The Lost Horizon

The revelation of the secrets of the lamasery of Shangri-La and the reactions of the hero, Conway, be interesting affluent that even though nothing genuinely happens (in the sense of dramatic action or adventure) for most of the book, it rest as exciting throughout as it is in the jump when the plane and its four very different passengers argon abducted. The Utopia that Hilton imagines in the book is very lovable--although it becomes clear that it would not be attractive to anyone infra thirty, so that Lo-Tsen and M aloneinson want to escapism.

It is also certainly comprehendible why the book had such a large accumulation at the time it was written. As Martin says, there are two primary reasons why a writer creates a Utopia, " dissatisfy with the present and hope for the future" (100). Following the terrible prototypical World War (in which the nature Conway suffered so much), in the center of the Great Depression (which undermined the sense of stability peck had round their sphere), and with the fear of fight building everywhere from Europe to India to japan this period was one of the most ominous in modernistic history and it does not just look that way in retrospect when one knows what was to take place in the of late 1930s and the 1940s. Like so many others Hilton "saw enough to be sure that the future held great danger to all mankind" and he knew how badly people wanted to escape the present and develop hope (Martin 100). The simplest

But with a very different consciousness of the state of matter of the world today it is a little more tight to accept what is appealing in Hilton's fantasy because, perhaps, we find out a little better how the world came to be in such a state in the early 1930s. This does not stringent that our world is in much better shape; in many respects--such as increase destruction of the environment and increased exploitation of the so-called Third World--it is worse. But we do understand the underlying causes of much of our misery better than Hilton did.

The idea of his mortal 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 spot of happiness" through the order's " precede 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 move 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.

Crawford, John W. "The Utopian Eden of Lost Horizon." Extrapolation 22.2 (1981): 186-90. Rpt. in ordinal Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 21. Detroit: Gale, 1986. 101-3.

way of putting aside thoughts of war is "a dream of escape" and this is what Lost Horizon provided (Martin 100).

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