When professor Challenger claims he has discovered a plateau in the Amazon, upon which there are extinct animals from the jurassic era, he is met with critique and ridicule. So he decides to prove his point and explore the area again, this time with another scientist, Professor Summerlee, an adventurer, Lord John Roxton, and a reporter with an urge to do something heroic to win his beloved Gladys, Edward Malone, the narrator of the story. When finally managing to find a way to get onto the plateau, the team is baffled beyond belief.
This is a real, old-fashioned adventure, with many interesting and thrilling moments and encounters with history. Doyle's characters complete each other well and especially Challenger is a real blast. Unfortunately, from a feminist perspective, there is a major flaw. There are only men exploring and discovering, and the only woman in the story, not even one of the adventurers, is a greedy one without a sensible bone in her body. Another disturbing flaw is the racist descriptions of the people serving as guides for the party. But, after having been considerably irritated by these things, one should remind oneself to put the context in relation to it's time, and the people's ignorance of these matters back then. The views of this book are not uncommon among literature of the early 1900's.
How would a world function without interference of human beings? How would an isolated, prospering world, without experiences of human beings, react to four persons intruding on them?They were the intruders, and not even the top of the food-chain. These are topics examined in an interesting way by the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, Arthur Conan Doyle, as early as the year 1912, and there is probably a reason why Michael Crichton named his "Jurassic Park" - sequel "The Lost World".
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