How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert Lom in the unloved crevices of the TV schedule when only insomniacs or household spiders are deemed to be a risk.
I ask the question because this year marks 100 years since the death of Sir Henry Rider Haggard as he was then, having been knighted in 1919, apparently for services to the British Empire – and things have obviously moved on a bit since then. Except, of course, they haven’t changed in his famous tale of adventure and lost treasure in Africa. And that’s both its curse and blessing.
Yes, it’s undoubtedly a bit blokey. But it was written in 1884, and you’d hardly tune into The Real Housewives of New York City today expecting a profound study of masculinity
It’s a curse because while none of the principal white characters in the novel is actively racist – in fact, I think one can argue the opposite – they nonetheless espouse certain opinions and make observations that are broadly consistent with 1885, the year the book was published, and many of them have not aged very well. That was the year, don’t forget, that 14 mainly European countries (though their number included the USA and the Ottoman Empire) signed the Treaty of Berlin, which formalised the imperialist carve-up of Africa.
Yet, if anything, against the background of the Scramble for Africa and the prevailing views in countries like ours, aspects of King Solomon’s Mines seem almost rather progressive. For starters it includes an inter-racial love affair – more than 80 years before Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura’s on-screen smooch set pulses racing (and bigots raging) in 1968 America. But more than that, it’s clear that our narrator holds no truck with notions of innate white superiority. On the contrary I think he judges people as he finds them, regardless of race. Near the start, for instance, he states that he dislikes use of the ‘N-word’ and in a tangent about what makes a gentleman, remarks: ‘I’ve known natives who are… and I’ve known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain’t.’
A second charge against the book is that of misogyny. ‘I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history,’ the narrator, elephant hunter Allan Quatermain, tells us proudly near the start. The story itself is dedicated to ‘to all the big and little boys who read it’, which is the sort of thing that might possibly offend some sentiment today, along with the fact that the only important female character in the book is an aged woman name Gagool, a witch-like crone – bald and ‘vulture-headed’ is how Haggard describes her – who does a pretty good job of personifying evil.
So, yes, King Solomon’s Mines is undoubtedly a little bit blokey – the male gaze, if you will, glares vigilantly along the gun-sights at passing game. But then it was written in 1884, and you’d hardly tune into The Real Housewives of New York City today expecting to find a profound study of masculinity.
Of course, these aren’t the only ways that the book has dated. When, after all, did you last find a story in which the hero was named Allan? But if you can suspend your objections to these flaws, then you are in for a treat. Because 140 years on, King Solomon’s Mines remains what it was for readers back then – a tantalising, gripping, fast-paced adventure, boasting heaps of jeopardy which all keeps the pages turning. It includes an incredible, blood-thirsty pitched battle and then there’s a lost world with improbably shaped mountains (‘Sheba’s Breasts’), inspired by the author’s knowledge of southern Africa and fused with historic legends of Prester John – the mythical patriarch who ruled a lost Christian kingdom in Africa.
The outcome – once you weave in those mines of King Solomon – goes a long way to live up to the claim from the book’s publisher, who asserted it was ‘the most amazing story ever written’. Well, maybe. Certainly the story is every bit as brilliant as the diamonds and glittering treasures implied in its title. So it comes as no surprise to me that it sold 31,000 copies in its first year, nor that The Spectator’s reviewer apparently compared Haggard favourably to Jules Verne and Herman Melville. Nor is it surprise that the book spawned 17 further Quatermain short stories and novels, the last of which was published posthumously in 1927.
And unlike some of the other great titles of colonial derring-do from the late-Victorian and early 20th century – such as The Four Feathers by A.E.W Mason from 1902 or 1924’s Beau Geste by P.. Wren – there is an altogether livelier quality to Haggard’s prose and narrative voice.
Haggard, who served briefly as a colonial administrator in South Africa in the 1870s, wrote the book in just 13 weeks after making a bet that he could produce a better story that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which came out two years earlier. As well as the series, Haggard is credited with establishing whole new ‘lost world’ literary genre, while Quatermain himself – inspired by the real life big-game hunter Frederick Selous, whose statue (with rifle) is still on the main stairs at the Natural History Museum – has doubtlessly been reborn in many guises, not least as the bullwhip-cracking archaeologist Indiana Jones.
Haggard, of course, was also influential on generations of writers who followed him, including Ian Fleming, John Buchan and his creation Richard Hannay, and Graham Greene, who rated King Solomon’s Mines ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.
So I urge you, mark the centenary of Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s death by picking up a copy of King Solomon’s Mines. It’s not just for 1950s schoolboys. Yes, the elephant hunt in which eight or nine animals are butchered will turn your stomach – I think that’s the point – but the book as a whole is a gem. It’s dated, of course. How could it be otherwise? But if you can accept it for what it is, it’s actually a blast. What’s more, it’s also a window on to a vanished world in more ways than one, and that’s rather invaluable.
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