“She” is a textbook classic adventure novel from a time when the British fleet was on top of the world, at least considering themselves to be. It is reminiscent of Jules Verne, especially Journey to the Centre of the Earth and the Gothic horror of Poe. Haggard treads in both but I feel that his prose isn’t anything extraordinary.
“She” is full of adventure tropes: a youthful hero chiseled from Greek statues, in this case, Leo is part Greek; the wise mentor who has incredible love of the hero; the distressed maiden; expandable side characters; wild natives after the guts of these heroes. It is unfair to judge a classic adventure novel based on these tropes as back then, these ideas can be considered original — but the tropes are familiar and overtime has vintaged into sour clichés.
Haggard’s writing is a product of its time, and we can criticise him for that now. Thus, it is heavily Victorian — The whites are masters and heroes, taking on the cultures of the natives head on. This is an attitude I still see to this day and it still bothers me. Although I may not be able to blame Haggard for this, the portrayal of the natives in this book is condescending. The natives here are savages and base — the right of intelligent thinking is stripped away and the tendency to violence is enhanced.
But what bothers me more is the attitude of the protagonist, Holly, who at one point realised that he was English and as such didn’t need to kowtow to the royalty in the place where he stayed as a guest. Holly’s decisions are always ‘right’ relative to the natives and he is on entitled pedestal of superiority.
This attitude throughout the book killed my empathy with him as a protagonist.
I’ve felt that there are aspects of this book that I found too unbelievable. The sheer idea of a woman who would wait 2000 years for her lover to reincarnate while remaining a virgin baffles me. Maybe it’s just me. All in all, I find that “She” belongs to an audience gone by and hence over the years have become outdated.
