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Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (​22 May Machine Professor Challenger #4 by Arthur Conan Doyle annotated - Kindle Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month?
Table of contents

The seventeen Round the Fire Stories cannot be brought to account by modern categories. Although Doyle was not born until Poe was ten years dead, many of Doyle's stories, like Poe's, belong to an undifferentiated precursor of today's more specialized genres: detective, mystery, horror, intrigue. For reasons I hope to make clear, it is important to note that two of these stories involve the materialization of spiritual beings, including one ghost.

Doyle has only one narrative voice. But it is a charming voice. Of course since Doyle is a writer we expect he has a facility with language above the norm, but as he must have meant to be understood we know the norm was once higher than it is now.

Professor Challenger & The Disintegration Machine

This was a time in which the opposite of "gravity" was "levity" and not "antigravity," and words like "animadvert" and "lucubration" might not send every reader in search of a dictionary. One gets past the feeling that all of these stories are told by Watson. But if several of the stories are taken at one sitting the narrators run together. Both among the narrators and the other characters we have a number of young, struggling medical men who remind us that a career in medicine has not always implied a great income, and we have several examples of upper-middle-class youth who have fit themselves for life as gentlemen of independent means and who, when their expectations come to nothing, find themselves unfit for any other occupation—this must have been a fairly common situation as the empire began to settle a bit on its foundations.

No one here is in any sense comparable to Holmes, nor is any really distinctive character wanted. For the most part these are supposed to be ordinary people put in odd, decidedly peculiar, or bizarre situations. One can easily imagine these stories were written by someone other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it is altogether desirable to so imagine. It is the shadow of Holmes rather than any defect in these stories that accounts for their obscurity.

The publisher's title is misleading. Besides "When the World Screamed" the volume contains only one story and the rest is a novel. The subtitle is more accurate; Professor Challenger appears in both of the stories and in the novel. Challenger is supposed to be a character to rival Holmes and perhaps precisely for this reason he was Doyle's favorite.

Challenger is a gentleman scientist of enormous intellect, but we have little evidence of his mental powers.

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For Holmes we have not only the report of his monograph on cigar ash, but also numerous demonstrations of his deductive powers—at least one tour de force per episode. For Challenger we have only reports of his papers. All the evidence we see of Challenger's intellect is a slight ruse. This is most unsatisfactory. There is nothing in Challenger suggestive of the almost Continental darkness in which Holmes broods. Challenger is all too positive, absolutely positive. Challenger is domineering, demanding, stubborn, argumentative, abusive, and unpleasant.

That he is slightly less so with his intimates hardly makes him endearing; at his most familiar he is, by our standards, cold and reserved. Challenger is, in a word, English. Doyle seems well aware that Challenger cannot be swallowed in large doses.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Challenger appears suddenly with the violence of a summer storm and, to the relief of the reader, disappears just as quickly. For the most part we are entrusted to a young journalist, who sounds very much like Watson and also like Doyle. The Land of Mist , which is the novel, follows the young journalist's viewpoint, but evidently the novel is told by Doyle in propria persona—an exceptional if not singular manner of proceeding.

I assume that it is a publishing accident—that these three Challenger works happened to fit into one volume—but it is remarkable that each of these works presents a concept entirely familiar to New Agers.

In "When the World Screamed" we are introduced to the thought that the earth may be a living organism. Today this concept is call Gaia, for such is a planet described, if memory serves, by Asimov, which can be thought of as a single organism in the same way that an ant colony can be thought of as a single organism; all of the beings on the planet and indeed of the material of the planet is alive and interconnected. New Agers say this is really the situation on Earth and Gaia is not allegory, but literal fact.

Doyle's vision is not so refined. He means the planet is really alive, but we live upon its outer shell as tiny parasites, the earth as unaware of us as we are of its life. So Challenger proves it to be.

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This is, of course, nonsense even by the geology of Doyle's day—as was the premise of The Lost World, a previous Challenger novel which supposes that prehistoric creatures have survived in some isolated area. That Challenger may live in a parallel universe is a possibility to be borne in mind.

Anyone who prefers Holmes—I think I have made my sympathies clear—is bound to be disappointed by this story. In Challenger stories, at least in these, everything is as it purports to be. Channeling, as it is called in the New Age, is the subject of the novel. In Doyle's time it was a Christian sect known as Spiritualism, a sect which remains a living religion barely—I pass a little whitewashed Spiritualist church as I go to the post office.

The problem is that The Land of Mist is a perfectly serious piece of Spiritualist propaganda. I resisted this conclusion as I read the novel. Perhaps the Appendices were an attempt at verisimilitude, like the epistolary form of Dracula. That position can be maintained for one or two or even three chapters. By then it is clear that Doyle is not kidding. Spirits of course appear throughout literature, both good and bad.

