Dr Hermes Reviews - TARZAN Back to our Contents Page

TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE (Feb 19, 2003) From BLUE BOOK, where it was first published as a seven part serial from from October 1930 to April 1931 (under the title "Tarzan, Guard of the Jungle"), this is for the most part a dreary, confusing mess. Although it gets off to a strong start with a band of international Communist conspirators setting out to loot Opar and closes with a very effective sequence as Tarzan conducts a war of nerves against the invaders, In between, however, is a pointless jumble of characters wandering aimlessly through the jungle. Apes and Arabs carry off the white women, lions stalk hungrily, Tarzan drops down on an antelope for a meal, all familiar stuff. The book might have worked much better as a short novella, leaving out most of the padding in the center. As a coherent story of an attempted conquest of Opar, with the Apeman helping La regain her position, TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE would have had much more impact. There are some great moments, as when Tarzan`s quick thinking deals with being trapped in a dungeon between a hungry lion and a crew of unruly Oparian goons, or later when he is tied up in the jungle and watching a hyena slowly circling in. But the effect of the good scenes is muffled by the surrounding filler which brings the story up to book length. Burroughs, who previously had demonized the Germans as barbaric Huns in TARZAN THE UNTAMED and who later would go after the Japanese as "cowardly monkey-men" in TARZAN AND "THE FOREIGN LEGION", was in 1930 enraged about the Communists. He has an assortment of thugs from different nations bullying their way through Africa, hoping to find enough gold in Opar to finance revolutions in Mexico, the Phillipines, India and elsewhere. Now, every writer of adventure stories needs villains, and the nationalities suitable change over time. But Burroughs portrays the various Communist agents here as absolutely vile... greedy, braindead or secretly planning to start a new African Empire of their own; they are not shown with any depth or subtlety, and are basically fiends with BAD GUY practically painted on their shirts. To be honest, Burroughs often seems to hate the human race in general. The only reason he admires animals is because he glamorizes them and gives them virtues they don`t in actuality possess. (The extent of his research into wildlife is shown as he invariably has solitary lions and elephants wandering through the deep jungle, instead of living in groups on the savannahs.) Except for Tarzan himself and his loyal Waziri, there are few human beings in the second half of the series that are likeable or even tolerable. (Although there is always the mandatory young couple to go through the usual ritual of misunderstandings and romance.) One exception to the tired recipe is La, the High Priestess of the Flaming God. She actually comes to life on the page, with a vivid personality and presence. La is not exactly a New Age tree hugging sweetheart, of course, since she has spent most of her life stabbing victims to death on the altar of her people`s god. (And in fact, in this book, she promptly kills a guy who presumes to grab her by the shoulder. He`s not the last one she does a little open heart surgery on, either.) But she also is human, willing to make friends with Zora Drinov when they fall in together. La is a passionate little wildcat, openly telling Tarzan she is ready to be his mate then and there. The potent image of this gorgeous, barely dressed* woman,, offering herself to the even more naked Apeman has gotten generations of young readers worked up. It`s strange, but when Tarzan firmly turns her down, he never mentions his own mate. In fact, he gives no reason at all. (Hey, Tarzan! If YOU don`t want her....) After his return from Pellucidar, the Apeman seems to have abandoned his wife, his plantation, his son and the rest of his family. Instead of Jane and Korak, his companions now are Nkima (the bloodthirsty troublemaking monkey) and the Golden Lion himself, Jad-Bal-Ja, always an imposing figure. These are friends he doesn`t have obligations to protect or care for, either, as they wander off at will. Tarzan invariably appears as a lone wanderer in the wilds of Africa, as if his marriage and his kinfolk never existed. It`s a real loss to the series, as is the dual nature of our hero being both a savage Apeman and a cultured English lord at the same time. This simpler, cartoonlike interpretation is not nearly as satisfying. _______________ *La, maybe it`s none of my business, but just how comfortable can those gold breast plates be in the hot African sun? My God, didn`t it ever occur to you to borrow a strip of cloth from Zora to wear?

