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.
Themes
Utopia as Refuge
Shangri-La is essentially a utopia, following in the tradition of works like Erewhon by Samuel Butler, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Utopia by Thomas More. Each of these novels satirizes existing social structures, habits, and assumptions by describing a supposedly perfect or ideal fictional society. Hilton’s vision of utopia is reliant, as many are, on isolation from the outside world. This isolation allows for the development of values that may be at odds with those of the outside world, and the first task of any utopian fiction is to elucidate those values. In Shangri-La, the central value is moderation. When Chang describes the religious practices of the Karakal valley, including those professed by the lamasery itself, he says, “We rule with moderate strictness, and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience” (65). Hilton’s utopia is focused not on governance or policy but on happiness, which Chang says exists in “considerable degree” in the valley. By necessity, however, no one is allowed to leave Shangri-La, recalling works like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, in which utopia is seen as both a paradise and a prison.
Shangri-La’s physical location amid a forbidding mountain range aids in maintaining its isolation from the rest of the world, but as a safeguard, the community insists that no one who enters may leave. This “proviso” gradually remakes Shangri-La as a strikingly cosmopolitan outpost, mixing cultures and civilizations from across the world. The proviso, though, also protects the inhabitants from aging, as Chang tells Conway about a Russian man who left the valley, got waylaid by bandits, and returned so drastically aged that he “died shortly after, as an old man dies” (136). The life-extending effects of the valley disappear the moment one leaves, and Lo-Tsen also dies when she delivers Conway to the hospital in Chung-Kiang. This pattern forms a kind of built-in protection from interlopers, such as Barnard’s desire to ship gold or Mallinson’s desire to bomb the mountains, since anyone who stays in Shangri-La long enough will surely die when they leave, either from the environment or from rapid aging.
These aspects of Hilton’s utopia create a society in a vacuum, one in which order is maintained without force. By creating a society in which everyone stays in one place, enjoys art and music, and refrains from any excesses, Hilton is responding to the excesses of greed, ambition, and imperialism that led to so much suffering in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Two of the four waylaid travelers (Conway and Mallinson) are officers of the British Empire. A third (Brinklow) is a missionary—an agent of cultural imperialism. The fourth (Barnard/Bryant) is an American fleeing the ruin of his financial empire in the Great Depression. Each of them represents the tumultuous world from which Shangri-La exists as a refuge. Hilton’s utopia is distinct from other literary utopias in that it is not merely an escape from or an alternative to the existing world: In isolating itself from the wider world, Shangri-La aims to save that world from its own destructive impulses. The High Lama declares that Shangri-La is meant to be a shield to protect works of art and artifacts of culture from a coming war that will encompass the entire world, making Hilton’s utopia a criticism of the predatory impulses dominating world politics in his era. In the end, the High Lama hopes that a bomber flying over Shangri-La “may not consider [them] worth a bomb” (158), thereby maintaining the peaceful, if stagnant, Karakal valley forever and allowing the works contained within to spread again after the war is over.
The East as a Source of Wisdom
Speaking of the long lives enjoyed by many of Shangri-La’s inhabitants, the High Lama refers to time as “that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it” (125). Implicit in this statement is a critique of the West’s industrial-materialist obsession with productivity and efficiency. The more “Western countries” have sought to wring every last dollar from the passage of time, the more they have robbed themselves of pleasure and beauty. This is the book’s central thesis, and the function of Shangri-La within the fiction is to provide a counterexample demonstrating the error of industrialist notions of progress. If Conway is uniquely equipped to receive this “lovely gift,” it is because of what he calls his “laziness.” Both Conway and the Brinklow speak at length about laziness, but while Brinklow sees it as a sin to be stamped out, Conway accepts his own laziness with equanimity and even seems to view it as a kind of virtue. Conway’s “laziness”—really a disillusionment with competition and ambition—is the result of his experiences in World War I, and this aversion to striving, ironically, is what positions him to assume the role of High Lama after Perrault’s death.
