventure fiction set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential.

That sums it up pretty well. Books by him that you may have heard of include King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, She and its sequel Ayesha. His novels portray many of the stereotypes associated with colonialism, yet they are unusual for the degree of sympathy with which the native populations are portrayed. 

Other Lost World writers of the period included Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs. But while Burroughs' writing has been labelled as the pulp fiction of the time, Haggard's books stand the test of time more easily, although they have to be read in context - the context was the all encompassing Golden Age of the British Empire, where British people were the best and everyone else was a few rungs below in terms of sophistication, morality, etc, etc. 

As an aside, I reread a lot of Burroughs recently - see https://timsbestreads.blogspot.com/p/the-barsoom-series-by-edgar-rice.html.

Haggard's characters are still referenced. She's epithet "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is used by British author John Mortimer in his Rumpole of the Bailey series as the private name which the lead character uses for his wife, while Allan Quatermain was a template for the American character Indiana Jones. Haggard's writings have been turned into films many times - She has been adapted for the cinema at least ten times.

She, subtitled A History of Adventure, was published in book form in 1887 following serialisation in The Graphic magazine between October 1886 and January 1887. She was extraordinarily popular upon its release and has never been out of print.

The story is a first-person narrative which follows the journey of Horace Holly and his ward Leo Vincey to a lost kingdom in the African interior. They encounter a primitive race of natives and a mysterious white queen named Ayesha who reigns as the all-powerful "She" or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". 

She is a vivid example of what is now labeled "imperialist literature". As such, the story embraces concepts of race and evolution, especially notions of degeneration, racial decline and racial purity, prominent in the late Victorian period and at the turn of the century - ideas whose influence would shape the 20th century.

Ok, now for my comments!

I really enjoyed it and could not put it down once I had started. Haggard had great imagination and put it to good use here. I was disappointed to see so many negative reviews on Goodreads. It seemed to me that people were not willing to put the book into its Victorian Age context but wanted to review it against modern standards. That misses the whole point of reading an older book. For my part, highly recommended.

I have now downloaded the sequel Ayesha from Gutenberg and have started reading on my iphone.

Ok, it's 22nd August 2020 and I have finally finished Ayesha on my mobile phone Kindle app.

 

Written in 1905 (She had been written in 1887 - 18 years previously), this is a bigger book but, whereas I found She a rollicking tale, this was ponderous and uninteresting. It took considerable effort to get to the end of what was, in my mind, dribble of the first order. I must agree with the review of John in Goodreads:

It's probably the worst sequel of all time, apart from TRANSFORMERS 2. The story is dull and talky, the dialog is extremely stilted (like reading a high school kid trying to ape Shakespeare), and the main characters all behave like knuckleheads pretty much throughout. Very little about the plot makes any sense, and all the mystical reincarnation/destiny stuff is completely over-the-top and downright silly. It's going to be a long time before I can rid myself of the bad taste this book has left in my mouth.