TARZAN TRIUMPHANT (Oct 3, 2004) This was more fun than you might expect. Although the books in the second half of the series don't feature much of the creative enthusiasm or inventiveness Edgar Rice Burroughs showed in the first dozen, each usually has a few good points that make it worth reading at least once for a pulp fan. Two or three of the books are completely hopeless drags, of course, and there is a LOT of repetition from the early stories, hey, that's true of most any pulp series. TARZAN TRIUMPHANT has a good deal of flowery, pretentious writing at first about the strange ways of Fate but Burroughs drops it quickly for his usual style. "The Triumph of Tarzan" ran in six installments in BLUE BOOK from October 1931 to March 1932. Like most of the later entries, it doesn't exactly have a linear plot as such. Burroughs basically throws half a dozen characters into the African jungle, stirs in a lost city and some slavers, and lets everyone run back and forth for two hundred pages until he drags them back together for the resolution. Sometimes his writing reminds me a scoutmaster trying to get an unruly troop of cub scouts lined up, with one or two always wandering off and getting into mischief. Like several other of the entries of this period, TARZAN TRIUMPHANT takes place in Abyssinia (today called Ethiopa), which was much in the news at the time as the new Emperor Haille Selassi was facing Italian aggression and his country would eventually be invaded by Mussolini's forces in 1935. So it was a natural setting for a writer who wanted to toss in a few European spies and instigators to give Tarzan headaches. In the previous book TARZAN THE INVINCIBLE (these generic titles are another uninspired aspect of the later books), our hero had stopped a Communist expedition to stir up trouble in Abyssinia and Egypt, causing the death of Red agent Peter Sveri in the process. Back in Moscow, Stalin himself is annoyed enough to send an assassin to avenge Sveri. Unfortunately for the story, it's not someone as awesome as SMERSH's Red Grant but the rather drab and unimpressive Leon Staubich. Back on his own turf, Tarzan is receiving a desperate plea for help from the chief of the Bangalo people far to the north. They have been victimized by shiftas, black raiders who take slaves to sell to the Arabs. Tarzan says that's a shame but none of his business ("I do not interfere among tribes beyond the boundaries of my own country, unless they commit some depradations against my own people.") The chief answers that the shiftas are led by a white man and "it is known among all men that you are the enemy of bad white men." Oh well, that's different and Tarzan promptly agrees to look into things. This is an interesting point. Despite all the times we're told Tarzan is a simple beast to whom all those awful humans are alike, he has a sense of diplomacy. His personal kingdom is basically protected to provide safety for his family (although they are not mentioned here) and his adopted tribe, the Waziri (who are really flourishing with this guy as their overlord). Beyond the rather large territory, he has staked out, Tarzan doesn't interfere with what the natives do to each other, but he does step in when white people show up and cause trouble. Maybe he feels their actions reflect badly on himself; maybe he thinks the black Africans should be free to kill and enslave each other their own way; and maybe as an English lord with large business interests, he likes the situation as it is, and doesn't welcome European agitators to disturb the status quo. Be that as it may, the Apeman sets out to investigate. He poses as a British traveller named Lord Passmore, with a full safari. This might have been intended to be a big surprise at the end of the book, but Burroughs pays so little attention to "Lord Passmore', who hardly makes an appearance, that he might have skipped it and no one would notice. It does give Tarzan an excuse to loll about in front of his tent, "faultlessly attired in evening clothes", eating a good meal and sipping coffee. Maybe Jane had corrupted him more than he admitted. As you might expect if you've read a few of these books, Tarzan inevitably finds a pair of warring lost cities full of white people deep inside Africa. What the heck? How come Stanley and Burton and the other 19th Century explorers didn't come back and mention Opar or the City of Gold or Pal-Ul-Don? It would have made world history class more interesting. This time out, we're dealing with Midian, an unattractive slum in the crate of an extinct volcano, inhabited by epileptic religious fanatics descended from a follower of the apostle Paul. These mangy mutts practice human sacrifice as part of their distorted form of quasi-Christianity and are not much fun to visit, being offended by anyone even smiling. Dropping