The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

'The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere.'

My father was born before television was invented, and I have never known a world without it.  I once asked him what it was like before television.  He said they had radio instead, and he made this observation: with television, you are presented with the pictures as well as the words and sounds; with radio, all you had were the words and sounds, and everything else had to be filled in by your own imagination.  He said this made the scary stuff far scarier than anything you can see on TV, such is the power of imagination.  

Of all the things he heard on the radio, the scariest was a dramatisation of The Lost World, and he said that he still had vivid memories of the pictures other people's words had conjured up in his imagination.

There is a lot to be scared about in this novel: wild Amazonian natives, murderous bandits, river rapids, sheer cliffs, ravenous dinosaurs, evil ape-men and a rampaging professor of archaeology. The story is simple enough: the scientific community guffaws at Professor G.E. Challenger's claims of having discovered an isolated plateau somewhere in the Amazon basin where Jurassic dinosaurs survive to this day (1912), and he has to return there in order to bring back concrete evidence and clear his name.

It's a story that could not credibly be told nowadays, not with the globe having been thoroughly explored and surveyed on land and from space.  All the blank spaces on the map, big and small, have been filled in, and there is little room for romance (except in the imagination).

So if you are in the mood for an old-style ripping yarn, and if you can overlook the racist subtext in the novel, then The Lost World is one of the better ones - Sir Arthur knows how to tell a tale.  Like my father, I enjoyed allowing his words to stir my imagination.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'

Well, at least that is what the mothers and daughters in the town of Meryton believe; and when the affable Mr Bingley, young, rich and single, moves into the neighbourhood, the mothers want him for their son-in-law and the daughters want him for their husband.

Mr Bingley has brought his friend Mr Darcy with him. Darcy is far richer and more handsome  than Bingley and just as single. He's a dream come true for the ladies of Meryton, and then he opens his mouth.  It quickly becomes a truth universally acknowledged that Darcy is a self-opinionated and bumptious snob.  Who would want to marry such a man?  Certainly not Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a solidly respectable country gent.  She says of Darcy:

I believe, Ma'am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.

And with these words Elizabeth seals her fate.  All we need do now is wait and see which path she and Darcy will take to the wedding chapel together.

In the course of the novel we get to see the little world of the Bennets and the people who move in and out of their circle - some of them endearing, some repulsive, and some of ambiguous personal merit, but all very memorable and well drawn.  It is to Austen's great credit that readers can easily immerse themselves in the story and come to care for the people they meet in the pages.

Pride and Prejudice gives us insight into the world of the English rural gentry in the early nineteenth century, and the reader is scarcely made aware that England had been at war with Napoleon's France for the better part of a decade.  No, the novel strictly confines itself to an examination of the manners and morality of that small slice of English society in a diverting way.  And why not?  Diversion is good when it is this entertaining.

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

When I misspent my youth I read a lot of The Mighty Thor comics.  It was my favourite of all the Marvel comics then available, and I liked the mixture of faux mythology, magic and swashbuckling. I saw the first movie in the Thor franchise in the cinema and enjoyed it very much.

Thor: The Dark World is not so nearly a successful vehicle as its predecessor.  There is a bad guy, Malekith the Dark Elf, who has the motive and opportunity to destroy the universe.  What a pity the character is given neither the charisma nor the intrinsic power to match his grand scheme.  In short: the baddie is boring and oddly impotent, unlike Loki (the arch-villain of the previous movie) portrayed with great likability and subtlety by Tom Hiddleston.

Here's the thing:  whenever Loki appears, the film becomes interesting; in his absence, things quickly become dull and plodding.  Kat Denning and Jonathan Howard provide some welcome light comic relief at times in their roles of Darcy and Ian, while Stellan Skarsgard's character Eric Selvig is put through an unbecoming vaudeville escapade by the scriptwriters.

Also jarring was the predominance of high technology and the lack of light in the action scenes.  The thing about Asgardians is that they are the possessors of elemental god-powers, but they rarely use them in the film; and Malekith has a suite of magical powers which don't get used either.  No, what we get is spaceships and ray-guns on one side and swords and flying boats on the other.  And it all happens in a murk so deep it is very difficult to discern what action is actually happening

If you haven't seen the first Thor movie, I recommend it as a solid action movie with one of the great baddies - Tom Hiddleston's Loki.  Thor: The Dark World is perhaps mandatory viewing in that it will be the prelude to matters to be raised in subsequent Marvel movies.  I understand that there will be a third movie in the Thor franchise.  All I can say is: guys, more magic and more light next time.

