Shangri-La: The Return to the World of Lost Horizon

Write a sequel to Lost Horizon? What hubris, what presumption! Just who do you guys think you are? Then I read it. It's wonderful. When James Hilton ordains that you leave Shangri-LA, you understand that you will never find it again. But Cooney and Altieri work their hermetic arts, and as you inch your way around the narrow ledge, hugging the rock like a lover, you pause to catch your breath, the mists below slowly clear, and there it is! I think Hilton would have been honored, and enchanted. How can this book be out of print? To Ms. Cooney and Mr. Altieri, Thank you.

Read it. It's a great novel and highly worthy as a sequel. This book left me in the same dreamy state as the original. Thought provoking about Tibet and the state of the world for any socially conscious person.

Sequel. Ugh. What a horrible word. Most of them should never be born, or if they are, they should be left on a hillside to die of exposure. There ought to be a different word to describe SHANGRI-LA--THE RETURN TO THE WORLD OF LOST HORIZON by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri (Wm. Morrow, 1996). It is in fact the sequel to James Hilton's classic, but without the irrelevance and loss of tumescence you've learned to expect. It actually needed to be written. LOST HORIZON leaves you dangling deliciously. Forget about the movie version--it was good, but they took huge liberties with the plot of Hilton's tightly constructed work. Most notably, the movie shows the hero, Hugh Conway, arriving back in Shangri-La to the accompaniment of a swelling chorus and heavenly beams of light. It was the era of happy endings in movies, so they stuck one on. But the book--ah, the book is very different indeed. It starts with a group of British gents in a men's club talking about Conway, a likable but peculiar chap, and how one of them discovered him quite by chance in a hospital in Canton suffering from amnesia. Then we learn that his memory abruptly returned on board a liner bound for San Francisco, that he jumped ship in Honolulu and was never seen again. The middle part of the book is a flashback: Conway's story of being benignly abducted along with three other people into Shangri-La, meeting the two-hundred-year-old lama, finding himself annointed as his successor, and then having to make a decision of Hamlet-like proportions: stay or go. He goes. Dreadful things happened to him after he left, evidently, so that he wound up ill and amnesic in a hospital. Then he got his memory back and jumped ship--to try, we presume, to find his way back to his lost paradise. And that's the last we hear of him. The final words of the book echo down hauntingly over sixty years: "Do you think he will ever find it?" The authors of SHANGRI-LA dip into that poignant mystery with respect, precision and imagination. Their account of what happened to Conway during his disastrous journey out of the hidden valley in the high Himalayas, how he lost his memory, and what happened to him after he got it back is uncannily Hilton-esque and fits with the unanswered questions in the original like the parts of a fine watch. This account, in turn, is part of a highly relevant story about the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1960s, the real-life fulfillment of disaster prophesized by Hilton through his fictional character Father Perrault. Tibet is still under the heel of China, and SHANGRI-LA teaches the reader some of the harsh facts while delivering a taut tale of suspense, intrigue, romance and mystery. Suffice it to say that there's a rapacious Chinese General who's got hold of a series of ancient riddles that put him on the trail of the hidden valley. A really good villain is the heart and soul of a thriller,