down into this hellhole are an intrepid British aviator, Lady Barbara Collis; a sheltered geologist with good intentions but poor survival skills, Lafayette Smith; and a ex-gangster from Chicago who has fled to Africa because things got unhealthy back in his town, Danny "Gunner" Patrick. The fourth member of the cast is a potential PLAYBOY Playmate of the Year from Midian, the gorgeous blonde Jezebel. (Once again, Burroughs sets up a colony of ugly brain-dead males and their beautiful oppressed females - it would be nice just once if we found a lost city of homely hags and buff young studs, but I think he was trying to win over women readers.) All four outsiders become completely tangled up in each other's problems. getting captured and freeing each other, fighting off the slavetakers and wild animals, tangling with the vile Staubuch and and an Italian Comminist he happens to meet and team up with, wandering through the jungle and running into each other as if they were all at a small county fair instead of lost in a vast wilderness. Meanwhile, Tarzan carries on as normal for him, dropping out of trees and mugging lions, making daring rescues and pausing for an occasional brief sermon about the evils of the human race and how wonderful animals are ("Geeze! That guy ain't so crazy about men," the gangster observe astutely.) Nothing new here, although it's handled well enough. What I liked best about TARZAN TRIUMPHANT is that for once the comic relief is actually amusing. "Gunner" speaks in an exaggerated big city jargon, both Lady Barbara and Lafayette Smith speak upper class dialect and poor Jezebel (who has been taught some English by Lady Barbara) only catches parts of what Gunner is saying. Even Tarzan, who has travelled around Europe and the States and who is fluent in French and Latin, sometimes is baffled by what "Gunner" is saying. It's good-natured and inoffensive (the characters themselves seem to enjoy the repartee), and it seems to make these people more lifelike than the usual folks we meet in these stories. "Gunner" also provides some crudely funny moments. He verbally mistreats the Africans badly, calling them "smokes", "Cotton Ball here", and "tar baby" but the natives don't seem to notice or care. Trying to trail the villains, "Gunner" spots a footprint which is one of his own and starts to follow it. "I guess I'm getting good," he thinks smugly, "Pretty soon that Tarzan guy won't have any edge on me at all." All the time, he is undergoing that character development Burroughs often put his people through, where surviving a week in the jungle brings out the good in a person. The inevitable romance which develops between "Gunner" and Jezebel is surprisingly well-handled and not forced. They're an unlikely couple, a thug who carries a Tommy gun around the African jungle and a girl brought up in a colony of fanatics, but then we've all seen marriages where you can't imagine how they ever got together. She seems a bit boy-crazy, too, marvelling how every man she meets outside Midian is "beautiful" and frankly, I think "Gunner" will have his hands full. Lafayette Smith and Lady Barbara also hook up, but less convincingly, and I bet they didn't stay together after the last page, err after they went to England. (I like Lady Barbara's attitude. Captured by ignorant Midianites who have already tried to drown her, she tricks the leader into staring down the barrel of a revolver he has confiscated, and then tells him to pull the trigger. "It will make a light in the little hole," she promises helpfully ashe complies. It probaby did make a light for that split-second.) TARZAN TRIUMPHANT is okay, not the memorable high adventure of TARZAN THE TERRIBLE or TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN, but not the mean-spirited rants of some of the later books, either. It has a light, cheerful feel to it, with likeable characters who care about each other. The sharp little digs at organized religion are perceptive and pretty bold for 1932, although Burroughs prudently restrains from attacking mainstream churches. The holy men of Midian "were intoning their senseless gibberish, meant to impress the villagers with their erudition and cloak the real vacuity of their minds, a practice not unknown to more civilized sects." Comments like that must have slightly miffed or tickled many readers at the time. The book is better than I had feared. It would have been nice if Burroughs had dropped either the shiftas or the other colony of boring South MIdian, so as to spend more time developing the Red plot to kill Tarzan. Stalin's appearance is so brief and sketchily described as to make no impression; I would have loved it if, at the end, Tarzan had somehow smuggled a package into Moscow, maybe Staubuch's chewed up jacket or something, just to give Stalin a jolt.

TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD (Sep 16, 2003) From 1932, where it was serialized in six parts in ARGOSY for March and April, this is pretty unrewarding. Most of the book has such an unpleasant, bitter attitude that it's difficult to find any excitement or pleasure in it. In the third half (errr the final third), though, everything comes together for a strong, tense finish... so if you are a diehard Tarzan or Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, the ending alone would make it worth trudging through the build-up. Wandering around Abyssinia for no good reason, the Apeman finds, yes, another pair of lost cities locked in endless pointless war. By this time, he seems to take it for granted that Africa is dotted with remnants of ancient civilizations populated by Europeans. This time, the City of Gold and the City of Ivory are apparently the surviving outposts of early Greeks (they use drachmas and have names like Xerstle and Gemnon). It's never explained. Tarzan never troubles to ask, "Say, what are you boys doing out here, anyway?" Possibly Burroughs intended to explore the backstory in a planned sequel called TARZAN AND THE CITY OF IVORY but although our Apeman does return to the area in the second part of TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT, we still don't learn the history of this bunch. Our hero finds himself a prisoner in the warlike Cathne, where the people worship lions, use lions for hunt and for war, and in general suffer from leomania. They also use gold for just about everything, which may be impressive but (considering how soft and easily worn away it is), might not be practical. The Cathneans are caught up in the usual unending series of raids and sorties which these lost empires are prone to; their rival city Athne uses elephants the way the Cathneans prefer lions. (An all-out battle between armies of lions and elephants sounds pretty colorful but again apparently Burroughs was saving it.) The City of Gold is ruled by an absolute tyrant Queen Nemone, who is absolutely gorgeous and who either suffers from manic depression or has just been ruined by the way she was brought up. Cruel, vindictive, imperious, demanding absolute obedience, she's like Madonna with a pet lion. And because Tarzan isn't intimidated she naturally tumbles for him hard. He never mentions Jane (neither does the narrative, although La of Opar is mentioned), and while he finds her fascinating and even tragically appealing, her sick personality keeps him from quite falling in love with her. Nemone has a strong sexual charge that just about crackles off the page, though. The tug of war between Nemone and Tarzan is really what this book is all about. By this time, I expected to find mean-spirited sermons by Burroughs on how abominable human beings are and how saintly wild animals are by contrast. But the rhetoric seems more harsh than usual, and Tarzan seems unpleasantly smug as he keeps rubbing it in (there's a huge vanity there, too, because he himself is morally superior to all other humans in his own eyes). But toward the end of the story, almost against his will, Tarzan starts caring about the friends he starts to make; he risks his life to rescue helpless sacrifices to the sacred lions; and he starts to seem genuinely heroic and noble for the first time. The uneasy relationship between Tarzan and Nemone makes up most of the book. Although unhappy, it does have a certain resonance of a doomed romance in the making. After about the halfway point of the series, the Apeman apparently abandoned his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, even his grandchild, not to mention the Waziri. It seems to happened at about the same time Edgar Rice Burroughs' own marriage started to turn sour. Now this is just an obvious interpretation, but Burroughs' increasing sullenness and loss of good-natured humour in his writing, as well as the way Tarzan runs away from his obligations like a deadbeat jungle lord, kind of suggests that the aurthor was acting out his own inner struggles on the page. It's almost inevitable with writers. Two years after he wrote this agonized book, Burroughs seperated from his wife of thirty years and applied for divorce. It wasn't until after he re-married his new love that Jane returned to the printed page. So reading TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD as a sort of playing out of the author's conficts gives the book some depth the text itself doesn't provide. Aside from the psychodrama underlining the story, there's not much in this book that we didn't find better done in early entries in the series. I will say this for Jad-Bal-Ja, though... that cat knows how to make an entrance! (Think about the symbolism of that final scene, too, as Nemone sends her soul-mate lion Belthar to chase and devour Tarzan; that lends itself to several bad puns.)

