The Return of Conan by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp

"Man of Cimmeria!  You are a son of Crom, and he will not let you suffer eternal damnation!  You have always been true to him in your heart, and the black arts of the East shall not have your soul!"

Recently I spent quite a bit of my limited time on this Earth looking at many different images online of the Frank Frazetta painting that appears on the oft-reprinted paperback Conan the Avenger, which first appeared in 1968.  There are serious differences in color tone and cropping among different reproductions of the 1968 painting, and in 1980 Frazetta revised the work, making radical changes to the hero figure and the female figure (the revised painting was used as the cover of the 1981 Italian translation of Conan the Liberator.)  I have to admit I have always been skeptical of this particular Frazetta painting.  I love the wizard, and the crocodile and the octopus and the overturned bowl, and either version of the young woman is good (though I think I prefer the earlier one, as you can see the woman's face and her color fits in better with the rest of the colors in the painting.)  My gripe is with the hero--what is he standing on?  Why does he look so large?--his size is such that he looks like he should be closer to the viewer than the wizard and the woman, but he is obviously further away than they are.  I'm compelled to consider that the painting would be better without the hero.

Having spent so much time looking at this picture, I was inspired to read from the paperback upon which it appears.  Conan the Avenger prints two documents; part of Conan creator Robert E. Howard's 1930s history of Conan's world, "The Hyborian Age," and a 1957 novel by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp, The Return of Conan.  So let's read that 1957 novel; there are three different printings of Conan the Avenger available at the internet archive, so the text from the paperback is not hard to find.  (The 1957 hardcover from Gnome Press is a little harder to come by, and goes for over $150 on ebay.)  

The Return of Conan takes place not long after the events of The Hour of the Dragon, and refers many times to earlier Conan adventures, and includes many secondary characters from Howard's stories.  Conan is king of Aquilonia, the leading Western nation, and his policies have brought it peace and prosperity.  In the first chapter of the novel he is holding a big party in the palace, and, when his wife (Conan almost always refers to her as his "mate" or "woman") Zenobia goes out on the balcony to get some fresh air after a dance, a flying demon snatches her and flies off with her.  (Conan met Zenobia in The Hour of the Dragon: a brave slave girl familiar with horses and weapons, she helped Conan escape captivity and at the end of that novel he freed her from a rival monarch's seraglio and declared his intention to marry her.)

Conan puts some other guy in charge of the kingdom and rides off at a furious pace, exhausting multiple horses.  His destination is the golden tower of Pelias, a wizard he met in "The Scarlet Citadel" when both men were captives in a dungeon full of wells leading to hell and worked together to escape.  Conan hopes Pelias can use his magical abilities to divine Zenobia's whereabouts and the identity of her kidnapper.  Pelias's tower is in a city, and in the city a disguised Conan is quickly distracted from his mission by a hot chick.

A spy in his palace has alerted some of Conan's innumerable enemies of the Cimmerian's solo departure, and some of them have laid an ambush for our hero, using a gorgeous woman as bait.  She comes to Conan for help, saying some brutes in a tavern tried to take advantage of her.  Conan may be a pirate and a bandit and a thief and a torturer, but he won't stand for mistreatment of women; at least that is what we hear at this juncture in the plot.  So he goes into the tavern, where the trap is sprung  but without success, Conan killing all his attackers.  The woman has disappeared, to the disappointment of Conan, who "had meant to take a kiss at the very least as a reward for helping her" even though he is married and actually on a mission to rescue his wife.  

At the tower of Pelias, Conan gets plenty of intelligence from the friendly wizard, and the novel takes on some of the aspects of a "Yellow Peril" story.  The wizards of the East, Pelias tells the Cimmerian, are more powerful than the wizards of the West, and the most powerful of all, Yah Chieng of the city of Paikang in the land of Khitai, has the ambition of ruling the world.  Conan is an obstacle to Yah Chieng's conquest of the world, even though the Cimmerian doesn't know it!  You see, the world is evolving away from magic and towards "enlightenment and reason," and magic spells are becoming less powerful all the time.  Conan and his rule of Aquilonia are, somehow, one of the main drivers of this evolution.  If Yah Chieng wants to cast the spell that will give him power over the world, he will first have to kill Conan, and so he has abducted Zenobia in hopes of luring the barbaric Cimmerian king of civilized Aquilonia into undertaking a perilous journey that will lead to his death.

Pelias gives Conan a magic ring that he says should protect him from summoned monsters, and Conan hurries off, bound for the purple tower of Yah Chieng in far Paikang.

