A review by paul_cornelius
The Holy Flower by H. Rider Haggard

4.0

A return, in many ways, to its late Victorian origins, this volume in the Quatermain series seems to relish in adventure and fantasy for their own sake. At the same time, Haggard also returns to a sense of Victorian morality, especially as regards the issues of killing and justice. Odd, because the book first appeared in serial form just before the carnage of the First World War. In the book format, it was published during the war, in 1915. So here we have a work reaching back into the last century to find its bearings. Even more so, just a few years later, the Roaring Twenties would blow the doors off their hinges and usher in a cultural shift so radical that the pages Haggard penned, especially about empire, marriage, murder, and law, would come to be seen as quaint and out of place. Lucky for those reading the novel, now, that they can put themselves into two pairs of shoes--those of the readers whose world was about to be upended by World War I and the cultural cacophony that followed and those of the readers nostalgically looking towards the past, as Quatermain himself does in this volume and as the aging Haggard also was no doubt doing.

*One more note. Again, it appears that Haggard is making use of James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough to lace his work with allusions to taboos in place in far away lands. I also wonder if Merian C. Cooper read this book about this time or soon thereafter. Some resemblance to King Kong fills the novel.