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So ends the Quatermain series. Not a bad ending, although the return to the time travel theme, all in order to provide a sort of sermon on reincarnation, did wear thin. Everyone seems exhausted in this novel. Allan, his friend, Good, and the recently deceased Lady Ragnall and Hans. I don't know exactly how Haggard himself died. But, as this is one of his posthumously published works, he must have felt his own mortality at hand. Stretching across the aeons, he must have felt a desire for something greater--as it ran through all his works.

Having spent the past two months reading through the Quatermain and Ayesha series, I can say I am surprised. Before reading him, I had dismissed Haggard as being something of a lightweight. He isn't. His writing is not only captivating but full of masterful prose imagery. And he fills his novels with ideas, especially as he seems to be arguing about the merits of religion and the infinite over the entirety of his four decades long writing career.

I'm not sure that I will soon, if ever, have time to return to Quatermain. I shall miss his character, however. It was quite a thrill to see the author grow through life with his most memorable subject. And I'm also struck at how Allan changed and grew through the years. At first, I dismissed him as a stock genre protagonist, into which the reader pours his own perspective, to gain catharsis. I was wrong in that early assessment. For even from the second book onward, from Allan Quartermain, that is, readers were given one long flashback from the point of Allan's death. In Allan and the Ice Gods, a terrible title, Haggard almost brings us all the way round. And in the meantime, we have seen Quatermain grow from an impulsive youth, a romantic young man, and a virile adventurer, to a middle aged skeptic, a father who lost his son, and an elderly man making a tally of his life, wondering where it all leads. Quite a journey. ( )

One of the lesser Allan Quartermain novels ( )