An exciting account of a jungle expedition’s encounter with living dinosaurs, written with the same panache exhibited in the author’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. This 1912 novel, the first installment of the Professor Challenger series, follows an eccentric paleontologist and his companions into the wilds of the Amazon, where they discover iguanodons, pterodactyls, and savage ape-people.
This short novel – it’s really a novella — was more interesting to me for what it said about the colonialist mentality of the 19th/early 20th centuries than for the story itself. From the angle of pure prose and character generation, Conan-Doyle has written much better; for sheer imagination, I’m not sure he ever went this far. The story of explorers who discover a plateau in the Americas which dinosaurs still live and subhuman primates terrorize a primitive population of humans, it goes unintentionally far in showing how the lust for discovery often led to the total destuction of that which had been discovered. Nobody in the novel ever questions the havoc they are wreaking on the Lost World or considers simply leaving it be: no, it must be explored, its beasts shot, dissected, stuffed and mounted, and its subhuman population massacred and its survivors made slaves. After that, bring on the next wave of “explorers” who will soon have it “civilized” in no time. I found this unquestioned need to rip everything apart and stick the pieces in formaldahye — or on a curio shop shelf — fascinating and appalling. It may be that Conan-Doyle meant some of this as societal criticism, but that’s probably just wishful thinking on my part.
Easy to award this five stars… another freebie worth the read… ACD is a writer I would choose to read again, maybe I’ll try some Sherlock Holmes… (and I did… read all of them)
READING PROGRESS
March 3, 2016 – Started Reading
March 3, 2016 – Shelved
March 16, 2016 – Finished Reading
This book made me wonder what other ideas Michael Chrichton had stolen from other early authors. Page turning, old fashioned adventure, not unlike beloved adventure serials. Surprise yourself with the things early novelists had thought of before modern writers and what they knew/didn’t yet know about our world. Great stuff.
One of the two original, popular “dinosaur” novels.
By Charles van Buren on May 2, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
This review of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD is from the Amazon Classics edition, December 5, 2017. Reviews of this edition also appear at the Amazon listing for a different edition published by Amazon Digital Services, March 30, 2011. Appearing under both lisings are multiple reviews of Michael Crichton’s THE LOST WORLD. For instance, of the 35 one star reviews listed on, May 1, 2018, 25 are clearly reviews of the Crichton book. Only 2 are clearly reviews of Doyle’s novel. I have now discovered that my review and many others of Doyle’s book appear under at least one of Amazon’s listings for Crichton’s book.
Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD was originally published as a magazine serial in 1912. It was the second story of modern humans meeting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals to meet with widespread public appreciation. The first was Jules Verne’s 1864, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Doyle’s book was followed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, in 1918. Over the following years, Burroughs wrote several more “dinosaur” novels. Doyle, Verne and Burroughs are obviously the main forerunners of Michael Crichton’s JURASSIC PARK, books and movies.
Doyle’s book has a team of four European explorers trapped on the South American plateau of the lost world. SPOILERS AHEAD: there are dinosaurs chasing humans but not devouring them. With but four explorers, Doyle would have run out of characters. Instead, the book concentrates on the many dangers which confront the explorers, character development, suspense and acrimonious arguments within the scientific community. As one would expect from Arthur Conan Doyle, the novel is well written, but don’t expect Sherlock Holmes meets dinosaurs. Several movies and TV programs have been based on the book. Some pretty good and some pretty silly. My favorite is Irwin Allen’s 1960 movie with Michael Rennie and Claude Raines. It does not follow the book very closely but Rennie, Raines and Jill St. John make up for a lot of the sometimes silly alterations of the plot.