She and Allan

She and Allan is a 1921 novel and one of Haggard’s strangest experiments. By this point in his career he had been writing about both his most famous characters, Allan Quatermain and the immortal sorceress Ayesha from the 1887 novel She, for several decades, but he had never put them in the same book. She and Allan corrects that. Quatermain, looking for a way to contact his dead wife and child, travels into the African interior with a Zulu shaman who tells him about the white queen who lives in the lost city of Kor.

Most of the book is the long journey to find Ayesha, with the usual Haggard mix of trekking, set-piece combat, encounters with hidden tribes, and supernatural foreshadowing. The actual meeting between Quatermain and Ayesha happens in the last third and is mostly a long philosophical dialogue about death and immortality, with Ayesha trying to recruit Allan to her cause. The novel is uneven. Hardcore Haggard readers tend to love it for the crossover. Casual readers may find the pace strange. Worth reading after King Solomon’s Mines and She to get the full effect.