Great Adventure

Haggard was a much better writer than the snobs gave him credit for. The dialogue is realistic - the language pure Victorian. The narrator of this selection is good and separates character's voices well. She is high adventure which misses only in the lack of detail about the trip home. It's a wonderful tale probably better heard than read. Most fantasy, science fiction, and adventure tales have lifted plot lines, characters, and even locales, from She. That alone makes it a must read.

She is easily better than almost any adventure story written since.

8 persone l'hanno trovata utile

The Dangers and Attractions of Removing the Veil

For its Victorian era, H. Rider Haggard's classic novel of romantic, lost world adventure She (1887) has some surprisingly open-minded views on marriage customs (morality being "a matter of latitude") and a few kinky hints of sex, including an erotic kiss and a nude woman bathing in a pillar of flame. Being a Victorian novel, it also contains a fair amount of racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism. But Haggard transcends his era. His creation of She-who-must-be-obeyed, AKA Ayesha or She, is complex: beautiful, powerful, irresistible, amoral, selfish, serpentine, undying, and loving, she could make the most inveterate misogynist swoon at her feet. And although Haggard's play with reincarnation is a little dodgy, his evocation of expanses of time (including what it would be like to live for thousands of years), his examination of the limits of human understanding (ever seeking and failing to remove the veil concealing the face of Truth), and his exploration of love (including parental, fraternal, and romantic in intense situations) are all compelling.

The novel begins slowly, as its "editor" (a Haggard-like writer of African adventures) recounts how he became acquainted with the simian H. Horace Holly and the Apollonian Leo Vincey so as to one day find himself in possession of a manuscript written by Holly about his and Vincey's extraordinary three-week experience with She-who-must-be-obeyed. And that manuscript itself begins with a fair amount of explanation by Holly as to how he became the guardian of the younger man.

It develops that Leo is descended from a line beginning 2,200 years ago with a Greek priest called Kallikrates, that back then Kallikrates and his Egyptian wife became lost in Africa and fell into the clutches of an undying white queen--She--ruling a savage civilization in some volcanic mountains, and that because She fell in love with Kallikrates but was spurned by him she killed him, leaving his pregnant widow alive to escape to bear their son in Greece. Ever since, each scion of the line of Vincey has been told about that murder to be encouraged to seek revenge on She.

That backstory established, the men soon find themselves in She's domain, in which she rules a race of light-skinned and Arabic-speaking cannibals who live in the extensive mausoleums honeycombed into an extinct volcano by an extinct ancient civilization, and the novel moves into higher gear. If the story is still sometimes slowed by long stretches of dialogue and monologue, it is also enlivened by passages of grandeur, beauty, horror, and suspense, as when Holly describes an ocean sunrise, a giant Ethiopian's face carved into a mountain peak, a subterranean pyramid of human skeletons, an embalmed human torch dance, a winged statue of the goddess of Truth, and an abyssal chasm with a slender spur of rock nearly reaching across it. Moreover, Haggard has Holly interpret the stunning phenomena he witnesses so as to illuminate aspects of the human condition like mortality and love. Here is an example of a sublime moment in Haggard's novel:

"It was a wonderful sight to see the full moon looking down on the ruined fane of Kôr. It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed glory. The white light fell, and minute by minute the quiet shadows crept across the grass-grown courts like the spirits of old priests haunting the habitations of their worship—the white light fell, and the long shadows grew till the beauty and grandeur of each scene and the untamed majesty of its present Death seemed to sink into our very souls, and speak more loudly than the shouts of armies concerning the pomp and splendour that the grave had swallowed, and even memory had forgotten."

Phenomena like the savage Amahagger residing in the mausoleums of a superior but extinct ancient race and using embalmed corpses as fuel and embalming slabs as dinner tables, are darkly wonderful.

Reader Bill Homewood has an appealingly deliberate, rich, and articulate voice for Holly's narration, as well as an unsettling pseudo Arabic one for She's. He enhances the reading experience.

The influence of She: A History of Adventure appears in the work of later writers, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, and even C. S. Lewis, e.g., the ageless and amoral witch-queen, the long forgotten empire and its ruins, the discovery by a white hero of a lost world or civilization, the power of love to transcend time, and the use of first person "manuscripts" and different languages to increase verisimilitude. . . She is worth reading.

4 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Excellent performance of SFF classic

Bill Homewood's performance is well-suited to Rider Haggard's adventure tale from the height of the British empire.

1 persona l'ha trovata utile

excellent

as entertaining as Verne. I have never heard of this writer before I'll look some more of his books.

Not my favorite Haggard book

I really disliked this book. the narrator was great, the story was just really meh. Haggard went back to the well one too many times with the Africa thing.

TERRIBLE!!!!

What disappointed you about She: A History of Adventure?

BORING and dated. So dated as to be completely offensive to everyone but old white men. Stopped listening at the third to last chapter after realizing it would never get better. If I could give it less than 1 star I would. DON"T WASTE YOUR TIME!

What do you think your next listen will be?

Heaven's Keep by William Kent Krueger

What didn’t you like about Bill Homewood’s performance?

The performance was average, the accents & female voices were annoying at best.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Nope. Simply the worst book I have ever encountered. No wonder no one I know has ever heard of it.

Fascinating on several levels

I read this book as a child. It was one of my first "adult" reads - I think I was about 10 years old. I still have my copy. When I saw it on Audible, I purchased it because I had never forgotten it. What a blast from the past. The language was that of my childhood - things we would never say or think now - all came rushing back.

I wonder if, in this modern age, this book will hold the reader the same way it did for me in the '50s. I also wonder if people who use phrases like "She who must be obeyed" realize that this book is the origin of the phrase. Wonderful escapism. Enjoy