Thongor Against the Gods by Lin Carter

"Daily, the young empire of Thongor grows vasteer and more powerful.  Already the barbarian and his princess rule the Three Cities of Thurdis, Patanga and Shembis on the Gulf.  At any time he may turn his savage eye southwards, upon Tsargol.  We must strike now!"

Welcome back to MPorcius Fiction Log!  Today we'll be reading the third of Lin Carter's Thongor novels, Thongor Against the Gods, first published in 1967 by Paperback Library with a cover by Frank Frazetta.  It is a Frazetta cover edition that I will be reading; if isfdb is to be believed, it seems that, unlike the first two Thongor books, Thongor Against the Gods was never adorned with a cover illo by Jeff Jones or Vincent DiFate.  

At the start of the first book in the saga of Thongor, Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, Thongor was an enlisted man in the army with a criminal record as long as your arm.  A month later, at the end of the second book, Thongor and the Dragon City, he was married to a princess and had been declared Emperor!  I don't know how Lemuria stacks up on such measures as infant mortality rate, Gini coefficient or per capita GDP, but Thongor provides anecdotal evidence that Lemurian society enjoys a high degree of social mobility.

Thongor Against the Gods begins almost two years after the end of Thongor and the Dragon City; Thongor has a one-year old son and the city of Patanga, of which he is king, has a whole fleet of air boats.  Chapter 1 of the novel starts off with a conference in the city of Tsargol; four people are in attendance, all of them druids or politicians who lost their positions of authority in the first two Thongor books thanks to the Northern barbarian's unwelcome interventions.  This conference of villains decides to hire Zandar Zan, the Black Thief, to kidnap Sumia, Thongor's wife, and Tharth, their son.  Zandar Zan is interrupted in the course of this operation, and only gets away with the queen, being forced to leave the baby behind.  And while he is flying a stolen air boat, with Thongor's own boat in hot pursuit, Sumia manages to knock the Black Thief unconscious, throwing the aircraft out of control!  It is tough out there for a thief!       

I believe the cover painting of the German edition of Thongor Against the Gods
is by Esteban Maroto.  Presumably it was originally created for some other property:
all us Thongor experts know that there are no horses on Lemuria!  

A convoluted series of events follows which sees one of the boats wrecked in the mountains and the other stalled, and the three characters separated, each individually facing what seems like certain death.  Totally unbelievably, all three survive.  

Interrupting the drama concerning King Thongor, Queen Sumia, and Zandar Zan the Black Thief, Carter introduces us to a new character, Shangoth, one of the Blue Nomads, a people who are eight or nine feet tall and have utterly hairless dark blue skin.  These super strong barbarians are split into many warring tribes that follow animal herds across the length and breadth of the plains of Eastern Lemuria in caravans of chariots and wintering in the ruins of long abandoned cities.  Emulating his models, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, Carter again and again has been telling us throughout the Thongor saga that Thongor the barbarian can do things city men and modern men are totally incapable of doing, and he tells us the same thing about the Blue Nomads.

Like so many characters in the first three Thongor books, Shangoth is a member of a royal family who has been forced into exile; Shangoth and his father Jomdath, chief of their tribe, were recently overthrown and are struggling to survive alone in the wilderness.  Shangoth enters a jungle in pursuit of game, and comes to the mountain that Zander Zan and Sumia's distracted driving lead them to crash their air boat into--Shangoth, who has never seen an airboat, witnesses the crash, and sees Sumia fall hundreds of feet down into the lake at the foot of the mountain.  He recovers her unconscious body (he has to fight a 100-foot long aquatic reptile to do it, but no biggie) and is amazed by her beauty--he has never seen a person with hair before or with white skin.

Not content with adding Shangoth to the cast, Carter then spends a few pages describing Shangoth's father Jomdath.  Dear old Dad was kicked out of the tribe he led for a hundred years (blue people live longer than white people) because he broke tradition and wouldn't let his warriors torture captured enemies.  Blue Nomads love to torture people.  We see this prominent feature of Blue Nomad culture up close when Jomdath is captured by the shaman of his former tribe; this joker was leader of the coup and is a wizard with a staff that can emit electricity which can be used to stun people and start fires, and he uses it to torture Shangoth's long suffering father.  (Conflict between the royal and religious establishments is a theme throughout these Thongor books we have been reading.) 

Meanwhile, Shangoth is going to burn on a funeral pyre the gorgeous little woman he found, thinking her dead, but just in a nick of time Sumia wakes up.  Shangoth's back is turned, and Sumia jumps to the conclusion that he is building a fire to cook her (remember, people were going to cook Sumia in the start of Thongor and the Dragon City--you don't just forget that kind of thing.)  So Sumia grabs some spears and is about to stab the blue giant in the back when, just in a nick of time, a wild boar appears to distract her.  The boar has saved Shangoth from Sumia!  Of course, this boar wants to kill both Sumia and Shangoth, but Sumia throws the spears at the beast, killing it just in a nick of time.  Sumia has saved Shangoth from the boar!  Princess and giant nomad make friends over a pork lunch, and march off together, only to be hypnotized by fell sorcery and drawn to a creepy black tower.

