H. Rider Haggard's "Allan Quatermain" Books

Somehow 2014 snuck up on me (though I was TOTALLY on top of Christmas this year…I just didn't look ‘round the corner to New Year’s) and I've found myself with a stack of books I've finished but still need to review. So with no more ado, here’s one of them:

I've been slowly reading H. Rider Haggard’s famous Victorian adventures, focusing on the series following the exploits of Allan Quatermain for now, though I’ll move on to other classic “penny dreadful” books such as She soon enough. I chose to start with the Quatermain novels because I’d heard of him as a child, watching Richard Chamberlain’s movie adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines with my parents and thinking it was the bees’ knees. (Sometimes I wonder if I was an odd little girl; instead of princesses—who are wonderful in their own way, I guess—I loved to read books which made me imagine drums in distant jungles, which is why Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was my favorite bedtime story and why even today I love sensational tales taking place in Deepest Darkest Africa.)

I’ll skip reviewing King Solomon’s Mines because a) most people know the general plot, and b) it isn't my favorite of the other books I've read thus far. I first read it via audiobook when I was in my early teens, and part of me honestly is still the teenage girl annoyed that there is no “plucky female love interest” in the actual book like there always is in the movie adaptations.

Not that Haggard completely leaves out women, or even treats them as peripheral characters.  Sure, a lot of the white Englishwomen characters he writes are “Mary Sue” perfect paragons of goodness, but the African women are more complex.  Take the titular character from Maiwa’s Revenge, the vengeance-driven wife of a tyrannical ruler who killed their son just so that he would have no heir to usurp him.  Or even better, the manipulative princess Mameena of Child of Storm whose destiny seems to be causing war between tribes in her unquenchable thirst for power. True, this means that Haggard’s complex female characters often are morally dubious (if not straight-out villains), but that seems to be a common flaw in most fiction even today. It’s hard to make good character complex without sacrificing that “goodness” by adding flaws the author fears the reader won’t forgive.*

“But that is what Englishmen are, adventurers to the backbone; and all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy.  ‘Adventurer’ – he that goes out to meet whatever may come.  Well, that is what we all do in the world one way or another, and, speaking for myself, I am proud of the title, because it implies a brave heart and a trust in Providence.” – Allan Quatermain

While analyzing the gender and race dynamics is interesting, it’s not the reason I read Haggard’s books. Yes, it’s morally edifying to scrutinize the characters and decisions, judging Victorian British imperialism from a vantage-point of the 21^st century, and noting that even Haggard seemed to question it (“Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.”). But sometimes one has to read a book because it’s just plain fun. Why does Quatermain always seem to discover yet another lost empire “from which no one has ever returned”? BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME THAT’S WHY. 

The best example of the “good fun” these books can be is The Ivory Child** The story starts out like most Quatermain books: with hunting. Before I get egged by PETA I’ll specify that that’s not the fun part, because we all know Quatermain would totally be in jail in present-day Africa, because he gets his living by killing elephants for their ivory.  So most of his stories start out with “I was hunting blah blah blah” and then some newbie hunter comes along, thinks Quatermain is inferior to them, and then Quatermain out-shoots them and they feel pretty sheepish until he finally introduces himself and they don’t feel so bad losing to the Great White Hunter and become BBF’s with him.

The Ivory Child starts this way, but it takes place in the English countryside. It soon goes from banal to bizarre: the group of main character meet in a country house, there’s some door-to-door Egyptian soothsayers that show up and do a seance where Quatermain dreams of this evil white elephant (Moby Dick, anyone?) going around killing children and ladies.  Then the Egyptian soothsayers do some voodoo stuff on the white English lady in attendance, making her sleepwalk and eventually kidnapping her because a moon-shaped birthmark on her chest means she MUST be the incarnation of Isis. 

Now, maybe it’s just me, but if I had a dream about an evil white elephant going around killing people, I’d probably say “Time to start poaching narwhals to get my ill-gotten ivory” and take up whaling. But not Quatermain.  He goes straight to Africa, where guess what tries to kill him for most of the remainder of the book?

“Man’s cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.  You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.  It is the one fixed unchangeable thing—fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal.  Human nature is God’s kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and what not, are turn in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.  But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.”

If The Ivory Child is (so far) the most fun of the Quatermain books I've read, the last installment is possibly the most profound. Here Haggard pulls out all the literary stops, proving that you can write an adventure book and write it well.  With lines like, “So short is our life; yet with space for all things to forsake us” (page 143), and a recurring theme of night and day (especially the two princesses in the obligatory Lost Kingdom*** who are respectively compared to the darkness of night and the dawn of day), Allan Quatermain is not as much an adventure as a retrospective, as an old and mortal hero looks back over his life and then forward toward its inevitable conclusion. 

Speaking of conclusions, this post is much longer than I intended.  Maybe as you’re reading this you’re wondering, “Hey, you say you read these just for fun, but then you go on forever about the themes of mortality and complex character analysis. So which is it? Do you recommend these books because they’re action-packed and fun, or are because of their profound themes?” 

To which I respond: Why can’t it be for both?

*Note to Authors: Readers aren't perfect. They’ll forgive your heroes if they aren't, either.

**Yeah, there are a lot of children in Haggard’s titles. I noticed it too.

***You'd think there wasn't enough room in Africa for all those lost empires.