Last month, Edinburgh has been celebrating the life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle: as part of UNESCO’s City of Literature campaign, there have been all kinds of things going on, ranging from poetry trails to free copies of The Lost World (not to forget a Writers’ Bloc show, possibly the only UNESCO-affiliated event ever to involve Nazi dinosaurs). There is even a collaborative storytelling adventure going on, including material from Jasper Fforde.
Arthur Conan Doyle was a strange man who, in addition to being the creator of that rather famous deerstalker-hatted chap, had a tumultuous friendship with Houdini, got obsessed with spiritism and fairies, possibly perpetrated the Piltdown Man Hoax and was,perhaps,involved (along with a mummy curse) in the death of a man called Bobbles.
I learned the last fact in one of the concluding events of the campaign, a panel called ‘Lost Worlds’, featuring China Miéville, Roger Luckhurst and Adam Roberts (chaired by Stuart Kelly), discussing The Lost World. The panel was very entertaining throughout, ranging from topics as diverse as gender in science fiction, 20th Century utopias and imperialism, the Scottish identity in the book and Darwinism vs. social Darwinism.
I was fascinated by the panel’s conclusion that The Lost World itself is a book out of time, a self-conscious reference to earlier Victorian boys’ own adventure novels. (Written in 1912 and supposedly set in the same year, things like aeroplanes that would presumably make Maple White Land much more accessible are notably absent.)
The panelists kept the discussion at a somewhat scholarly level, to the disappointment of a lady in the audience who had brought her 13-year-old son. To be fair, dinosaurs were not discussed very much, and there are not that many in the book, contrary to what one might expect. (Andrew Wilson, of course, remedies this in his stirring sequel.)
Adam Roberts did note that perhaps one reason why children are fascinated by dinosaurs is that they are creatures of a different scale — and being a child involves a lot of interaction with strange beings much larger than oneself.
Inspiring stuff, and evidence to the fact that in spite of its racism, imperialism and “just being completely gay” (to quote Roger Luckhurst), The Lost World is a remarkable book that that should be read.