Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World. 1912; Project Gutenberg, 2008.

We are fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories and have read some nonfiction by Arthur Conan Doyle as well, but we had never read Doyle’s other somewhat famous work of fiction The Lost World. Like many other people who have never read it, we knew it had something to do with explorers finding a remote region of the world where dinosaurs still existed.

Even though that last clause is a brief summary of the story, The Lost World is as much character driven as plot driven. Our narrator is a young London journalist named Malone. He wants to report on the curmudgeonly Professor Challenger who claims to have discovered a place in the remote Amazon jungle (the term rainforest had not been widely used in 1912) where supposedly extinct creatures lived on.

Circumstances lead Malone to join Challenger and two other Englishmen, a Professor Summerlee who is very skeptical of Challenger and a Lord Roxton who is known for his overseas adventures. Together they return to the Brazilian crater that has preserved some ancient species of plants and animals in isolation.

This is primarily a survival story. Yes the large reptiles create some conflict, but a lot of the survival is simply surviving the jungle trek to get to the location. The main conflict, though, is somewhat unexpected.

It is clear that Doyle and his characters are influenced by Darwin. What we have in this crater besides pterodactyls and plesiosaurs (in the crater’s lake) are ape-men. They resemble orangutans, but a little more intelligent and clearly living and warring in large social groups. The explorers use the overworked term missing link to describe these creatures.

I could not help thinking of The Return of Tarzan with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ version of ape-men in a remote African plain. Did Doyle “borrow” from Burroughs or vice versa? Considering that the two books came out within a year of each other, that seems unlikely. The missing link and “ape-men” were part of the zeitgeist back then, so it appears that each writer created his own take on the subject.

Doyle is a good storyteller. He understands all three types of conflict well: man vs. nature, man vs. man, and man vs. self. From someone who remembers the variety of monster movies from the fifties, superhero comics, and the various Michael Crichton stories, The Lost World seems less imaginative, though it was one of the first. Even with the science-fiction suspension of disbelief, parts seem a bit hard to believe.

This is the first of five Professor Challenger stories Doyle wrote (2 more novels and 2 short stories). He may have tried to create another series, but the Sherlock Holmes stories are simply superior. Doyle himself was an M.D. He gets Holmes. And so do most readers.

I suspect that fans of Tarzan might enjoy The Lost World, but probably find the Tarzan stories more fun. Unlike the timeless Holmes stories, The Lost World is, frankly, more dated. It is a light distraction and certainly gets us thinking once again about various actual historical mysteries concealed in the Amazon rainforest. It is perhaps an ancestor of many various lost world, dinosaur, and ape-men tales that have followed, though one must credit Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth with the popular genesis of the genre.