King Solomon's Mines (Hardcover)

I grew up on the movie so it was quit a shocker to read the book. As stated in the beginning there are no petticoated women in this book. It is a men's adventure written by a man for men. You can not miss the hand of H. Rider Haggard as he has a unique sense of humor that pops up at the strangest times. And as with written stories this one is much more intricate than the movie adaptations. You will find many assumptions of the time such as any complex construction must have been built by white people and natives on their own may turn savage.

The story is told first person by Allan Quartermain. Nevil is off to make his fortune by finding King Solomon's lost diamond mines. Allan sends him a map to help. This is the last anyone heard from Nevil. Turns out that Nevil is really the estranged brother of Henry Curtis. Sir Henry Curtis now wants to make amends and he with his friend Captain John Good, bribe Allan Quartermain to take them across an endless desert and trough impassible mountains to an adventure that will hold you to the very end. Along with them is their self imposed helper Umbopa who carries a secret of his own.

An added plus is narration by John Richmond; He brings the characters to life and adds to the mystique that this story has been passed down.

The book is styled as a long chronicle written by safari-leader Allan Quatermain to his son, describing a hunt for the lost diamond mines of King Solomon in the heart of Africa. Haggard peppers the tale with nods to real life that go out of their way to convince us that everything we are reading is true--editorial comments purportedly added later, for example--and the result is a compellingly detailed read. It is clear that Haggard knew Africa well, and his framing of this knowledge within a focused and nicely spun-out plot pulls you right through the book to its climactic finale, which I should probably allow you, after you've traipsed across deserts and tamed native unrest with the narrator and his companions, to discover for yourself.

So, "King Solomon's Mines" is a well-constructed read, but another of its strong points, the humor that is so central to the story, forces a look at the bigger context. Haggard takes solid jokes (like Good's pasty white legs, for which he is assumed to be a god by the natives) and, like David Letterman, returns to them at intervals in a manner that always uses them in a new way but lets the reader think that he or she is on the inside, slyly being chucked on the shoulder by the narrator.

It's this penchant for humor that gets a little uncomfortable once you think about it, because you can't help but compare Haggard's novel here to another journey to the center of Africa written two decades later, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," which is conspicuously devoid of laughter unless it's the very evil kind. Haggard's novel is immensely entertaining--I don't want to deny that for a second--but it glosses over some very real problems that Conrad is more careful about: imperialism and its disastrous universe of consequences.

I probably shouldn't stand in judgment of Haggard for his take on and his playing to the racial politics of his day, but I'm going to do it anyway because Haggard was, in his day, one of the most widely read writers writing. Adventures like "King Solomon's Mines" set the bar for the British male for decades and, if it taught him to be a gentleman and fair-player, it also grounded this ethos in the belief that he was superior both socially and racially. Thus is it the gentlemanly westerners who manage to import due process into African law in this novel, and thus does Captain Good's native love-interest ultimately recuse herself from his affections because, as a white man, he is like the sun. And what can possibly be good enough to mate with the sun?, she asks. Disturbing, in retrospect.

This gripping adventure story gets four stars by virtue of its great plot and skillful spinning-out of that plot. It misses the fifth star because it buys wholeheartedly into the myths on which centuries of imperial violence were founded. And no matter how enjoyable this novel is, it's hard to chase those ghosts away.