Book Review: “King Solomon’s Mines” by H. Rider Haggard (1885)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

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This fifth book in our Siblings’ Book Club for 2021 scratched my every itch. I’d known for a long while that H. Rider Haggard was an adventure novelist worth reading, and this Allan Quatermain original did not disappoint.

Many years ago, I had read Rider’s best-selling tale, She, a book which made me realize how simply movie-like old adventures could be! I loved the book and felt that Haggard would become an instant favorite of mine. Alas, a decade or more passed before I ever returned to another of his rags, and doing so felt as though I was coming home. That may sound sappy, but it’s true.

Briefly, this story is about a young Allan Quatermain who, in concert with a small pack of men, decides to risk their lives in a cross-desert search for King Solomon’s lost diamond mines in the hidden mountains of Africa. Along the way, they score a vast treasury of elephant tusks, meet a nation of people whose rulers maintain a strong thirst for human blood, and free the people of that nation through war and by reestablishing their rightful king. In the end, they discover the mines but must make some difficult choices about what to do once inside.

This book is nonstop adventure, and I’m not mincing words when I say that reading it was like watching a modern-day action movie. Haggard’s ability to thrill and to string his readers along with suspense and colorful scenes is an art I’m frankly surprised to see in a book 136 years old!

A few things stand out to me in this book, especially in our racial climate of today. First, the white protagonists never treat Ignosi, an African who joins the European trio across the wasteland, as less-than-human (as might be expected from a white author in 1885 traipsing through Africa with his string of strong and noble white protagonists). Ignosi starts off as a servant, yes, but the men respect him for his size, his abilities, and his courage—and this before his true identity is ever revealed! Of course, “near equality” is nothing to praise….today. But back then, just a two decades after the American Civil War? This seems like a racial perspective many years ahead of its time.

A second note comes from my brother, simply that “These guys totally massacred the elephants! 7 here, 9 there. No wonder they’re an endangered species today.” Yup, that comes to the fore in this book, much like it did in The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (both the novel and the graphic adaptation). Just as with the issue of race, though, we cannot hold our ancestors 4-5 generations back to the same standards we have today. It would be ludicrous to think we should (or could), so as painful as some of the sentiments, actions, and vernacular might be to us today, we can choose to read on! We can still learn a great deal of life and adventure in the late19th century from books such as these, and we can learn to appreciate them as snapshots of times past, not merely as stories that continue to entertain.

I suppose if I’m ever going to hit up another H. Rider Haggard novel, it’ll be Allan Quatermain. I just hope it doesn’t take me another decade to get to it!

©2021 E.T.