In his Spectator review of the 1937 Gaumont film of King Solomon’s Mines— in which singer Paul Robeson plays Umbopa— Graham Greene wrote that the film “must be a disappointment to anyone who, like myself, values H Rider Haggard’s book a good deal higher than Treasure Island”.

The remark is a reference to a famous story that Haggard was bet by his brother that he could not write as good a novel as Stevenson’s.

Greene is certainly right about the film, and maybe about Treasure Island, too, but his observation also raises the question as to how King Solomon’s Mines itself may be a disappointment to readers today. It has become a novel one must defend against charges of misogyny and racism.

It is certainly guilty of both. From the epigraph onwards, the tale is directed at men: “This faithful but unpretending record of a remarkable adventure is hereby respectfully dedicated by the narrator, Allan Quatermain, to all the big boys and little boys who read it.” Quatermain freely admits, “I can safely say there is not a petticoat in the whole history.”

The possibility of a relationship between the (petticoatless) Kukuana maiden Foulata and Royal Navy officer Captain Good, gives Quatermain a great deal of discomfort. As for race issues generally, King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885, exemplifies all the standard cultural bias against Africans of the period, in sporting books and travelogues, as well as in the few novels that had appeared about colonial Africa— novels such as RM Ballantyne’s The Gorilla Hunters (1861).

Yes, there is some unspeakable stuff in King Solomon’s Mines to modern eyes and ears. Yet writer after writer and reader after reader will stand up and defend this book.

One argument in Haggard’s defence is that the ideologies promulgated and attitudes struck in the book are those of Quatermain, not the author himself. Another is the simple bulwark of realism: that he was describing the relationships between black and white, servant and master, oppressed and oppressor, as they were at the time and to do otherwise would be to do a disservice to his reader.

A more sophisticated argument is that as the quest develops (like Treasure Island, this is a quest novel) the relationships between the four men engaged on it— Quatermain, Umbopa, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good— develop deeper, more human relationships than those normally allowed by Victorian stereotypes. There is some evidence for this, and also for the related argument that Haggard is concerned not so much by cultural specifics as by the transience and fragility of all cultures.

Diamond fever

Negative portrayals of the impact of European so-called civilisation on Africa is one way by which Haggard tries to undermine the received ideas of his time. Throughout, the white man’s greed for ‘bright stones’, ie diamonds, is deprecated: it should be remembered that, at the time of publication, Cecil Rhodes was in his pomp, already a notorious figure. Umbopa, or Ignosi as he becomes, is a vehicle for other deprecations at the end of the book: “No other white man shall cross the mountains, even if any may live to come so far. I shall see no traders with their guns and rum.”

And what are we to make of the stalactite-pickled spectres in the Hall of the Dead, the seated spectres and the 15-foot-high skeleton who, “holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear,” presides over these entombed kings of Kukuanaland? “Such, at any rate, was the White Death and such were the White Dead!” concludes Quatermain.

It’s an odd sentence, at one level no doubt merely rhetorical. At another it may show the degree to which Haggard feared the destruction of the great African civilisations at the hands of their white invaders, occupiers and suborners. If these are some arguments to rehabilitate Haggard on modern terms, they do not show readily why King Solomon’s Mines remains a classic.

That is largely to do with what he called “grip” or narrative tension. It depends on the interplay of polarities, in particular those of loss and restitution (Sir Henry’s lost brother and Umbopa’s lost kingdom). This interplay appeals to primitive, atavistic emotions that, in themselves, transcend cultural differences.
Haggard’s real trade was telling stories. Along with Stevenson, he made possible the rise of the modern blockbuster. King Solomon’s Mines can fairly lay claim to be second of that ilk, after Treasure Island. Haggard took the by-then already standard forms of boys’ adventure books, as purveyed by Ballantyne and GA Henty, stripped them of their veneer of missionary-inflected chivalry, and made them sublime.

Hero by proxy

The result does exactly what Quatermain’s epigraph implies: it allows a recrudescence of the boyish desire to be a hero. It allows us, by proxy, to engage in risk. Adventure is not simply about danger; its essential characteristic (which King Solomon’s Mines deals up in spades) is the unexpected. The word actually comes from the sea-going trade ‘ventures’ that 16th-century insurers would underwrite. What’s going to happen, will our ship make it? That was what worried those early brokers, and it’s the same feeling that can quicken the heart now.

Adventure is not about broken bones— it’s about overcoming an unforeseen course of events within the context of a particular experience. Office-bound, well-fed, TV and internet-fixated, we are too comfortable these days. In a sterilised world we need an outlet for a contingency with all its attendant thrills. King Solomon’s Mines provides that outlet.

Am I speaking for men alone? I am certainly speaking for myself, who first read this book in Africa, in the old, 1890s, blood-red-bound Longmans edition. I was eight or nine. My family was living in Malawi, which in 1975 was about to celebrate its 10th year of independence from Britain.

I can distinctly remember handling the book as if it might somehow give me, a boy in Africa, magical access to the African adventures it contained. Had I not heard my father talk of “the Manica country”, just as Quatermain does?
Manicaland was just next door in Mozambique. It seemed within reach. It still does now, even though I am in London and 30 years have passed. I need only pick up this book and, like the door to Solomon’s treasure chamber, a mass of stone rises from the floor and vanishes into the rock above.

The Guardian