The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft

No desire have I to recount the horrors I have endured in reading a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, and yet I feel that I must - not for my own sake, for I am lost, but for those who may read these words of mine and, having done so, still harbour hopes of sleeping an untroubled sleep.

For myself, I am now only too aware that there are nameless forces with names like Yog-Sothoth, eldritch entities powerful and malign, waiting to issue into this gloomily adjectival world of ours from dimensions dark and numberless beyond the count of numbers.  

Should they succeed - and who knows how many of the foolish and degenerate among us are willing to open the portals on their behalf, whether for motives of power or of vain vanity - then there will tentacles, lots of tentacles, and rats, and noisome smells at once both repugnant and repellent, and unheard sounds that can never be heard nor described so as to be intelligible to the pitifully limited faculties of our all-too-human minds, and there will be more tentacles.

Such is my warning to you, my dear and unwittingly doomed fellow travellers: there are people who like Lovecraft's brand of horror, and you might know one.

Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

'...we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Margaret, Lady Windermere receives gossip from an impeccable source that her husband of two years frequently visits a certain Mrs Erlynne, a woman with a reputation for having amorous affairs with married men.  Later that day, Lord Windermere reveals that he has invited Mrs Erlynne to his wife's upcoming birthday party, explaining that he wants to introduce her into society.  Margaret reacts badly to the news, but Lord Windermere is insistent that the invitation stand; and when Mrs Erlynne arrives at the party that evening, a train of events is put in motion that threatens more than the domestic happiness and the reputations of the Windermeres.

Lady Windermere's Fan marked Oscar Wilde's debut as a playwright.  It was first produced in 1892 and then published in the following year.  The play satirises 'polite' London society, and especially the institution of marriage among the well-to-do.  

Wilde puts forward two propositions to be tested: 1) All men are mostly bad; and 2) most women are good.  The satire then proceeds, and when the equilibrium of the Windermere's social circle is broken, we get to see who acts virtuously and who doesn't.  All the characters are in the gutter in so far as every human being has their failings, but some rise above it to look at the stars.

The same character, Lord Darlington, who made the observation about the gutter and the stars also asserts: 'It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.'  Does Wilde really believe this himself?  After all, the play is subtitled: A Play about a Good Woman.

Lady Windermere's Fan, while being a worthy piece, does not have the same timeless quality possessed by The Importance of Being Earnest.  And while it has it's share of frivolity, the play does touch on darker matters, such as blackmail, betrayal and gold-digging.  Even so, it is a minor gem sparkling with its own light and can be well enjoyed for what it is.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Hobbit and Heart of Darkness.  They are next to each other on the bookshelf, and they are both 'there and back again' stories; but, oh, what a difference.

The story begins on a ship moored in the Thames estuary, waiting to depart on the turn of the tide.  On board is Marlow, who recounts a tale from his past to an attentive ship's company - the tale of his journey up the Congo River and into the heart of the Dark Continent in the late 19th century. (Marlow was the storyteller in Conrad's Lord Jim) 

At the staging post marking the mid-point of his journey, Marlowe begins to hear rumours of Kurtz, 'a remarkable man'.  Kurtz is the manager of the company post much further up the river.  Marlowe comes to believe that he wants to meet Kurtz, and he does what it takes to continue his journey.  What he finds shakes him to his roots.

Heart of Darkness was written in 1899.  Conrad had visited the Belgian Congo years earlier and had witnessed some of the depredation the agents of King Leopold II were committing on the native population: starvation, killing and mutilations amongst them.  News of the atrocities and their magnitude was slow to reach to Europe.  

Despite the stories folk in the home countries might tell themselves about the civilizing force of Empire, all Imperialism is rooted in power and violence.  Conrad puts it like this:

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Although natives (Conrad used the N-bomb) play little part in the narrative apart from being bearers and messengers,  we do see something of their hardships through Marlowe's eyes:

Near the same tree two more, bundles of acute angles, sat with their legs drawn up.  One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its [sic] forehead, as if overcome with great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or pestilence.

As terrible as these things may be, the story is about white men abroad, and the effect that an untamed and alien continent has upon them. Africa unhinges Kurtz, and the extent of his warped aspirations in the upper reaches of the Congo is limited only by the magnitude of his genius.  Marlowe arrives too late to save Kurtz, and he is torn between damning or salvaging the madman's reputation.  It is something Marlowe never resolves within himself.

The questions of evil confronting Marlowe should be very familiar to modern readers.  The Holocaust is not that far removed in time, and we have witnessed the ethnic atrocities in Rwanda and Serbia.  We can wonder whether what Marlowe found in Kurtz's inner core is explanation enough for humankind's darkest deeds.