In Chapter 3 Conan gets distracted again when he learns that the civilized Turanians have wiped out a band of nomadic Zuagirs and captured their chief.  Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born" led a band of Zuagirs against the Turanians and he still has a soft spot for the Zuagirs and so he decides he will rescue this chief.  He disguises a party of Zuagirs as merchants and they enter the walled city where this chief is held, and at night open the gates and allow in the rest of a big Zuagir war party.  Despite all that goop about Conan's "barbaric code of chivalry" in Chapter 2, he doesn't seem to mind how the Zuagirs round up all the town's women while sacking the place.

In the quarters of the governor of the town (after killing the governor, naturally), Conan runs into that woman again, the one who lured him into the ambush in the tavern back west.  In Chapter 3 we get to know this woman pretty well in scenes in which Conan does not directly appear; she is Thanara, a spy working for Yah Chieng but ostensibly in the employ of King Yezdigerd of Turan (a figure from "The People of the Black Circle.")  She has been given some special equipment by a shaman who is acting as an intermediary between her and Yah Chieng ("He who is not to be named") and when Conan, instead of just killing her or avoiding her, lowers his guard because she is so sexalicious ("Conan felt the hot urge of his racing blood"), Thanara tosses into his face "pollen of the yellow lotus of Khitai" and Conan is rendered unconscious.

Conan wakes up in Chapter 4 in chains in a dungeon under King Yezdigerd's palace, which overlooks the sea from high atop a cliff.  Soon he is dragged before Yezdigerd's court; with the help of another Western barbarian who is present at court, Rolf, Conan escapes, jumping out a window to the sea below after first humiliating Yezdigerd and Thanara.

Again and again in The Return of Conan, Conan meets an old enemy like Yezdigerd or an old friend like Rolf, and in Chapter 5 he and Rolf climb aboard a pirate ship among the crew of which number many of Conan's comrades from his pirate days and whose captain is an old rival of Conan's.  Conan makes himself captain lickety-split and then leads the pirates to victory over two Turanian vessels, including one commanded by Yezdigerd, who is killed.  

Chapter 6 sees Conan in Vendhya, which is ruled by Queen Yasmina, whom we met when we read "The People of the Black Circle."  Yasmina summons Conan to her bedroom and they have sex.  Between bouts of lovemaking, some assassins sneak into the queen's bed chamber and Conan and Yasmina kill them; they then have sex again while Conan still has their blood on him.

Chapter 7 has a little introductory prologue like those we often see in horror literature in which a minor character is killed by a mysterious monster.  The main portion of this brief chapter has Conan hanging out with some hill tribesmen, then climbing the snowy Himelias, where he is attacked by a snow demon; the ring Pelias gave Conan (and which Yezdigerd's subordinates apparently neglected to seize from him when they stripped him naked) protects Conan from this alien creature.

In Chapter 8 Conan has crossed the Himelias and is in Khitai, where he climbs over the Great Wall of Khitai and meets "saffron-skinned" people, including a beautiful girl whose "slant-eyed face was of startling oriental beauty."  We are reminded that Khitai is an old civilization, that the people of Khitai had vast rich cities when the men of the West had yet to invent fire.  Conan rescues the woman from two of Yah Chieng's top soldiers who are tying her to a tree as a sacrifice to a dragon.  Moments after he kills the two guys the dragon shows up and Conan kills it as well with a lance he makes out of bamboo.

The "oriental beauty" has sex with Conan and then leads him to her hidden village, a colony of dissidents.  In Chapter 9 the girl's father describes to Conan how Yah Chieng took over Paikang twenty years ago, driving him and his surviving relatives and friends into the jungle.  His wife, a sort of seer, died during the Yah Chieng takeover, but her dying words were a prophecy, that a white king from the West would overthrow Yah Chieng within twenty years.  Conan has shown up just in time to make the prophecy come true!

Conan and these counter revolutionaries hatch a scheme to get into the palace during the big annual celebration that is taking place next week--Conan, who is of course taller than all these people, hides under one of those big dancing dragon costumes we've all seen on TV during Chinese New Year.  Once inside the town he sneaks off in the confusion if the drunken celebration. Down in the dungeons Yah Chieng has imprisoned an entire company of white mercenary soldiers; Conan frees them, and, as luck would have it, one of them is an old friend, Lyco of Khorshemish.  These mercenaries join the anti-Yah Chieng locals in attacking Yah Chieng's troops.

Yah Chieng is not participating in the celebration.  In Chapter 10 Conan makes his way to the chamber in which Yah Chieng has Zenobia chained to an altar and is about to sacrifice her, on the way overcoming the flying demon who abducted Zenobia back in Chapter 1 and rescued Thanara from Conan in Chapter 5.  After a trip of some months, the King of Aquilonia has arrived on the very day, at the very hour, when Yah Chieng has decided to murder Zenobia.  If this sacrifice is part of the spell that will allow Yah Chieng to take over the world, Nyberg and de Camp didn't make it clear to me, and, anyway, I thought the Khitan wizard couldn't cast that spell while Conan was stull alive.  Anyway, the magic ring and direct intervention by Crom, Conan's god, save Conan from the wizard's magic, and then he kills Yah Chieng with his bare hands a second before the sorcerer kills Zenobia.

