For him she felt the same keen, almost fanatical loyalty that many another had experienced for Tarzan of the Apes. Beast and human, he had held them to him with bonds that were stronger than steel--those of them that were clean and courageous, and the weak and the helpless; but never could Tarzan claim among his admirers the coward, the ingrate or the scoundrel; from such, both man and beast, he had won fear and hatred.
As the novel begins, Tarzan is on a long trek on foot, searching for his wife Jane, who was carried off by Germans in the last Tarzan novel, Tarzan the Untamed, which was set during the Great War. Our hero crosses an almost impassable "morass" into an uncharted territory inhabited by animals he has never seen before; this land, known as Pal-ul-don, has been separated from the rest of Africa for long eons, and evolution here has taken a peculiar course, producing animals and peoples unknown to the outside world.
Tarzan soon meets some of the local people, whose species Burroughs labels "pithecanthropus." These men and women look and behave more or less like the humans Tarzan, you and I are familiar with, but their feet are like hands and can grasp and hold, and they also have prehensile tails, giving them a fifth appendage with which to climb and fight, which comes in handy as almost every page in a Tarzan novel involves somebody climbing something or fighting somebody, and often both. These monkey people come in two ethnicities, the white Ho-don, who have hair only on their heads, live in cities, and are politically united under a king, and the black Waz-don, who are covered in a think shaggy coat of hair and are separated into warring tribes that reside in cliffside caves. The Ho-don and Waz-don are perpetually at war with each other, but Tarzan convinces the first Ho-don he meets and the first Waz-don he meets to become friends after saving them from lion attacks. Like John Carter, the Earthborn warlord of Mars, Lord Greystoke is the white man who goes among violent dangerous aliens, proves to them his superiority as a fighter, befriends them, and then teaches them how to behave; these books are a sort of allegory of Western imperialism. Before Tarzan the Terrible is over the title character will have made peace between the races of Ho-don and Waz-don and radically reformed the Ho-don religion, laying off all the priests (learn to code, smart guy!) and putting women in charge of the temples, women being the gentler sex and less inclined to human sacrifice.
Tarzan's new pals Ta-den the Ho-don and Om-at the Waz-don teach him the language of Pal-ul-don and when our guy learns the basics of the local situation he decides to hunt for his wife in the capital city of the Ho-don. But first these three amigos visit Om-at's tribe; there Om-at defeats in one-on-one combat the cowardly jerk who is current chief of the tribe and Om-at is thus declared chief himself. If that Wakanda movie I have heard people talk about is any guide, this is how the most advanced African nations choose their leaders, and here we see that the system works--new chief Om-at immediately institutes an executive order that suspends the age old custom of summarily executing all Ho-dons and other strangers, a stride forward for diversity that yields the immediate benefit of sparing the lives of Ta-den and Tarzan.
 |
| Left: Richard Powers Right: Boris Vallejo |
Tarzan immediately demonstrates the benefits of the new policy of welcoming high-skilled immigrants. Just minutes before the arrival of Om-at, Ta-den and Tarzan, the previous, now-deceased, chief of Om-at's tribe had tried to rape Om-at's girlfriend, Pan-at-lee. Pan-at-lee, resourceful and brave, fought off the unscrupulous chief and escaped into the dangerous wilderness, but where she is now, nobody knows. Tarzan leads the search party for Pan-at-lee, and the tailless stranger amazes the tailed natives with his ability to follow the girl's trail after sniffing around her bedroom--it seems the Ho-don and Waz-don don't have the keen sense of smell that Tarzan enjoys. During the search, fights break out with a lion (over the course of these books Tarzan fights more lions than you would believe) and then with a neighboring tribe of Waz-dons, which offers Tarzan repeated opportunities to prove his value as a friend to Om-at and his people.
Tarzan the Terrible has plenty of good elements and I enjoyed it. But there are problems. The novel has a huge cast of characters and while Burroughs is good about giving most of them memorable personalities, a number of them are pretty nondescript and Tarzan's new best friends Om-at and Ta-den are perhaps the worst offenders, princes who are in love with princesses but otherwise lack individuality or compelling motivations; they are just props to hold up the plot. And it doesn't help that almost all these monkey people have names that aren't easy to remember. During this first section of TtT (feel free to call it "Triple T"), I kept forgetting which of Ta-den and Om-at was white and which was black and if it was the whites who lived in cities or the blacks. I'm kind of a lazy dope who reads books for the feels and is rarely moved to put any effort into memorizing the names and affiliations of fictional people in fictional countries (and let's be honest, even when I was a college student thinking of becoming an academic specializing in British history I kept mixing up Bloody Mary and Mary, Queen of Scots and had to keep telling myself that George III was the grandson, not the son, of George II) so maybe this is a me problem, but Burroughs does include a two-page glossary of Pal-ul-don words and proper names in the back of the book, setting you straight on who is who, so maybe he anticipated that among the readers of his novel about men and women who get captured and escape again and again and sometimes ride a dinosaur would be dim bulbs like myself.
