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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
Simply incredible writing! Genius story-telling.
Leo Vincey's father has left him a mysterious casket in his will, which can only be opened on his twenty-fifth birthday. When the day arrives, Leo unlocks it to discover ancient scrolls, a fragment of pottery marked with strange inscriptions - and a letter. Its contents reveal a mystery that Leo must travel all the way to Africa to solve, taking him on an adventure beyond his wildest imaginings.
Sailing across stormy seas to Zanzibar, Leo endures shipwreck, fever and cannibals attacks, before coming face to face with Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed: the beautiful, tyrannical ruler of a lost civilization. She has been waiting hundreds of years for the true descendant of her dead lover to arrive. And arrive he does - with terrifying consequences...
I picked this up as a result of finding myself watching an utterly ridiculous movie on TV that I'd come across while channel surfing. I only caught about the last hour, but the sheer ridiculousness and bad acting of it kinda sucked me in. Later, checking it out on IMDB, I discovered that it was based on a book, and decided to read the book. So here I am.
The book is... very different from what they chose to do with the movie. I can't speak to the first half of the movie, but, aside from some key plot elements, the second half bore essentially no resemblance. I can't entirely blame the movie people for doing that, since, for such an epic sort of story, very little actually happens. Mostly there's a hell of a lot of talking. But yeah. In the movie, all kinds of stuff happens before they even encounter Ayesha, which happens in the last, like, 45 minutes of the movie. In the book, very little, aside from a rough passage and attempted cannibalization, happens before they get to Ayesha about halfway through the book. And then the endless talking starts. Oy. Aside from this notable structural difference, there are also a variety of additions and alterations, but in the end, Ayesha dies, and the adventurers go on their merry way and eventually make it back home.
The writing in this book is actually very pretty, and downright poetic at times. For example:
The moon went slowly down in chastened loveliness, she departed like some sweet bride into her chamber, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars peeped shyly out. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and then the quivering footsteps of the dawn came rushing across the new-born blue, and shook the planets from their places. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded upon her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as the elusive wreaths of sleep brood upon a pain-wracked mind, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west spread the angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain top to mountain top, scattering light with both their hands. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious, like spirits of the just breaking from the tomb; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains beyond them; over those who slept in peace, and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or has breathed thereon. - p.68
That was the most striking example, I think, but there definitely were other passages with a similar feel to them. I don't normally like reading poetry, or excessive descriptions in novels, but I actually kinda dug this guy's style.
What I did not so much care for is the inherent racism of pretty much any book published in 1887. One has to take a certain amount with a grain of salt, because the unfortunate fact of the matter is that those were the prevailing attitudes of the time, but it's still, for my modern sensibilities, a little distressing to read some character's vocal distaste and distrust for the "black devils" or similar epithets. It's telling, too, the fact that although Ayesha is Arab, she's also explicitly described as a white woman. Like I said, a little distressing, but I don't really want to get into the debate right now of whether or not we should continue to consider old works of art that are blatantly offensive in their racism/sexism/whateverism, as still valuable because they're old and classic, or whether we should just let them die because the attitudes in them are so, well, offensive. In any case, I don't expect anyone to have their moral compass guided by H. Rider Haggard, so I'm not too worried.
Sailing across stormy seas to Zanzibar, Leo endures shipwreck, fever and cannibals attacks, before coming face to face with Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed: the beautiful, tyrannical ruler of a lost civilization. She has been waiting hundreds of years for the true descendant of her dead lover to arrive. And arrive he does - with terrifying consequences...
I picked this up as a result of finding myself watching an utterly ridiculous movie on TV that I'd come across while channel surfing. I only caught about the last hour, but the sheer ridiculousness and bad acting of it kinda sucked me in. Later, checking it out on IMDB, I discovered that it was based on a book, and decided to read the book. So here I am.
The book is... very different from what they chose to do with the movie. I can't speak to the first half of the movie, but, aside from some key plot elements, the second half bore essentially no resemblance. I can't entirely blame the movie people for doing that, since, for such an epic sort of story, very little actually happens. Mostly there's a hell of a lot of talking. But yeah. In the movie, all kinds of stuff happens before they even encounter Ayesha, which happens in the last, like, 45 minutes of the movie. In the book, very little, aside from a rough passage and attempted cannibalization, happens before they get to Ayesha about halfway through the book. And then the endless talking starts. Oy. Aside from this notable structural difference, there are also a variety of additions and alterations, but in the end, Ayesha dies, and the adventurers go on their merry way and eventually make it back home.
The writing in this book is actually very pretty, and downright poetic at times. For example:
The moon went slowly down in chastened loveliness, she departed like some sweet bride into her chamber, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars peeped shyly out. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and then the quivering footsteps of the dawn came rushing across the new-born blue, and shook the planets from their places. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded upon her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as the elusive wreaths of sleep brood upon a pain-wracked mind, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west spread the angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain top to mountain top, scattering light with both their hands. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious, like spirits of the just breaking from the tomb; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains beyond them; over those who slept in peace, and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or has breathed thereon. - p.68
That was the most striking example, I think, but there definitely were other passages with a similar feel to them. I don't normally like reading poetry, or excessive descriptions in novels, but I actually kinda dug this guy's style.
What I did not so much care for is the inherent racism of pretty much any book published in 1887. One has to take a certain amount with a grain of salt, because the unfortunate fact of the matter is that those were the prevailing attitudes of the time, but it's still, for my modern sensibilities, a little distressing to read some character's vocal distaste and distrust for the "black devils" or similar epithets. It's telling, too, the fact that although Ayesha is Arab, she's also explicitly described as a white woman. Like I said, a little distressing, but I don't really want to get into the debate right now of whether or not we should continue to consider old works of art that are blatantly offensive in their racism/sexism/whateverism, as still valuable because they're old and classic, or whether we should just let them die because the attitudes in them are so, well, offensive. In any case, I don't expect anyone to have their moral compass guided by H. Rider Haggard, so I'm not too worried.