Review:The Lost World/Christopher Roden
This review of the book "The Lost World", by Arthur Conan Doyle was written by Christopher Roden and published in the The Parish Magazine (No. 12, april 1995).
This review presents Oxford's new edition of The Lost World as a reasonably priced and useful paperback, helped by Ian Duncan's introduction and a select bibliography. The reviewer is less persuaded by the pulpy presentation and by an introduction that seems to over-interpret what was meant as straightforward escapist adventure.
Review
- The Lost World
- by Arthur Conan Doyle
- with an Introduction by Ian Duncan
- Oxford Popular Fiction, 1995; xxiii+ 189pp; £4.99 ISBN: 0-19-283186-0
Reviewed by Christopher Roden
This, the second new edition of The Lost World to appear in recent months, forms part of the initial release of Oxford's new Popular Fiction series: classics which do not quite, in the true traditions of the World's Classics series, merit the label of classics. The series boasts, according to Oxford, 'some of the most talked-about works of British and U.S. fiction of the last 150 years-books that helped define literary styles and genres... which modern readers enjoy.' The 'classic' appearance is removed along with the 'classic' status, for the jacket illustrations for the series adopt the garish tones of a 1930s American pulp-magazine cover. For this volume, two of the story's intrepid adventurers appear to be escaping from a pursuing Tyrannosaurus Rex, a creature not written into The Lost World by ACD but no doubt there to capture the imagination of fans of the Jurassic Park which it preceded—and surpassed.
In his Introduction Ian Duncan explores the various symbolisms of ACD's story, and looks at possible events which inspired its composition, but one cannot help feeling that he reads a little too much into a tale which ACD intended to be escapism, pure and simple.
Unlike the Alan Sutton edition there is no further story to accompany The Lost World, but in addition to the Introduction there is a useful Select Bibliography. Price is more modest, too but there are a hundred pages fewer, emphasising once again the trend to charge higher prices for what are only mass-produced paperbacks.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
