48 pages • 1 hour read
James HiltonLost Horizon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1933A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: The source text contains derogatory terms for Asian people and displays racist and imperialist attitudes toward non-European cultures. These attitudes are discussed in this section of the guide, along with the source text’s depiction of PTSD.
The narrator sits smoking cigars at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport with two English friends from school, Rutherford and Wyland. Rutherford is a novelist, and Wyland is an Embassy secretary. Their conversation is stilted, with the narrator preferring Rutherford over Wyland. A Royal Air Force pilot named Sanders comes to sit with them, and when Wyland steps away, he discusses an incident during a revolt at Baskul, in India, in which a man hijacked a plane with four passengers. Among the passengers were three men, one of whom was named Conway, and a woman who was a missionary. Rutherford knows Conway, and he expresses astonishment at the fact that the plane, once stolen, was never found. When Wyland returns, Sanders apologizes for revealing a story that should have been secret, and Wyland chastises him. Wyland, Rutherford, and the narrator all knew Conway from school, and they all think he is a remarkable man. Wyland pushes the conversation away from Conway and the Baskul incident, and the four men part ways.
Rutherford invites the narrator to return to his hotel to chat before the narrator’s train arrives. Rutherford is interested in the narrator’s work as a neurologist because he saw Conway a few months prior in a mission hospital in Chung-Kiang, China, and he was suffering from amnesia. Despite the amnesia, Conway retained his ability to speak many languages, including Chinese, Hindi, English, French, and German. Rutherford recognized him immediately, and he brought Conway on a ship to San Francisco. On the ship, Conway began to regain his memory while listening to a pianist, Sieveking, after which he played two pieces that he attributed to Chopin. Sieveking noted that Chopin never wrote these pieces, and Conway claimed to have learned them from one of Chopin’s pupils, though Chopin died in 1849. Before leaving the ship, Rutherford listened to Conway’s story leading up to the hospital in Chung-Kiang, but Conway slipped away when the ship docked. Rutherford received a letter shortly after that Conway was in Bangkok, Thailand, and planning to travel northwest.
Rutherford gives the narrator a manuscript composed of Conway’s memories, and he tells the narrator that the story is difficult to believe.
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 begins Rutherford’s manuscript. The revolt in Baskul occurs in late May, and the white residents are evacuated by the Royal Air Force. Onboard a plane belonging to the maharajah of Chandrapur are Roberta Brinklow, a missionary; Henry Barnard, an American involved in oil; Hugh Conway, a British consul; and Charles Mallinson, the vice consul. After the plane takes off, Mallinson notes that the pilot is not anyone he recognizes, and he thinks the plane is going in the wrong direction at a strange altitude. Conway is exhausted after four sleepless nights of destroying documentation prior to the revolt, and he tells Mallinson to relax. Conway reflects on his own dispassion, noting that he is competent but lazy. The passengers realize that the plane has been hijacked when the pilot suddenly, and skillfully, lands them in a valley in a mountain range, where men in turbans surround the plane with rifles. The pilot exits, brandishing a pistol, and the men refuel the plane and provide water to the passengers. Barnard criticizes the Royal Air Force for allowing a hijacking. Brinklow says very little, expressing confidence in Conway’s abilities, while Mallinson panics and criticizes Conway for his inaction.
The plane takes off again, and Conway silently busies himself writing SOS messages in various local languages to drop from the plane at intervals, hoping for a rescue. He then starts to fall asleep. Mallinson defends Conway by telling Barnard that, due to the chaos of the revolution in Baskul, he hasn’t slept in four days. He also notes that Conway speaks several languages and possesses a mysterious charisma, and he expresses his confidence in Conway’s ability to get them out of this situation. Conway, not actually asleep, thinks of how he does not get much of a thrill out of danger. He also thinks about how he has no connections, like marriage, children, or career goals, whereas Mallinson is engaged, Barnard has business, and Brinklow has her vocation.
Conway insists that they cannot do much in this situation, but Mallinson thinks they should try to talk to or overpower the pilot. When Conway knocks on the cockpit partition, the pilot silently points the pistol at Conway. Barnard smokes a cigar after asking Brinklow’s permission, and everyone falls asleep over time. Conway wakes up and is impressed by the view of the mountain range, noting that he is rarely impressed by landscapes.
Chapter 2 Summary
The plane continues east into the mountains, and the passengers periodically argue about where they are and why the pilot might be taking them to their mystery destination. Everyone but Mallinson is impressed by the pilot’s skill, and Conway concludes that they are in the Himalayas, approaching Tibet. Brinklow remarks that the Tibetans are strange and spiritual, expressing distaste for both Darwinian evolution and the supposed Tibetan belief that humans descend from monkeys. Everyone falls asleep again, but they wake up in the early morning, realizing that the engine has turned off. The plane makes a sudden landing, and Mallinson discovers that the pilot is unconscious. They bring the pilot into the cabin, and Conway figures that they are in Kuen-Lun on the Tibetan Plateau. They remain inside until dawn, worried that they will not survive the cold.
