Rating: 2 of 5. SHE, by H. Rider Haggard. While SHE may not be the worst book ever written, it must certainly be in the running for that honor, and it is a mystery to this reviewer as to why it should have attained such a high measure of popularity when it was published in 1887, much less why it should continue to be read. The brave reader, armed with pith helmet and machete, may suppose he is prepared to penetrate the darkest secrets of 19th century Africa, however the only thicket he will encounter in this book is a dense Elizabethan verbiage of thy’s and thou’s and wherefore’s and canst not’s, which render the endless pages of monotonous dialogue more impenetrable than any African jungle.
The narration is equally flat and serves merely to accelerate the plot, which is itself surprisingly limited. A beautiful Arab woman has hidden herself away in the remains of a long dead civilization in central Africa and stumbled on the secret of eternal life inside a dormant volcano. Leave aside the questions of why she should be ivory white though of Arab ancestry, and why she should be content to remain hidden in a dull cave for two thousand years, surrounded exclusively by a savage tribe of African natives, though She Herself is inexplicably highly educated and, as she repeatedly avers, with her supernatural powers has only to emerge to dominate the world.
And ignore the issues of Haggard’s failure to account for the precession of the equinoxes which, if he had, would ruin his plot, and how an extensive network of caverns could have formed inside a volcano, when, as every geologist knows, such networks form only in calcitic limestone of sedimentary stratigraphy, never in an active igneous volcano. And ignore the fact that no significant monumental civilization has ever emerged in tropical Africa or could have due to the disease gradients and the total absence of navigable rivers, not to mention many other possible factors.
But these are quibbles. Allowing for poetic license, the plot remains inextricably flawed in that Haggard cannot decide who is the chief protagonist: Leo the beautiful, the reincarnated eternal love interest of She; or Baboon, Leo’s “uncle,” who raised him from infancy and informed him of the family curse which induced every ancestor of Leo for two thousand years to attempt to find the ancestral secret of his family by penetrating Africa, where, as it turns out, all one need do is stumble into a swamp because, once in Africa, all roads will lead to She. Unfortunately for Leo, malaria renders him unconscious for half the book. Unfortunately for the reader, this leaves the misogynistic misanthrope Baboon to carry the weight of the reader’s imagination in his stilted conversations with a strangely Shakespearean and ivory skinned Arab She.
The only truly inspired passages in this book are those that deal with She Herself, and it is plain that all else was merely prologue to bring the reader as rapidly as possible to Her. But here we have the paradox above of a thoroughly improbable character indulging in a prolix King James version of a philosophical duel with her hurling justifications for moral relativism against the hapless Baboon, who, tho in love with She, as all men are, insists on the absolute nature of good and evil, which, being English to the core, he distills into a stolid English Protestantism as the perfect philosophical counterweight to every conceivable argument. Baboon’s frantic firing of Biblical quotes at She is rather less than satisfying.
These objections made, SHE does have some positive qualities, surprising tho likely inadvertent. The mythic elements essential to all grand cosmic conceptions are to be found here and are perhaps the explanation for the book’s otherwise mysterious perennial popularity. The ancient race that built the dead city and whose mummies and boneyards litter the landscape represent Death, and She Herself, dressed in the white filaments of a corpse shroud rushing thru her caverns, is the Goddess of Death. But as the ruined city is the source of Death, the Mountain that surrounds it is the source of Life.
The volcano, in whose caldera lives the savage tribe and She Herself, represents the Pyramid of Life, Mount Olympus, the eternal sacred Mountain where humans touch the celestial divine. Like Dante’s several levels of existence, the Mountain encompasses both Death and Life, and unites them, housing at its core the bottomless Abyss of Chaos from which springs eternal Life, and She, as the master of the source of life, is therefore also the Goddess of Life. Life from Death; Death from Life. An Angel of Heaven living eternally atop the Pyramid of Life surrounded by devils. The eternal paradox of good and evil intertwined.
Another mythic element is the Arab origin of She, which should be unnecessary—but for the metaphor of the Veil. Haggard grasps the poetic significance of the Veil, the mask eternally worn by Truth, demonstrating the superior attraction of suspense over fact, as every good moviegoer and suspense story reader knows, and the reason why myth and emotion will always prevail over science and rationality. This must be the reason why Haggard made She an Arab, which would otherwise be inexplicable. The Veil taunts and entrances, permitting the imagination infinitely more play than any reality it may cover.
At times, therefore, SHE manages to hold one’s attention. But only momentarily. The plot is thin; the style mediocre to abysmal; the denouement predictable, though the language does manage finally to rise sufficiently to carry the plot in the final climactic scenes. In the end, perhaps the most redeeming characteristic of SHE is that the book inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write his 24 Tarzan books, among the most popular novels ever written. So H.R. Haggard must have been onto something.