(The text makes clear that Frazetta's painting means to depict Conan leaping over the altar to tackle Yah Chieng.  I would never have guessed that the central male figure was airborne; he looks like he is running, not jumping.  Also, and I know I am not supposed to say stuff like this, the facial features of the wizard in the painting do not in the least look like those of an East Asian.)    

In an Epilogue Conan and Zenobia are almost home when they are attacked by an army lead by Thanara; just in time an Aquilonian army arrives to save the day.  Zenobia, a skilled archer, shoots down Thanara just as she is about to shoot down Conan.  (This is the one time Conan uses the word "wife" to describe Zenobia, as he praises her after she saves his life.)

I don't want to say The Return of Conan is bad, but I can't say it is good, because it has a lot of problems.  A big issue is its lack of direction and unity of theme and a related flagging of narrative drive.  Nyberg and de Camp start off the novel with two big ideas that serve as the foundation for the story and which should supply Conan and the other characters with their motivations--Conan's queen has been kidnapped and Yah Chieng is trying to take over the world.  But Zenobia's liberation and Yah Chieng's campaign for world conquest, instead of being the source of everything that goes on, are almost forgotten for six or seven chapters as Conan flits from one self-contained episode to the next.  In those chapters--the bulk of the book!--Conan almost never thinks of Zenobia or Yah Chieng, and he is always getting distracted from what should be his unwavering goal, getting to Paikang.  The King of Aquilonia never pines for his queen or worries she is dead or has been tortured or raped or whatever, and the fact that he is the one thing standing between the world and an Eastern tyranny never seems to cross his mind; as a result, the novel lacks tension--why should I care about Zenobia and Yah Chieng if Conan doesn't?  Conan is far more passionate about helping friends from his past like the Zuagirs or getting vengeance on enemies from his past like Yezdigerd than he is about the here and now problems of saving his queen and saving the world.  Now, maybe you could argue that this jives with Conan's personality, that Conan is a womanizer and a selfish sort of individualist, but if Nyberg and de Camp are choosing to portray Conan in this way, why did they build the structure of the novel around two quests that Conan is going to be indifferent to?

Some of the early self-contained episodes work reasonably well, and Chapters 9 and 10 are not bad, though the excitement of sneaking a disguised army into a walled town at the end of the novel is somewhat undermined by the fact that Conan has already sneaked a disguised army into a walled town in this book, just 75 pages ago.  Some of the fight scenes are good.  But too many of the capers in the middle of the novel are weak and/or needlessly encumber the narrative, and a few--the episodes of Yasmina and the snow demon are good examples--are pretty perfunctory.  Some of the secondary characters from Conan's past contribute nothing to the narrative; Rolf and Yasmina, for example, appear and disappear without adding anything to the story.  It would have been better if the authors had spent those pages developing Yah Chieng and Thanara, giving them more screen time.  I even think shortening the novel--say, eliminating the Yasmina and snow demon chapters altogether--would have been an improvement.

I have my own vision of what Conan should be, and a lot of the things Nyberg and de Camp do here are contrary to my conception of Conan and thus I found they detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  I like to think of Conan as the embodiment of the individual who triumphs over adversity in pursuit of his own chosen goals, a man who bends the universe to his will.  But all that jazz in Pelias's tower about Conan (in some vague and abstract and involuntary or autonomic way) personifying the rise of reason and actually causing the decline of magic, and then the prophecy business among the Khitans, turn Conan into an instrument of fate or just a man blown by the winds of fate.  Maybe this would be fine in a Michael Moorcock story in which the protagonist is a tragic figure, but to my mind, Conan should represent the man who is master of his own destiny and the master of his environment.   

Curious about Pelias, I reread "The Scarlet Citadel" and its virtues cast into sharp relief the shortcomings of The Return of Conan.  The characters, even the minor ones, all have powerful emotions and strong motivations that bring them to life--Howard transmits to the reader the genuine anger and fear of Conan and the various wizards and kings, and the actions of everybody in the story stem from their emotions and their personalities.  The magic and monsters are strange and scary and feel fresh and original.  Howard describes the settings vividly, offering not only a picture you can see in your mind but also an atmosphere you can feel.  "The Scarlet Citadel" is engrossing.  Nyberg and de Camp in The Return of Conan don't achieve any of this--the characters lack personality and seem to do what they do not out of inner drives but because it is what the plot demands of them, and the magic (e.g., magic ring) and monsters (e.g., dragon) and settings are pedestrian, banal, and vague.  

We're grading The Return of Conan barely acceptable.