In the morning, they take the pilot outside in the sun, and he wakes up slightly. Conway can understand some of the Chinese the pilot speaks, but the pilot dies shortly after. Conway reveals that the man instructed them to go to Shangri-La, a lamasery, which is along the path of the valley in which they landed. Mallinson is opposed to the trip, claiming that it may be a trap, but Conway insists that they have no other place to go. All but Mallinson agree outright to walking to Shangri-La, and Mallinson reluctantly accompanies them, realizing that they have no food.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The opening chapters utilize a conventional framing device for adventure stories, akin to modern found-footage methods, in which a credible narrator receives or finds the documentation of a grand and mysterious adventure. In this case, the narrator receives the manuscript of Conway’s journey from Rutherford, a novelist, which adds an element of potential for unreliability or embellishment. In other utopian novels, like Gulliver’s Travels or Erewhon, the novel itself is the “found” documentation, while others, like Heart of Darkness, involve stories heard firsthand or corroborated through documentation after the fact. The purpose of such a framing device is to lend credibility to the story, as well as to displace the action of the story as something that has already been accomplished or experienced, which, as Rutherford notes, lends a “quia impossibile est” (22), a phrase in Latin meaning that the story is credible because it is impossible. The framing device emphasizes the separateness of the setting and events from the ordinary world, highlighting the theme of Utopia as Refuge: The hidden, isolated setting of Shangri-La is a place in which the rules of life in the outside world do not apply.
Like other utopian novels, Lost Horizon uses an imagined perfect society as a lens through which to look critically at the society in which the text was composed. Because this particular utopia exists explicitly to be a refuge from the capitalist, industrial, militaristic West, its existence casts light on what is destructive in that culture, implying an East-West dichotomy that treats The East as a Source of Wisdom and an antidote to what ails the West. Conway, the protagonist, has a fundamentally dispassionate approach to life, a concept that arises frequently in Buddhist and Hindu spirituality in the context of a rejection of worldly attachment. Perhaps the best description of Conway’s demeanor is that he is “not bothering,” noting in the plane that he “[is] unmarried; there would be no tender greetings on arrival. He ha[s] friends […] it [is] a pleasant prospect, but not one to sigh for in anticipation” (25). This description highlights his lack of attachments or desire to form them. Conway’s disposition arises not from spiritual training but from the trauma of World War I, and it equips him to act as a bridge between East and West much as the High Lama, Perrault, has done before him.
Conway’s own isolation mirrors that of the Tibetan Plateau on which the plane lands, which he calls “distant, inaccessible, as yet unhumanized” (38). As a utopia, Shangri-La is distinct and separate from what Mallinson calls “civilization,” and its physical isolation both preserves and emphasizes this cultural separateness. Conway’s view of the region as “unhumanized” implies a distinctly European understanding of what it means to be human: that to humanize a landscape is to utterly transform the physical environment. The phrase “as yet” also implies a fixed belief in a European notion of progress—the plateau has not been “humanized” yet, but it soon will be.
Each of the four travelers regards both their destination and its inhabitants as exotic and strange, in keeping with attitudes typical of European colonialism. When the pilot exits the plane to greet the men in turbans, Conway notes that “he [is] not an Englishman at all, and possibly not even European” (27), and the man’s ambiguous, non-European ethnicity marks him in the minds of the travelers as untrustworthy. Later, Brinklow asserts that “Tibetans are very odd people. They believe we are descended from monkeys” (41); her intention is to persuade the Tibetans to adopt Christianity, but she knows little or nothing about their own beliefs other than that they are, in her view, “odd.” Conway seems in some ways counter to the Eurocentric, imperialist worldview of the other characters. He regards Brinklow’s remark as “rather comic,” for example. Unlike his traveling companions, he has already lost his faith in the imperialist project and in the supposed superiority of European cultures, and he is thus less quick to assume the worst of others.
Conway’s charisma and dispassion allow him to take control of the situation as the plane descends to the Tibetan Plateau. Later, these same traits introduce the theme of The Tension Between Ambition and Idleness. Conway prefers simplicity, but he will advocate for progress when necessary. By his own admission, Conway is “lazy,” and he frequently refrains from speaking throughout the flight, noting how Mallinson’s frantic concern is more of a detriment than an asset to reaching any productive conclusion. Nonetheless, Conway does have a compassionate urge, thinking often of how he might make Brinklow more comfortable, even as he resents the possible need to make the journey more accessible for her. As the plane finally lands, he thinks he “must do something to help these people” (42), as though he is not also one of the endangered party, and he advocates journeying to Shangri-La as a kind of path of least resistance. This pattern marks him as a leader, but Conway makes it clear that his vision of happiness exists outside the tumultuous nature of this adventure.
