The Tragedy of the Korosko

2 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
A group of tourists on a pleasure cruise down the Nile set out to visit a local sight and get into trouble.

Review
I'm a fan of Conan Doyle, and think it's a shame most people don't get beyond the Sherlock Holmes books. However, A Desert Drama: Being the Tragedy of the Korosko is not the book with which to convince anyone.

I read this in the same day as Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Both books make use of ‘the n word'. However, Sawyer, despite being the older book by 30 years or so, comes across as a fairly innocent product of its times – the word is used and class distinctions are clear, but, in part because of its juvenile viewpoint, they're more observed than intended. Doyle's Desert Drama, however, comes across a fairly bigoted. It's an adult adventure, but comes across as shallower than Twain's children's book, and more bigoted. It manages to insult a whole host of people and religions without half trying.

I don't know anything about the provenance of the book, but I hope that Doyle wrote it without trying. Certainly he doesn't seem to have put much effort into ... really any part of it. The characters are stock romantic drama figures who pretty much play the expected roles. Doyle's more ready to kill people off than you might expect, but heroes are heroes, villains are villains, whites and Europeans have natural virtue, etc. The plot moves smoothly enough, but there's not much to it, and it's hard to generate a lot of interest. Not boring, necessarily, but predictable and at times offensive.

Unless you really, really, want to read all of Doyle's books, skip this one.