James Hilton (1) (1900–1954)

Dispensing first with the trivia, this 1933 novel was the first mass-market paperback ever published (1939) and coined the name "Shangri-la". It also happens to be a pretty good old-fashioned adventure story. Stories that begin with an unknown pilot taking a passenger plane hostage tend to play a little differently in today's era, but I noted it was curiously lacking a suspenseful edge. The same went for mystery and tension throughout the novel, which had me gearing up to rate this as a flaw show more until the novel's theme was revealed: all things in moderation. I love a novel that demonstrates what it conveys. It's a good message too, so I'm embarassed I didn't appreciate this more to begin with.

Shangri-la is presented as a utopia of sorts, and while we do get a general outline of its workings I think there's not enough details that it could be recreated. This was probably a wise move on the author's part, since when he does get close to defining any of its conventions their flaws stand out. How to resolve jealousy in Shangri-la over the same woman? "It would be good manners on the part of the other man to let him have her, and also on the part of the woman to be equally agreeable. You would be surprised, Conway, how the application of a little courtesy all round helps to smooth out these problems." I'm not as sure that the woman in that scenario would feel courtesy had been fully extended "all around" while she's being exchanged as an object.

It's an old-fashioned notion now to suggest any valley on Earth can remain hidden and undiscovered, etc., but it's romantic enough to indulge in as you might read Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. It also serves as an artifact of that dark time between wars during the Great Depression, when there seemed so little to look forward to in the world's future that Shangri-la would have been everyone's ideal escape. Perhaps for many of us it still is. show less

The Book Report: Old Mr. Chipping, nearing ninety and still telling his hoary old jokes from sixty years ago to the newbies at Brookfields school, spends his last few days on earth wandering among the many well-furnished rooms in his head. We see the events of his entire career as a schoolmaster, his brief, brilliant career as a husband, and his long, glorious sunset as a School Institution. As he passes through the portal made for one (bet Chips'd know the source on that one), he feels...as show more I hope and pray all who read this will feel on their own long night...it was good, it was good.

My Review: I read this book tonight because, for far from the first time in my life to date, I learned that I lost an old, old friend: My mother's best friend, my heart-mother, finally let go of her life barely short of her 92nd birthday on January 4.

I know it was only her body wearing down, because dementia had long since taken her essence from the living world. But tonight, forty-two years after I met her and began to love her, I feel she is here. And I promised her I wouldn't cry, she told me it hurt her to see me cry once a lifetime ago, but I can't not. It's for myself, for my heart growing old and curling inwards from surprisingly fresh hurt. I don't miss her, or miss her more than I did yesterday; death is a release when someone is already no longer themselves; but the days ahead number fewer than the days behind, and I can see my own end like a hill far away, instead of the comforting illusion of horizons hiding it. It's not scary. It's just...real.

I am now the age she was when I met her. My memories are so real! The Pirate's Den, the junque shoppe on North Lamar, parking under the pecan tree and racing everyone to be the first to see what was new; cold, cold Bull Creek, flat hot rocks, the folds of the Balcones Escarpment and their fossil shells; laughing, crying, talking, always with a silver-bunned, trifocalled, green-eyed artist teaching the only things she knew to teach. I needed them then, I treasure them now, and there is no one else to whom these memories mean one single thing except an old guy reliving his past.

She was Mr. Chips, and I listened the way those schoolboys did; now it's my turn...sic semper tyrranis, oh wait that was the assassin but that's good too, sic transit Irenaea mundi...hail and farewell, dear, now you go on home to Mother and Daddy, walk safe! show less

Lost Horizon isn’t just a novel ... it’s a mystical whisper of discovery and yearning. A story that creeps up behind you and asks the question nobody wants to face: what if peace isn’t out there to be conquered, but within us, waiting for us to stop thrashing long enough to notice?

James Hilton wrote this in the wake of a world that had just torn itself apart, and you can feel the fatigue and yearning of that time in every line. The prose is deceptively simple, yet it glows ... like show more candlelight in a monastery corridor. Through Hugh Conway, Hilton gives us a man teetering between civilization’s noise and the deep quiet of something that feels like enlightenment.

It’s a story about escape, yes, but not the cheap kind. The escape here is existential ... an invitation to let go of ambition and rediscover grace. Every time I return to it, I find another small truth I’d missed the first time, hidden like a monk’s smile behind the veil of fog.

If modern life feels like an endless sprint, Lost Horizon is the exhale you forgot you were allowed to take. It’s not just a classic ... it’s a compass. show less

"… he isn't happy now – that I do know – there's always a look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn't find it." (pg. 26)

As the creator of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, James Hilton should be a more well-known writer; his name, by rights, part of our collective cultural memory even if he's no longer widely read. But, with the exception of that magnificent Lost Horizon and the short, sentimental Goodbye Mr Chips, none of his books are in print. To get Random show more Harvest, I had to buy a charming, old-fashioned hardback on eBay, a yellowed 1942 reprint with a dust jacket that proclaimed the role of the BBC as the 'voice of freedom' broadcasting to 'the occupied countries of Europe'.

Reading Random Harvest, a bestseller on its release in 1941 and considered the 'best of the rest', you can see why Hilton's reputation rests on just two books. Hilton, who died aged 54, was perhaps too prolific – and too popular – for his own good. However engagingly written – and Random Harvest is very charming – you get a sense of a writer writing middlebrow entertainments when he had the talent to write something more.

Whilst never a pot-boiler, and never gushingly sentimental, it is hard to peg just what Random Harvest is and why it never transcends itself in the way that Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips could. The book follows a successful but dissatisfied upper-class businessman who served in World War One and is now, as the world gears up for its sequel against Hitler, trying to remember what happened during a two-year period immediately following the war, where he lost his memory and, presumably, led another life.

It is a mystery book that never seems to care about its mystery; a love story that never commits to the centrality of its romance; a homespun, middlebrow Dickensian sketch that spends a lot of time talking about share dividends and board meetings. It seems to want to both bask in its created warmth – and there's always warmth in a Hilton story – and yet aspire to something more. The businessman's plight works as an overarching metaphor for a "brief unmemoried idyll" (pg. 321) between two wars, but this melancholy acceptance of impending cataclysm was done to much better effect in Lost Horizon and Mr Chips. Neither of the businessman's two lives are especially interesting – indeed, they seem drearily alien to a modern reader. A sentimental, improbable ending doesn't convince – although some readers will like it – and brings Random Harvest back down into the ranks of middle fiction.

None of this is to say the book doesn't work. It does – only it's hard to see the purpose towards which it is actually working. Plot, character, theme, setting and dialogue are all ably done without ever seeming to lift the novel off the ground. This is a writer who has a learned idiosyncrasy that brings texture and idea to his books, yet in Random Harvest it seems to be all things and none. Part of Hilton's appeal is that his characters are often reaching for something they cannot express and cannot grasp; it does not work quite so well when the book itself is doing the same. show less