Girl, 2000

She

H. Rider Haggard

A lowbrow classic, She is a book for schoolboys of all ages from twelve to... well, two thousand, I suppose. I can’t imagine any woman of any age ever wanting to read it, but despite this apparent handicap, Rider Haggard’s famous adventure story is one of the most popular novels ever written, with over 100 million copies sold. It’s a specimen – perhaps the specimen – of what used to be called a Rattling Good Yarn, and oozing, too, with that all-important Sex Interest, which Haggard ladles on in part-sublimated Pre-Raphaelite dollops (you know the kind of thing – the Blessed Damozel leaning bosomily over the Bar of Heaven, Waterhouse’s Lamia with one tit frankly out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth). It must have caused unnumbered nocturnal emissions, voluntary and involuntary, in the public-school dormitories of its day.

    Indeed, the formula has been more than good enough to keep us reading for well over a century, for though Haggard’s titillatory efforts seem merely funny today, the central character herself has an erotic power that cannot be denied. Jung held that Ayesha, the eponymous She, was one of the purest depictions of the anima in literature: a woman as near immortal as dammit and so appallingly beautiful that a single glimpse of her face is enough to enslave you and destroy your sanity, yet whose favour is also the key to untold wisdom, riches and power if only you can win it. 

    Everyone knows the story, or at least the outline of it. Since its first serialization in the Graphic, an English popular magazine of the era, it has appeared in multitudinous guises from feature film to comic strip to BBC radio drama, and inspired countless imitations (Indiana Jones is a descendant). To tell the truth, though, I didn’t find Ayesha nearly as eldritch or as archetypal as advertised; in fact I found myself liking her better and better as the story went on. She’s a girl of sturdy and loyal character, even if she doesn’t think twice about torturing deserving cases in her catacombs or giving love-rivals the kind of drop-dead look that actually works. 

    I wish I’d read She when I could have appreciated it properly – before, that is, age, experience and the countless other books I’ve read spoilt the innocent pleasure I might have taken in it at, say, age fourteen. I still enjoyed it well enough, though I had to skip through a few over-amped passages of description here and there, and put up with the fictional narrator’s half-baked amateur philosophizing. There’s a surprising amount of purple in Rider Haggard’s passages, some of it arguably fatal to the tension or excitement he is trying to build up; much of this occurs around the middle of the book and looks suspiciously like padding. Perhaps the author was simply trying to meet his contracted word-count-per-episode for the Graphic.

    Apart from a short but evocative nautical episode near the beginning, the writing only really comes to life after Ayesha enters the story – halfway through the book, in the middle of a lot of cod-philosophy about people growing more cynical as they get older, and suchlike. The later chapters, in which she transforms from villainess to heroine, are by far the best of the book, full of genuinely exciting scenes and images.
    She is the kind of novel that excites the contempt of intellectuals, and the long-outworn familiarity of its tropes – a product, lest we forget, of its own vast success – obviously works against it as far as the present-day reader is concerned, but it remains a pretty good read for all that. Ayesha may not truly have been immortal in the flesh, but as a literary creation – and a manifestation of the collective unconscious – she will never die. 

Intermittently Fascinating

The Book of Imaginary Beings

by Jorge Luis Borges 

A literary bestiary. The Classical monsters, from Kronos to the satyrs, are well represented. So are the cobbled-together cacozens of the Middle Ages, part this, part that and part the other: plausible as heraldic images, impossible to picture as living, breathing beasts. But Borges, in this short book, also brings us a haul of imaginary creatures from China, Latin America, the Malay Archipelago and just about everywhere else. Now and then we find among the specimens something genuinely exotic, like the Simurgh of Sufi fable or the Celestial Stag believed in by Chinese miners. Other beasts here were first imagined by famous modern authors: Kafka and C.S. Lewis each features more than once, and Kafka’s Oradrek is by far the most lovable monster in the book. Going in the other direction, readers of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will discover in this bestiary a Talos and a Baldanders – though on reading the entries for these beings, they are likely to find themselves more mystified than ever.

Although the subject-matter of the book harmonizes perfectly with Borges’s oeuvre, The Book of Imaginary Beings is too heavily in debt to its sources to give us much of the pure, the veritable elixir. Only two of the beings featured in it appear to me at all Borgesian. The Á Bao A Qu, an allegedly Malay monster (it sounds Chinese to me) could, in its aspect, character and setting, have sprung fully formed from the brow of the master, while The Sow in Shackles, who terrifies Argentinean peasants by tightrope-running along the telegraph-wires at night, rattling her eponymous chains, partakes of the Latin American magical realism of which Borges was a forerunner. She could have been imagined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she wasn’t. Yet for me, the most hauntingly Borgesian piece here is the one describing the fauna of mirrors, which speaks fascinatingly but obliquely about that mysteriously visible but strangely inaccessible world.

Sadly, many of the entities described – such as dragons, unicorns, or the Phoenix – are too familiar to be really interesting to us. The author does his best to find exotic traits and tall tales attributed to them in obscure and often dubious authorities, but this only partly ameliorates the tedium of over-familiarity.

I don’t know who would love this book. Bestiaries aren’t as unfashionable in our day and age as you might think; consider, for example, Monster Wiki and the character menus of RPGs. But film and video monsters come ready-made; the hard work of picturing imaginary creatures has already been done for us – and done breathtakingly well, by experts. This bestiary doesn’t have a single picture in it. 

Any work of this genre is ultimately a series of index entries lacking either plot, narrative or theme: an assortment, a farrago, a grab-bag filled with unfamiliar but not necessarily delightful treats. Most twenty-first century readers would be bored and mystified after a few pages. In the end, as with certain other works of Borges – ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, for instance, or ‘Funes the Memorious’ – the appeal seems to be mainly to hopeless bookworms and literary trainspotters, the kind of people who are fascinated by old books and long-dead writers. I am one of those people, but I am sorry to say that I found The Book of Imaginary Beings only intermittently fascinating.