Rutherford
Rutherford is one of the narrator’s friends, the one who tells him the story about Conway. He’s a novelist and his job gives him good money. He is a nice and sociable man, and the narrator really likes him. He travels a lot. And once, when he goes to visit his friend in China, he gets acquainted with a sister of charity in a bus and she takes him to the hospital and leads to Conway, the main character of his future novel.
Wyland
Wyland is the second narrator’s friend. He arranges the meeting with his two friends, during which they get to know the story about Conway. He is a strict, restrained, and too polite man with the slight touch of priggishness, according to the narrator. He is one of the Embassy secretaries. There is little information about this character.
Hugh Conway
Hugh Conway is actually the main character of the story. He is 37 years old, when the events of the main story take place: “He was inclined to look severe and brooding until he laughed, and then (but it happened not so very often) he looked boyish. There was a slight nervous twitch near the left eye which was usually noticeable when he worked too hard or drank too much.” He is very clever man. He had an exciting university career - until war broke out. Rutherford says: “I reckon him the best amateur pianist I ever heard.” After he was blown up or something, he didn't do at all badly, got a D.S.O. in France. He went east in 'twenty-one. His Oriental languages got him the job without any of the usual preliminaries. He had several posts. As for his character, other people thought about him as about a brave, strong man, who always knew what to do. But he himself thought that it was a kind of his fate in life to have his equanimity always mistaken for pluck, whereas it was actually something much more dispassionate and much less virile.
Mallinson
Mallinson is a vice-consul (after Conway). He is a young man, "in his middle twenties, pink-cheeked, intelligent without being intellectual, beset with public school limitations, but also with their excellences." Failure to pass an examination was the chief cause of his being sent to Baskul, where Conway had had six months of his company and had grown to like him. In their trip in Shangri-La Mallinson shows himself as a very unrestrained and straight man: he is always dissatisfied with his state, he is shouting on his hosts calling for his escorting to the nearest town etc. In the end of the story he shows sagacity: he says Conway that staying in Shangri-La is foolish, because it’s not the real world and they don’t actually know about all those things, that the settlers have told them, for sure. Unlike the others, Mallinson never lost his passion for the outside world.
Barnard- Chalmers Bryant
First, the reader learns that he’s the American who came from Persia. But actually he is a swindler, who has robbed many people and who finds some safe shelter for living. He is “a large, fleshy man, with a hard-bitten face in which good-humored wrinkles are not quite offset by pessimistic pouches. Nobody in Baskul had known much about him except that he had arrived from Persia, where it was presumed he had something to do with oil.” But for his not good past, he shows himself as an affable and kind man in Shangri-La: he has a joke for every occasion, he doesn’t quarrel with anybody, as for example Mallinson does, he is satisfied with everything: starting with hijacking of their plane and ending with his “freewill’ slavery in Shangri-La. In the end he actually stays in this place, rejecting the offering to go out with Conway and Mellinson.
Miss Brinklow
Miss Brinklow, the fourth occupant, is a small, rather leathery woman-Missionary. She is quite silent woman, who doesn’t do and speak anything superfluous. But when she speaks, her words are worth and appropriate in one or the other situation. In the end she decides to stay in Shangri-La, to save its inhabitants from the sin.
The High Lama-father Perrault
Conway describes him as “a small, pale, and wrinkled person, motionlessly shadowed and yielding an effect as of some fading, antique portrait in chiaroscuro. The voice was pleasantly soothing, and touched with a very gentle melancholy that fell upon Conway with strange beatitude.” Perrault was a monk, who came to Shangri-La in the 18th century, and since that time he’s still alive. He wanted to “plant” the true faith there, but changed his mind living for such a long time there. He created his own philosophy about time, relations and happiness, and local people supported this philosophy.
