Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
The Lost City by Henry Shukman
Reviewed on: August 1, 2024
Vintage Contemporaries: New York City
(2009) PB
21-year-old Jackson Small had been a member of British military forces in Belize, stationed to fight Guatemalan guerilla bands that often sought safe haven in that neighboring country. His best friend Connolly was killed in a brutal firefight and Jackson was sent home on compassionate leave after suffering both physical and emotional damage in that same attack. But before that tragic day, Connolly had instilled in the young soldier a spirit of adventure as he spun tales of his search for lost cities in the cloud forests of Peru. Mustered out of the military and alienated from his father, Jackson Small kitted himself out to continue his late friend’s odyssey and re-discover La Joya, the lost city of the ancient civilization known as Chachapoyan.
Before leaving London, Jackson was approached by military intelligence regarding gathering intelligence on a Peruvian drug lord named Gesualdo Carreras, who was operating out of the Chachapoyan area Jackson hoped to explore. While totally disinterested in such an undertaking at the outset, Jackson is forced to reassess when he is drugged and robbed of his passport and most of his money by a bandit named Papaluca on the jungle trail to the Peruvian town of Chachapoyas. He and Ignacio, a young boy who was to be sold into servitude by Papaluca, continue on to Trujillo, where Jackson is to meet with the British consul, who in turn will direct him on to his clandestine assignment.
What follows is a complex story of internecine conflict between the supposed forces of “law and order” and “criminal enterprise,” as well as the conflict among and between cultures. Jackson Small, the “innocent man” of this story, is drawn deeper and deeper into a conflict not of his making. At the same time, he finds himself falling deeply in love with a young woman for the first time in his life—and this fact might plunge him even more deeply into danger. His initial quest—to find the lost city of La Joya and to thereby validate the memory of his compatriot Connolly—plunges him into almost unimaginable dangers when he finds that the near-fabled lost city is located in the middle of the crime lord Carreras’ enclave.
The Lost City is not only a superb adventure story, but also a superb character-driven story. Perhaps most impressively however, it is a lyrical and beautifully written account of a harshly beautiful landscape, as found in the following excerpt:
Seen on a map, the cloud forest didn’t look big—the country between the peaks and the jungle, between the brown shoulder of the Andes as they swung west toward the Pacific, and Amazonia: a jumble of hills that didn’t know if they were moorland or jungle, where greenhouse air of Amazonia blew up the valleys and met with the chilly blasts from the peaks and grey glaciers. The two winds, not knowing what else to do, turned to cloud. Cloud that hung in rags on the brows, and in tufts like the wool you found on barbed wire in northern latitudes. Which hung like a veil of vaporized snow among the trees, a white-grey mist like whey. It was the rain factory; the place the rain was born. The big ragged thread of the Maranon river ran through it like an ice-crack. (p.190)
Four trowels for The Lost City.