TARZAN AND THE LION MAN (Nov 10, 2002) From 1933, where it was first serialized in LIBERTY (a bit more prestigious a magazine than the usual ALL-STORY pulp), this is one of the weaker entries in the series. It gets off to a dreary start, detailing a bunch of unlikeable characters entering Africa to film a movie, and it`s almost half over before things start to perk up. On the other hand, it does have the wild concept of a lost city of talking gorillas who till fields and build stone castles, and who are named after 16th century figures from English history like Henry the VIII and the Duke of Buckingham. There`s also a great mad scientist villain who calls himself God, and some amusing if heavy-handed satire as Tarzan reacts to Hollywood and its denizens. The Lion Man of the title is not, as one might expect, a genuine rival for Tarzan like Kaspa or Ka-Zar might be, but a character in a proposed film to be shot deep in Darkest Africa. This feral hero is to be played by Stanley Obroski, a hunky tower of beef who, strangely enough, resembles Tarzan enough that the two can impersonate each other without being detected. (There seems to be a lot of these guys. It`d be interesting if Tarzan got this Stanley and Esteban Miranda in the same room and gave Jane something to fantasize about.) Although Stanley looks the part, he`s a rather dim guy without much courage. The rest of the movie crew are basically unpleasant specimens whose struggles to get their massive equipment through the jungle make for some dismal reading ("Oh well, you got to treat these niggers rough" says one of the crew as the drunken director is using a whip on the natives hired to do the hard work.) A stunt woman named Rhonda Terry, however, is down to earth, resourceful and good natured, and although the movie star Naomi Madison starts out as a grotesque caricature of a diva, she starts to see the light as they`re hunted by cannibals, kidnapped by Arab slavers, chased by lions... you know, the usual stuff. One thing about Burroughs that never fails to irritate me is his attitude toward human beings. He fills his books with the worst examples of people available and then compares them with the allegedly pure, noble animals of the jungle who don`t have any vices. Of course, the fact that he doesn`t seem to know much about wildlife really stacks the deck. In fact, most animals who live in groups are constantly scheming and struggling for status and dominance, trying to challenge the alpha males or push out dominant females as soon as they feel up to it, and animals which are weak or getting old are in constant danger of being mauled or abandoned by their own kind. It sure doesn`t sound like they have any moral superiority over humans. Sometimes it seems that Burroughs didn`t so much glamorize other beasts so much as he disliked his own species. Anyway, the mastermind behind the Gorilla City which is called "London" turns out to be a one hundred year old Briton who did research with early geneticists like Mendel and actually discovered a way to implant "germ cells" from humans into gorillas and vice versa. Settling in Africa, he began basically transferring human DNA (although of course neither he nor Burroughs uses that term) into gorillas. Sure enough, in a few generations, the great apes began to start speaking and grasping the rudiments of agriculture. If that`s not wild enough, the cells which the mad scientist used had been taken from the dead interred at Westminster Abbey! So these talking gorillas have a natural affinity to English culture and are an odd lot indeed. As if a settlement of these critters isn`t enough to deal with, not far away is a colony of their outcasts... offspring which look partly gorilla and partly human or else resemble California surfers but have ape brains. These mutants are not much fun to visit, either, although the gorgeous and completely uninhibited Balza might be a fun date if she didn`t drop a rock on your head. As for "God" himself, once he started getting all creaky and aged, he reversed his genetic process and started injecting cells from healthy young gorillas into himself. So now he`s a bizarre hybrid of both species, piebald black and white skinned, with patches of fur and fangs in a human face. This is the stuff of classic pulp horror of this era, and I wouldn`t be surprised if this guy wouldn`t eventually have made his way to Harrisonville, New Jersey and found himself being shot by Jules de Grandin. "God" intends to regain his complete human physiology by simply eating his prisoners, which works faster than all that cell implant business and he implies that before he eats the beautiful Rhonda, he might have something else on his agenda. There is a lot of humour in this book, much of which is rather obvious but there are some genuinely amusing moments. When Tarzan meets one of the talking gorillas, he growls at him in the mangani speech. The gorilla answers in perfect English, and this reversal of the expected stuns both of them. It`s also a nice touch that the Apeman blithely allows everyone to think he`s the cowardly Stanley, purely for his amusement. Tarzan`s mischievous trickster nature is one of the more appealing sides of his complex personality. (Stanley`s unhappy fate seems unnecessary but it also keeps the reader from being too sure about which way the story is going to go.) Hollywood and its inhabitants come in for severe thrashing by the author, reflecting Burroughs` unhappy experiences with the Tarzan films. And in an epilogue set a year after the main story, the Apeman travels to California as John Clayton to see what this mythical place is like. Just as a goof, he decides to audition for the lead role in a Tarzan movie and is flatly turned down as being the wrong type. (Hey, wait a minute.... doesn`t he look exactly like Stanley Obrosky, who was chosen as the perfect type by the same company?) And when a supposedly tame lion gets rowdy and seems about to devour the genuine star, Tarzan leaps upon the beast in his long practiced routine and stabs it to death. ("My God, you`ve killed our best lion. He was worth ten thousand dollars if he was worth a cent. You`re fired!") You might think he`d take Jane with him to hobnob in Hollwood but in fact she`s not even mentioned in the book, and for all a new reader could tell, Tarzan is just a happy Apeman lounging around the jungle with his big golden lion buddy. Having Tarzan married but with his wife offstage meant that he could never really have any romantic adventures and that he lost the benefit of his supporting cast.. one reason why the second half of the series seems a bit downhill.