Back to our title character.  Thongor has also fallen in that lake, but is able to get himself out of it.  In a long sequence, parts of which make little sense, Carter describes in detail how Thongor captures a ceratopsian dinosaur and puts a bridle on it and teaches it to obey his commands so he can ride it around--the giant reptile can move with much greater speed than a man afoot, and is tireless besides, making it an ideal steed.  The barbarian rides in the direction he suspects his wife and the kidnapper to have gone, and comes upon the coup-plotting shaman torturing the deposed Jomdath; Thongor rescues Shangoth's dad (the shaman escapes) and they quickly become friends.  Thongor and Jomdath ride on, and Thongor blunders them into a field of narcotic and vampiric flowers, where they fall asleep.  The dinosaur wanders off, having contributed nothing to the plot despite the high word count Carter has devoted to describing it, and then the shaman catches up to our heroes and captures them.

Carter sometimes cuts away from all this drama in the east with Thongor, Sumia, Zander Zan and the Blue people to describe events back around Patanga and Tsaragol.  Karm Karvus, exiled Prince of Tsaragol, currently living in Patanga, goes to the mountains to consult the friendly wizard Sharajsha, who was a main character in the first Thongor book.  Sharajsha, an old geezer, is on his death bed, and  one of his last acts on this Earth is to use his magic to identify Tsaragol as the source of the kidnapping plot.  So the Patangan army mounts its fleet of flying machines and bears down on Tsaragol.  This fictional political/military history stuff is pretty boring, as Carter introduces a huge cast of characters on both sides, all of whom are totally forgettable.  (To make everything extra confusing, Carter, who has everybody call the reptile people who ruled the world before man "Dragon Lords," and has everybody call the city of Thurdis "The City of the Dragon," spends a lot of time talking about the toughest unit in the Patangan army, "The Black Dragons.")  

In a complicated way, Zandar Zan survived the crash of the boat he was piloting and acquired the boat Thongor was flying.  When we rejoin him he is flying around, trying tofigure out where he is and what to do, having failed in his mission.  He spots a crowd in a ruined city--it is the shaman and Shangoth's blue tribe just seconds away from burning alive their former chief Jomdath as well as Emperor Thongor.  The appearance of an aircraft, something none of the blue people has ever seen, throws the tribe into confusion, and, thinking the gods are angry, the tribe frees Jomdath and reinstates him as chief and sends the shaman into exile.  Zandar Zan drifts too close, and Thongor seizes the air boat; Zandar Zan gets killed in the process.

Aboard the boat, Thongor is accosted by the ghost of the recently deceased Sharajsha.  The wizard's shade directs him to the black tower where Sumia is in bondage and an evil wizard is summoning a demon that will devour Sumia's soul and animate her body so it can act as a spy and saboteur in Thongor's court at Patanga.  This wizard's dialogue seems to foreshadow the next Thongor book, Thongor in the City of Magicians.  Thongor arrives just in a nick of time to upset the spell, which leads to the destruction of the wizard and his tower and the preservation of his wife.

The last chapter of the novel sees the battle before the gates of Tsargol, which is a close run thing until Thongor arrives in his air boat with a dozen of the Blue Nomads as reinforcements; the city falls and Karm Karvus is installed as its king.        

I pity any Italian grad students who might have bought
Thongor Against the Gods thinking it was a Gramscian
satire of how Fordism leads to a conformist society

With its overly large cast and profusion of plot threads and superfluous scenes, Thongor Against the Gods is the worst Thongor book thus far.   As I have suggested before, Carter's style is not very good, and Thongor Against the Gods really shows signs that it would have benefited from some further editing.  One thing that stuck out this time around was Carter's use of anachronistic metaphors; e. g., a ceratopsian dinosaur is said by the narrator to be capable of "running like an express train," and when Zandar Zan sees a Blue Nomad caravan we are told that each its "great three-wheeled chariots" is "as capacious as a boxcar."  There are obviously no locomotives in Lemuria; it would be much better to compare the dinosaur and the caravan to something Thongor and Zandar Zan know about, or just skip the metaphors, which add nothing to the plot.  Another issue are little discrepancies, like how we are told the ceratopsians have beaks, but then later informed that they have lips.  Beaks and lips?  And how we are told that the women of Patanga fight on the battlefield besides the men--Carter didn't tell us that during the siege of Patanga in the last book, and there is no indication there are women fighting in the battle before Tsargol in the end of this book.  Carter obviously just came up with this stuff on the fly as needed to, for example, make Thongor's ability to control a huge dinosaur or Sumia's expert spear casting more believable and never revised the rest of the text to make it sit more comfortably within the larger whole.  

I also have to question the wisdom of introducing new characters who are barbarians like Thongor and exiled royalty like Sumia and Karm Karvus--if new characters are to be introduced, they should be different than the established characters.  Tabala the torturer and Xothun the blood-drinking scientist, who appeared in the second Thongor book and were killed in the same book, were novel and interesting, and I wish they had survived to be the villains in this volume--the crew in Tsargol who are the lead villains in Thongor Against the Gods get very little screen time and are totally forgettable, and while I like Zander Zan, he doesn't get much screen time either.  

I will generously grade Thongor Against the Gods as merely acceptable.  It is perhaps for the best that my relationship with Thongor of Lemuria must now go on hiatus, seeing as I do not own a copy of the fourth Thongor book, Thongor in the City of the Magicians.  I will keep an eye out for it, however.  And I own a bunch more Lin Carter books, so we'll be sampling his work again.  But first, a science fiction novel from the 1970s from an author who is, I think, a little more serious-minded than Carter.  We'll see!