It should be said though that this story was written during the zenith of British colonialism and the attitudes of the ruling class at that time looms over a modern reader like a (love the pronunciation) pateradactil.
The reader is wonderfully old-fashioned and a pleasure to listen to. In reality, it was ghosts that were poo pooed but here it's dinosaurs. It's ACD at his pompous best, letting off some steam about those sceptic scientists who refused to believe in his beloved spiritualists. Incidentally, the advisory about this being a “vintage recording” presents no problems at all.Ī brilliant adventure but of its time be warned It is a kind of story constructed with great care and no small degree of cleverness, and makes for a highly enjoyable listen. Not unlike a Sherlock Holmes enigma, there is an engaging story and character development among an ensemble cast, and the eventual moment when everything comes together and makes perfect sense, no matter how many dinosaurs and apes have been involved along the way. Fawcett had written in his memoirs that “monsters from the dawn of man’s existence might still roam these heights unchallenged, imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs.” Which is exactly as Professor Challenger finds them, and the many surprises that follow. It would be the first of Doyle’s five stories featuring Professor Challenger, a pompous, abrasive, but unarguably brilliant scholar. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the “p” pronounced in “pterodactyl.” But unlike Fawcett’s unspeakable miseries in multiple explorations of the Amazon Basin, this is a gentlemen’s yarn, ably narrated by John Richmond (1912-1992) in the most authentic of British intonations. Thus, the inspiration was probably set for a grand account of great adventure in a post-Victorian world. Fawcett vanished on a South American expedition in 1925, having told Doyle of seeing “monstrous tracks of unknown origin” in Bolivia. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a prolific writer of much more than Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was a friend of the explorer Percival Fawcett (see “The Lost City of Z”).
0 kommentar(er)
