James Hilton (1900-1954) was a bestselling novelist, responsible for Goodbye, Mr Chips and Random Harvest – and Lost Horizon (1933), the latter filmed twice, once by Frank Capra. Lost Horizon is little-read today, but is memorialised by Hilton’s place-name ‘Shangri-La’, which has passed into cliché as shorthand for any remote utopia.
Tibet, with its awe-inspiring landscape and profuse legends, has long been a source of fascination. Buddhist and Hindu ascetics have for centuries been drawn into the high mountains, and the first Europeans to see the area were also seduced – 1650s Portuguese Jesuits seeing doctrinal similarities between Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism, and the 18th century British trader George Bogle calling it “a fairy dream – a perfect illusion”. As John Keay wrote in 1982, “If Tibet did not exist, some visionary would surely have invented it.”
Four Westerners get taken unexpectedly by plane into the Himalayas, where it crashes, and they are taken to Shangri-La – a hitherto unheard-of lamasery in the shelter of a huge and equally unknown mountain called Karakal (which means Blue Moon). Shangri-La is an idyll – a fertile valley with its own temperate microclimate, guarded by almost impassable mountains, inhabited by several thousand contented people under the benign rule of mysterious lamas. It is a fantastical structure, described as “flower petals impaled upon a crag”, filled with art treasures and a magnificent library, and despite its extreme isolation somehow offers all modern comforts.
The four Westerners are an enigmatic American, a female English missionary, and two English diplomats. The senior diplomat, Hugh Conway, is the central character – highly cultured and principled, and unlike the others immediately beguiled by this extraordinary place. We learn why they have ended up here, and how they react as they start to realise the strange secret at Shangri-La’s heart – and consider the possibility that they might never be able to leave.
Lost Horizon is a light and escapist story, but it is also filled with 1930s pessimism about civilization, with mechanised and militarist ideologies on the rise everywhere. Shangri-La could seem like a gilded prison, but is to Conway more like a last bastion for high culture and humanity in a world in growing danger of destruction. Can he stay there for ever, or will his strong sense of duty ultimately impel him to leave, against his dearest wishes? Is he morally entitled to retreat from an ugly world, or must he leave the happy valley? And will the outside world eventually break in anyway? To a modern reader, considering both the ever-lengthening reach of technology, and today’s mechanised and militarist powers – one actually occupying Tibet and erasing its “fairy dream” culture as a matter of state policy – unsullied utopias seem if anything even more remote.
This short review first appeared in Chronicles, and is reproduced with permission