It’s important to note that accusations of laziness and idleness have long been bound up with racist and imperialist perceptions of people of color. When Mallinson complains about the people of Shangri-La, saying that “you can’t get them to do anything quickly and efficiently” (71), he is partaking in a longstanding imperialist myth. The other side of that myth is a sometimes-patronizing belief that the cultures of the East possess a wisdom lacking in Western societies—the scholar Edward Said uses the term “orientalism” to describe this gauzy romanticization of the East. Complicating matters in this text is the fact that none of the ideas in Shangri-La are organically “Eastern,” as the society’s underlying ideology has been explicitly transplanted from Europe. What the High Lama preaches is essentially a 19th-century aestheticism developed by thinkers like John Ruskin and Walter Pater as a direct response to the pressures of industrialization.
Barnard, Mallinson, and Brinklow represent varying aspects of “Western” folly. Barnard, the disgraced American businessman, values the Karakal valley only for its natural resources, which he hopes to extract for his own profit, putting the local community to work as a source of cheap labor. Mallinson, the ambitious, young English colonialist, imagines the sacred refuge as an exotic hotel with inhabitants that he treats as servants. Brinklow, a missionary whose theology is rooted in the Protestant work ethic, derides the lamas’ contemplative life as “doing nothing” and makes clear that she would like to eradicate happiness and pleasure from the valley along with idleness.
Hilton takes advantage of prevailing Western views of Asia as a mysterious and “backward” place, treating the hidden society of Shangri-La as a blank canvas onto which he projects European anxieties about war, industrialization, and the loss of culture.
The Tension Between Ambition and Idleness
The overarching theme of Conway’s journey is the tension between ambition and idleness. In the social environment that Conway and his traveling companions come from, idleness is perceived in wholly negative terms. The missionary, Brinklow, describes it as literally sinful, while Mallinson and Barnard view it as evidence of bad character—a prejudice derived from the industrial and professional society of European and Eurocentric cultures, which prize hard work, efficiency, and ambition above all. Shangri-La presents an alternate understanding of idleness—not as mere sloth or laziness but as the condition that allows for the contemplation of art and the appreciation of beauty. Only when the clamor of competition and ambition is silenced does it become possible to experience these quieter virtues.
In the interwar period—the time in which the novel takes place—the industrialist virtues of ambition and competition are in crisis. The competition between European empires has already led to immense destruction and death in World War I. The Great Depression has begun, wiping away fortunes and sweeping millions into poverty. As Conway is considering whether to remain in Shangri-La and become the new High Lama, another global conflagration is about to begin. Conway’s own personal experience in the war is evidence of how destructive these virtues can be: “I was excited and suicidal and scared and reckless and sometimes in a tearing rage—like a few million others, in fact” (143). Though he is discussing warfare, his words echo beyond the battlefield. The “boredom and fretfulness” he describes after the war reflect the growing tensions of industrial society as it transitions into the modern era. This mindset is, in the High Lama’s view, antithetical to the peacefulness one needs in order to properly appreciate the beauty of art. The prospect of another war not only adds to this tension but also threatens to literally destroy the artifacts of culture, and Shangri-La is explicitly a safe haven from such a war, with the High Lama telling Conway that he hopes to shield the treasures of the lamasery from the brutality of the outside world.
Mallinson is the novel’s appointed spokesperson for the opposing view. His response to Conway’s desire to remain in the peacefulness of Shangri-La is simply, “Possibly, if you happen to like prison” (146). For Mallinson, ambition is the essence of life, and the lamasery is a prison in that it keeps him from the competitive arena that is life itself. Progress in his career is the only way to find happiness, and he needs to return to life as a vice consul as quickly as possible to resume the dinners, dances, and polos that Conway fears. Barnard, similarly, wants to start gold mining, indicating his own inability to sit still and enjoy tranquility, while Brinklow decides to open a mission in the valley, surely devoid of peace and happiness, to put some “grit” into the valley’s inhabitants. In a sense, these perspectives are provided as examples of a flawed mindset since the complexity and busyness of these lives will likely compound in pressure and complexity, leaving happiness for the final days of a short life, whereas Shangri-La offers longevity and peace. Perhaps Conway is the only one who can find this happiness because he has exhausted his fears, excitement, and recklessness in years of war.
