James Hilton's Lost Horizon

James Hilton's Lost Horizon is an adventurous tale of the discovery of a secret Utopian society, hidden in the mountains of Tibet, where the inhabitants live for two or more centuries in peace, far away from the strife of the rest of the world. The hero, Hugh Conway, is clearly cut out for this society and is at peace there as he has never been anywhere else--although he has lived all over the world. But the peace of Shangri-La is not easily attained and just as "Eden had its serpent . . . Shangri-La also has it element of discontent" and, like the serpent, the character of Mallinson (or Conway's sense of duty) tempts the hero away (Crawford 102). But the element in this paradise that is most disturbing, at least to readers in the twenty-first century, is never acknowledged by Hilton or even by some of the critics who have written about the book. The great difficulty is that, just like the societies whose instability was making the world a dangerous place in 1933, the society of Shangri-La is built on the proposition that the greatest number of the human race exist to serve the very small number whose intelligence, wealth, power and other advantages make them different from the rest of humanity and seem to raise them above everyone else. Hilton's ideal, attractive as it may be, is an idea that is built on the same sand that was draining away from beneath the world's societies (especially Western nations) and causing their instability.

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o understand the underlying causes of much of our misery better than Hilton did. The idea of his earthly paradise reveals, probably unconsciously, the racism and exploitation of people that are behind so many of the world's problems then and now. Neither Hilton himself nor his character Conway questions these assumptions at all. Chang tells the strangers, for example, that the valley has "several thousand inhabitants living under the control of our order" and that they have achieved "a considerable degree of happiness" through the order's "moderate strictness" and its satisfaction with "moderate obedience" (82). This strikes Conway as a fine plan. The crops will be raised, the women will be exploited for sexual satisfaction, the errands will be run, the burdens carried, the buildings built, and the gold mined so that the small number of people who live at the lamasery can dream of the better world that they hope to bring about when the present one falls into ruin. The people of the valley are also credulous and superstitious and do not share (nor care that they do not) in the wonders of the lamasery. The contentment that these people feel is not just assumed to come 'naturally' from their belonging to a class of peasant wh

Category: Literature - J