Book review – “Ayesha” by H Rider Haggard

A sequel to She. Leo and Holly are back in England recuperating from their Africa experience, when Leo has a vision and becomes convinced that Ayesha is alive and living in Central Asia. It’s not as strong a reason for the voyage as last time – Haggard perhaps should have given his characters are stronger prompt than “vision”. So you can’t help feeling Leo and Holly are a bit silly to waste so many years (it’s something like 16) trooping around looking for her. Also the book lacks a Job – I know that character was weak in the original, but this sequel badly lacks a character going along on the expedition going “this trip is a lousy idea I wish I was home”. It acts as a sort of pressure relief.

The structure is similar – they go on the voyage, escape death (an effective avalanche), discover the hidden kingdom, meet a girl who falls in love with Leo, journey to the capital, meet Ayesha, Ayesha and Leo moon about each other despite her tendency to despotism, but things end badly when they try to solidify their union.

Once they track down Ayesha the story starts to slow down. It takes forever to get to Ayesha – but the book is called Ayesha, we know that she’s going to come back to life. It’s a bit unrealistic, sure, but the pages Haggard devotes to air-fairy mumbo jumbo doesn’t make it less so. And there’s too much about reincarnation and descriptions of rituals, which aren’t interesting.

The basic story isn’t bad – Ayesha is old, but Leo decides to be with her anyway and with a kiss she becomes beautiful (a neat reversal of the princess and the frog). It’s a great idea to have the mortal girl who loves Leo be the ruler of a land with a vicious husband, and she ends up leading an attack against Ayesha; also for Ayesha’s kiss to be so powerful that she kills Leo. (One of the best scenes comes when she angrily kills someone after this.) But it takes so long to get through it all ultimately its a shadow of the original.

Part of the problem is I think the characters aren’t as engaging. In the first book Leo was trying to solve a family mystery and fell hopelessly under Ayesha’s spell; here he knows what he’s getting in for and he doesn’t have any sort of journey to go on, so his inherent blandness is more noticeable in this one. Ditto Holly – there’s no development in his relationship with Ayesha or Leo – he doesn’t even have a wise old associate of Ayesha to chat with. Ayesha isn’t nearly as compelling either in this one.