It is these reactions which make me believe that Hilton wrote more about the finding and loss of an ideal than the ideal itself. From Conway, the true protagonist, to his assistant Mallinson, the missionary Brinklow and the questionable Barnard/Bryant, each of the characters reacts differently after finding they’ve been kidnapped and even after they’ve reached Shangri-La.
Hilton’s characters were rather flat, but innovative for the time. The four main characters are kidnapped and taken to Shangri-La, located in the valley of the Blue Moon, under mysterious circumstances, and each has their own ah-ha moment. However, the novel isn’t really about Shangri-La, it’s about the search for greater truth, the search for what was lost. If you make it past this bit, you see experience the (after the publication of this novel) legendary Shangri-La.Īs I read the novel I wondered where the legend of Shangri-La originated and according to Encyclopedia Britannica the meaning of it as a “remote, utopian land” derives from this novel. The novel, however, was well written and interesting enough if you can get past the first somewhat rather dull ‘old boys club’ sitting around a table rehashing their youth bit. There were so many additions that I was rather confused throughout. I think you could say the film is ‘loosely’ – if even that – based on the book. I just finished watching the film and as usual, the book was much better. The idea that precious things, such as beauty, or even texts and histories, would be lost in such cataclysm, was also central to the television series “Lost.I read this book for our library book group, Books into Films. In Lost Horizon, it is suggested that utopia (Shangri-la)–peace, happiness, and longevity–inhabits a Tibetan lamasery high in the mountainous wilderness, but the book’s idealism became overwhelmed in the rhetoric of war happening in real life. One such motif was the idea of a lost paradise that held some sort of magical quality about it that everyone was just dying to get to, if they only knew the place existed in the first place. I took a special interest in the book when watching the television show “Lost,” which had numerous mythological and literary (and other) references in it, including to Lost Horizon.
Though not really an unpopular book in need of rescue, it is quite old and probably not as widely read today as it was when it was published in 1933. I have this book on Kindle, but can’t pass up such a classic hard copy in good shape.
I was happy to find this old book at the Value Village in Burquitlam.
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