Book Battle!!! Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World vs Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot

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Here we have two books with identical premises. A group of travellers sets out on a journey and finds a place on Earth where dinosaurs still exist. Both books are roughly of equal length, and have been written in the same period (1912 and 1918).

I want to compare these two books, and explore what choices these authors made in the treatment of this idea. Where do they differ? And what effect does that have?

Ask yourself: if you were to write a “lost world” story, how would you go about it? Would you first collect a group of characters together, and then invent a reason for them to embark on a big journey, and then have them discover some hidden valley in the tropics? What choices would you make? What shape would you give the story and what motivations the characters? And what solutions did these authors arrive at?

Introduction of Characters and Impulse to Travel

The Lost World (1912) has the first person narrative of a young, insignificant journalist named Edward Malone. He interviews a prickly professor about an expedition to South America, where the professor had found a hidden plateau full of strange creatures a year before, but nobody believed him. Malone is also a spurned lover. His girl tells him that, frankly, he isn’t good enough for her. She wants to love a hero and bask in the glory of his accomplishments. This pushes Malone to join the professor in a new scientific expedition to the mysterious jungle. Quite a shitty reason to put your life on the line, but hey, we’ve all been young and foolish.

The overall tone is humorous and witty, and very much focused on the scientific nature of the trip. The characters are exaggerated. One member of the expedition is an Indiana Jones-type manly man named Lord John Roxton. He is the heroic adventurer, the hunter and sportsman, but he is a side-character. The naive young Malone is our point of view, and he idolises Roxton.

Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918) has a very different start. Compared to The Lost World, it is really wild and swashbuckling. Set during World War I, a German U-Boat shoots at an American liner in the English Channel. A man and a woman survive, are rescued by the British, who then manage to capture the submarine. The British Navy still shoots at them, however, and the German captives inside rebel as well. In the struggle, the U-Boat travels to unknown waters. Now there’s an adventurous start.

This story too starts with a man and a woman, but the woman he rescues from the water in the first chapter, and is with him all throughout the journey as his love interest. A beautiful girl named Lys la Rue. We don’t learn the name of the man. He’s simply the narrator, and Burroughs has no time for introductions. Where Doyle’s book has the young man growing up and learning a lesson that he shouldn’t run around as per the wishes of a girl to win her love, Burroughs’ story has more to do with simple wish fulfilment for the reader. 

The Journey and Entering the Lost World

The Lost World fast-forwards most of the journey and picks up the story as the team paddles down the Amazon in canoes and quickly arrives at their destination. It all happens really fast.

What both books do is make it very hard to enter the lost world, and the travellers have to navigate a dangerous passage into it. Doyle has the characters conquer a dangerous chasm, which works metaphorically as a portal to the underworld.

Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot eschews any notion of scientific understanding. The U-Boat is briefly taken over by the Germans and they sail towards Antarctica, where they happen upon an unknown island. Burroughs plops a tropical island right next to Antarctica. Then takes dinosaurs, mammoths and Neanderthals and throws them all together in a valley surrounded by cliffs. The U-Boat with Germans and Britons rides an underwater river through a cave and surfaces in the middle of this valley.

Exploring the Lost World

You know… this is actually the least interesting part to look at with regards to author choices. It turns out that simple-minded dinosaurs aren’t actually that interesting for creating drama! You can look at them, and run from them; that’s about it. Doyle arrives at a solution: throw in a tribe of ape-men! As Lord Roxton says: “Missin’ Links, and I wish they had stayed missin’”. The dinosaurs mostly exist in the background while a fight with the ape-men is at the centre of the story.

What’s strange is that both books have carnivorous dinosaurs that hop like kangaroos. Apparently that was the prevailing theory at the time.

Where Doyle introduces us to the wonders gradually, with a moment of beauty here and there, the moment that Burroughs’ U-Boat surfaces in the valley it is immediately besieged by a swirling, seething mass of reptiles. Dinosaurs mean nothing but danger and violence to him. There is no beauty in this novel.

Burroughs gets some drama from the distrust between the Britons and the Germans, and he too gives us ape-men: a whole series of them, in various stages of evolution. One of the ape-men kidnaps the girl, and much derring-do ensues. And our hero is of course irresistible for the ape-ladies.

My Personal Preference

Doyle’s The Lost World, by far. The story may be a bit straightforward and not as full of action as Burroughs’, but Doyle’s smooth and sardonic writing makes it a highly entertaining romp. The prickly professor Challenger is a hilarious character; one to be remembered. I also appreciated the effort to make the lost world at least somewhat believable, and the general focus on the scientific goals of the team.

Burroughs’ book is all action, all the time. It’s a rare chapter where someone doesn’t shoot someone else. A huge amount of stuff happens, but every plot point only takes a few pages. The book is almost written like a summary of a book. So much so that the main character doesn’t even get an introduction. All the other characters are cardboard cutouts. Dialogue is blunt and emotions are red-hot. The romantic tension between Mr main character and the girl is not interesting but uncomfortable. I thought it was a childish story. This is real pulp for teenagers, while Doyle’s style is much more sophisticated and easily enjoyable for all ages.

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