King Solomon’s Mines and Titanium Noir – Book Reviews

Two shorter book reviews today, as I’ve been looking at these in my “drafts” folder for awhile.

Review One: A “grabbed it for a little” title I’ve had a go at recently – H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. This I have in a nice looking hardback at the moment. I’ve been meaning to read it for several years. (I don’t remember for certain where I got it anymore, but I strongly suspect it was during a sale at the local second-hand shop.)

The essence of the plot is that our hero Allan Quartermain is hired to travel on a perilous quest with two other Englishmen and an African who they hire as one of their servants, to find a missing brother, and, if possible, a treasure trove they’re not sure actually exists or not, in a country somewhere near-ish South Africa, that extremely few Europeans have ever visited.

This book is considered one of the first foundations of the “Lost World” sub-genre of speculative fiction.

It is quite unfortunate this book ends the way that it does – with blatantly racist statements put into the mouths of various characters. Up until the last bits, I was able to pretty well enjoy it as an adventure story with some underlying beliefs that were, I assume quite common at the time with the audience it was written for – white boys and men in the British Empire in 1885. I was able to accept that since I was born a hundred years after the book was published, it was natural enough I found some components out dated. (The narrator makes his living hunting elephants for their ivory, we’re told for starters, which I assume and accept had a much more positive connotation back in the day than it does today.) The story is well paced and exciting in many places, and it is clear to me that this title has been influential – at one point while reading, I thought perhaps Haggard had borrowed an aspect of this story from Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King – only to realize that it may have been the other way around (“King” was published in 1888) and there are definitely moments that felt very Indiana Jones. I was preparing to defend this book, if necessary. I was wondering what it was that people object to so much about this story, really. And then I came to the ending. And now I know.

It feels especially egregious because it comes at the end, where there’s nothing much later to dilute with.

I am still glad that I read the story, and I am trying to hold on to it being about 75% a good time – but unfortunately it’s impossible to deny that it also summarizes itself in a way that makes it essentially impossible to recommend today to the boy-ish audience it was written for. For someone who is more mature, I would say, yes, if you’ve been wondering if you should try reading it, give it a try, and you’ll hopefully find that you also enjoy quite a lot of it, as both a historical document and as an adventure tale, and you’ll hopefully be mature enough that you’ll not condemn the whole thing because of actually it’s really just a few paragraphs in particular that are egregious. That is what I’m trying to do. I’m not sure I’m succeeding.

My copy came with some illustrations, that was nice.

And Review Two:

(I read this book months ago, while dealing with a headache. And while my library was sending me passive-aggressive notices about it being overdue.)

I found this book a bit disappointing, after “saving it up” to read for several weeks. I had high hopes, having enjoyed a previous Nick Harkaway book quite a bit. However, I was warned that just because I enjoyed that one, this one would be different and I shouldn’t assume it would also be my cuppa. The people who warned me sort of knew what they were talking about.

Still, I thought Titanium Noir would be interesting, it sounded like something I should enjoy. It is a genre-crosser taking “noir” detective-style storytelling into a future world where members of the elite have become (quite literally) semi-immortal giants. Our (ordinary human) hero Cal is a “consultant” both the police and the elite will talk to, although somewhat reluctantly, so when a member of the elite is murdered, he is called in to investigate. Important to the story (and kind of one of the problems with it I had) is that his ex-not-ex-girlfriend is one of the elite, a member of one of the most powerful families in the story world. (This leads to some… conveniences, particularly towards the end, I felt.)

Perhaps if I had read this book under different circumstances (with less of a headache) I would have found the main character more interesting or sympathetic, but as it was I found myself holding on to reading this book mostly because every once and awhile, it made me smile.

There is some definite comedy within. Which was good.

And the plot is complicated, hard to predict, particularly in places, and I’m sure a lot of people will find the science-fiction aspects interesting. Again, I might have found it more interesting, under different circumstances, but I was at the point where I either read this book now or I sent it back to the library unread, so I read it.

And I’m not sure I’ll try reading it again. It was, under my circumstances, modestly entertaining, but not as exciting or enthralling over all as I hoped it would be. Although there were some moments where I felt it was really doing something, I felt like overall, there just wasn’t enough meat to it all to be brilliant. Perhaps I had built it up to great of an expectation in my mind.

It is, however, quite highly rated with many readers and reviewers, and I’ll probably try a third Nick Harkaway book in the future. A relatively quick read, at about 230 pages, I was able to whisk through this over a weekend and get it back to the library on a Monday morning. If it sounds like something you might be interested in, I say go ahead and give it a try, perhaps you will love it. Perhaps part of it’s secret is to take a bit more time with it.

Have you been reading anything interesting lately?