Sometimes they are exposed as utter frauds. Other times whether they exist is left an open question—we do not doubt Hamlet and MacBeth see the ghosts, but we may, if we wish, make the case that Hamlet and MacBeth are hardly in objective frames of mind and that other reports are merely rumors among the ignorant. Even when the spirits are supposed to be actual no materialist can object.

The spirits are real for the sake of the story. The author may have to convince various skeptical characters. But he does not undertake to convert the reader to Spiritualism. From the Round the Fire Stories we know that Doyle knows how to present spiritual beings in the conventional manner. There Doyle presents his materializations and the reader may take them or leave them. But to convert the reader to Spiritualism is precisely what Doyle attempts in The Land of Mist —some passages are as unreadable as any of the polemic orations in Ayn Rand although, mercifully, Doyle is very much briefer.

Evidently in his dotage Doyle desired very much to believe in a life hereafter and to have evidence that there were such a thing. That he found evidence sufficient to convince himself is hardly surprising—he is by no means the first old man to do so. Doyle needs no further excuse for coming to believe as he did, but it ought to be said that he had survived long enough to see that science had not the power, after all, to bring about a secular millennium. He speaks of ether as if it were fact because he no longer bothers to keep abreast of science.

We suspect he, like his character Challenger, was the lukewarm kind of materialist who never could quite accept the implications of materialism and who therefore made a faith of science. He is thoroughly disillusioned with science as anyone must be who tries to make it bear what it cannot. As Orwell counts Uncle Tom's Cabin the foremost work of good bad literature, The Land of Mist cannot be discounted as a good bad novel solely on the grounds that it is propaganda. We may wonder whether Stowe's novel did not become good bad literature only after its issue was resolved; indeed Orwell has not, to my knowledge, cited any good bad book in English that deals with a controversy still living as he writes.

The Lost World from Amazon

Laying channeling aside, for it is a phenomenon that admits of several explanations other than conscious fraud and does not claim to materialize spirits apart from the body of the medium so far as I know, the issue of The Land of Mist is nearly as dead as slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin is bad literature because it is melodramatic. Stowe cannot pass up a chance to manipulate the reader's sentiments. Her plot is ridiculous and her characters are caricatures.

But these things, which make bad literature, make excellent propaganda and are also precisely the stuff of good bad books.

Plot Summary: "The Lost World" | Owlcation

Stowe, viewed in retrospect—Orwell's vantage and ours—had also a rare combination of advantages: she was right and she was on the prevailing side. Doyle, on the other hand, seems to want to convince us intellectually. At least two of the psychic researchers he introduces—Camille Flammarion and Charles Richet—were actual persons, alive when the novel was first published.

No doubt so were some of the other characters, although too obscure to be recognized today. Given that British libel laws were—as they are—draconian, we may be sure that Doyle proceeded with the imprimatur of orthodox Spiritualism. The result simply will not work as good bad literature. Manipulation, parlor tricks, the petty frauds of table-turning are anathema to a Spiritualist, who wants above all to be taken seriously.

Yet it is only by the literary equivalent of those things that Doyle might have succeeded. Several episodes are not satisfactorily resolved—-one would very much like to know, for example, what the apparition and the Anglican cleric had to say to each other in the haunted house.


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Doyle would have told us, sooner or later, if he had known he were writing fiction. Evidently he does not want to get beyond his sources. Spiritualists, we are told, have had unfortunate experiences with the press that have convinced them to confine their claims to what they believe to be fact. In spite of being sure what Doyle is about, a reader more familiar with Holmes may plow on in the hope that Challenger, materialist as he is in the beginning, will expose the fraud and explain all of the phenomena.

That is what Holmes would do and it is no doubt why Doyle has not employed the more popular character to promulgate the ideas he wishes to popularize. But as I have said, in a Challenger tale, all is as it seems. The cliffs to the plateau itself prove to be apparently unscalable, but an adjacent pinnacle turns out to be climbable, and moreover, has a tall tree which can be cut down and used as a bridge, which allows the four explorers to cross to the plateau.

However, they are almost immediately trapped on it, thanks to the treachery of one of their luggage-porters, Gomez: who, as it turns out, is a former slaver whose brother had previously been killed by Roxton during his anti-slavery activities. Gomez takes his revenge by dropping the tree off the cliff, stranding the explorers on the plateau. Gomez himself is subsequently killed by another porter, a negro ex-slave named Zambo, who remains loyal to the party: but the latter is unable to do much more to help, other than send some of the company's supplies over by rope.

Whilst investigating the wonders of the lost world, discovering many plants and creatures thought to be extinct, they narrowly escape an attack from pterodactyls. Although barely escaping with their lives, Roxton takes great interest in nearby blue clay deposits. At night a ferocious dinosaur is about to break through the thorn bushes surrounding their camp; Roxton averts disaster by bravely dashing at it, thrusting a blazing torch at its face to scare it away.