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 King Solomon's Mine |
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King Solomon's Mine by Sir Rider Haggard I just love this book because of its straight-forward action packed adventure, spiced up with a good deal of horror and humour. And that is what it is. Because the book was "listed" for English literature, I thought it would be just another boring book with difficult sentences and hard to grab (deeper) meaning. Okay, there might have been a deeper meaning in this book too, but then I failed to grab even the slightest hint of it. The book read like a standard role playing adventure: a party sets off with a mysterious map on a quest to find the brother of one of them, who was searching for King Solomon's mines. During the journey they encounter all kinds of problems, meet strange folk, fight witches, reveal the real king, rescue a damsel in distress, get involved in a battle, are halted by secret doors, find the treasure, and return home. Basic stuff for any adventure: Only this adventure is from the 19th century, a time where this story could have been very real in the not yet discovered parts of the world. Interesting themes in the book are basically the encounter of the white men with the wild men, the horror of Death, the mysteries of biblical times, and Mr Good, who is and stays every inch a gentleman (which is very funny, every now and then). The story drags you into the unknown, to a places where you can't tell what is beyond the next corner - the surprises of the grotesque, the bizarre and the exotic have every chance to create a feeling of awe. I think anyone thinking of making an adventure for a colonial setting can use ideas from this classic book. Quartermain Allen Quartermain, one of the main characters, features in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Well, sort of. I couldn't find much of this character in the movie and vice versa (I don't know about the comic, though). And some things of Quartermain's past the movie hints to are not explained in the movie, nor in the book. So don't be disappointed at this. © Yaghish 2003 |
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