One of Tarzan's many periods of captivity in Tarzan the Terrible is among that rival tribe of hairy black monkey-men who are at war with Om-at's tribe of hairy black monkey-men. Tarzan escapes pretty quickly, gets back on Pan-at-lee's trail, and rescues her from a member of a third species of tailed man, the gorilla-like Tor-o-dons. Pan-at-lee is probably the most interesting of the monkey-people in the book, and her name is easy to remember because it sounds a lot like "panties." Even though she is covered in hair, and has a tail, Burroughs keeps telling us Pan-at-lee is beautiful; more importantly, she has some real human emotion, and she actually rescues Tarzan, grabbing his ankle when he is about to fall down a cliff. You go, girl!
Pan-at-lee's path of flight took her to a region the Ho-don and Waz-don all avoid, the stomping grounds of what we might consider the guest star of Tarzan the Terrible, the gryf. The gryf is a descendent of triceratops which has evolved into a carnivore with sharp teeth, long talons and a monumental size--75 feet long! The apex predator of Pal-ul-don (there is no tyrannosaurus in the book--don't trust the covers of SF books, people) is clever and tenacious, and despite its immense bulk can sneak up on even such a master of woodcraft as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, the gryf being inexplicably capable of moving silently and also having very little odor.
Tarzan distracts the gryfs pursuing him and Pan-at-lee and so the hairy black girl manages to escape the valley of the man-eating triceratops, only to be captured by white hairless Ho-don slavers and dragged to their capital city--we get some slightly fetishistic scenes in which she wrestles and bites her captors and they have to bind and gag her and drag her by her hair. Meanwhile, Tarzan discovers that the Tor-o-don gorilla-people have domesticated the gryf, and he imitates their methods and makes a steed of one of the 75-foot-long ceratopsians and starts riding to the Ho-don city. At the city we get what we might consider a satire of religion as Tarzan claims to be the son of the god of the Ho-don and Waz-don and demands audiences of the king and the high priest. Seeing that their religious practice includes daily human sacrifice and their temple is overflowing with wealth, Tarzan orders the end of the sacrifices and the distribution of the temples' store of fine goods to the poor. The high priest, who as a purveyor of a false religion recognizes in Tarzan a fellow con artist, strives to publicly refute Tarzan's claims and have the interloper destroyed, and we get scenes of debate and trial--Burroughs ably portrays the monarch and aristocracy of the Ho-don, who believe their religion and fear both the demi-god whom Tarzan is masquerading as and their high priest, trying to hedge their bets, endeavoring to evade responsibility and stay on the good side of both contending forces, just as we expect of politicians.
I like when people in books behave in a psychologically realistic way. I'll also note here that Burroughs does an entertaining job of describing the Waz-don cliff villages and the Ho-don cities, painting sharp pictures of these peoples' physical environs even if some of the actual people are not very interesting.
There are a lot of complicated shenanigans in the capital Ho-don city and nearby cities as various Ho-don factions battle it out--the high priest and the king are at odds, and then when the king is unexpectedly killed rival aristocrats (one of them Ta-den's father) fight over the throne. Tarzan, Jane, and Pan-at-lee are in the middle of this and keep getting captured and helping each other escape only to be separated again.
Jane, it turns out, has been a prisoner in the capital Ho-don city for a while--both the king and high priest want to get their monkey hands on her tailless body, but each has been reluctant to rape her for fear of the other's vengeance. Fiction is full of coincidences, and Burroughs' books probably more than most, and the high priest and king both decide to finally satisfy their lust for Jane at the same time, fortuitously at the very moment when Tarzan shows up. Like Pan-at-lee, Lady Greystoke is a beneficiary of Tarzan's aid but also demonstrates initiative and determination, enduring hardships and overcoming obstacles at times all by herself. We are privy to flashbacks to her experiences in German captivity, and then scenes in which she has to survive alone in the wilderness of Pal-ul-don and fight off an insane German officer. This German ends up impersonating a god and siding with one Ho-don faction while Tarzan sides with the other. The whole story climaxes when Korak the Killer, John and Jane Clayton's son Jack, a veteran of the British Army, arrives an instant before Tarzan is about to be sacrificed on an altar; Korak saves the day by gunning down the lead villains with his Enfield rifle. Burroughs has foreshadowed this climax in multiple ways, so it feels appropriate, not like cheap deus ex machina.
As noted, I enjoyed Tarzan the Terrible but I kind of think it is below average for a Burroughs novel. For me, at least, there are too many characters, and I am not a fan of palace intrigue plots in which you've got three or more factions and each is making and breaking alliances with the others and I'm supposed to keep track of them all. In the same way my preference in detective stories is to limit the number of suspects and victims and to focus on the psychology and emotions of one or two highly-motivated characters, in a story like Tarzan the Terrible I would have preferred if, instead of a high-priest and five different competing monarchs in three or four (who can remember?) different cities and villages, we just had two rival big wigs and there was more attention paid to the warped desires of these tailed weirdos for the throne and for the goddess-like Jane and their twisted envy and fear of the god-like Tarzan. I'm not that interested in the mechanical clockwork of clues and schemes, I am interested in human feeling, in danger, in love and hate, in triumph and tragedy, and that is what I hope to find in these books.
 |
| Anthologist Otto Penzler included Tarzan the Terrible in his 875-page The Big Book of Adventure Stories, which also offers work by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and Damon Knight |
No comments:
Post a Comment