Tarzan and The Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"And you intend,” he demanded, ‘‘to defy a city of four hundred and eighty thousand people, armed only with a bit of iron rod?”

"And my wits,” added Tarzan.

It's been over a year since we read the ninth Tarzan book, Tarzan and the Golden Lion.  If I am going to read all 24 Tarzan books before I go senile I will have to pick up the pace.  Today we've got Tarzan #10, Tarzan and the Ant Men.  I own two Ballantine paperback printings of the novel, one with a Richard Powers cover featuring wild African masks (see also the Powers mask on the cover of the paperback of Chad Oliver's Another Kind) and one with a Boris Vallejo cover that features members of the two isolated branches of the human race that dominate the novel's narrative; these books' interiors were printed from the same plates, and it is this Ballantine version of Tarzan and the Ant Men, which first appeared in serial form in Argosy in 1924, that I will be reading. 

In Chapter 1 we immediately see how much Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves his reputation as a master of entertaining adventure writing.  We are reacquainted with Esteban Miranda, the big strong Spanish actor who has been impersonating Tarzan, whose sanity comes and goes (at times he actually thinks he is Tarzan), and who in the last book was captured by African cannibals.  Burroughs paints quickly and entertainingly the psychology of this greedy white criminal as well as those of the manipulative and power-hungry blacks who hold him prisoner and use him as a pawn in their competition for the allegiance of the tribe.  Eventually the canny Miranda, who is an actor, after all, a professional deceiver, tricks a naive teenage girl, the daughter of the witch doctor, into springing him from captivity.  Burroughs makes all the relationships among these people compelling and their behavior totally believable.  Their interactions all generate suspense, because Burroughs is not above killing these relatively minor characters off in gruesome ways.  The Iberian thespian Miranda kidnaps the 14-year old cannibal naif and periodically through the novel we check in on this odd couple as they try to survive in the jungle. 

In Chapter 2 we begin the novel's main plot line.  Tarzan's son Korak the Killer has taught Lord Greystoke how to fly a biplane, and on his first solo Tarzan spots a region he has never explored because a thorny forest separates it from his own stomping grounds and those of the tribe of which he is "Big Bwana," the Waziri.  Carelessly Tarzan crashes his plane within this mysterious land, and is captured by a strange tribe of primitive people.  As with the cannibals, Burroughs presents characters here who are alien but act in a way with which we can identify and efficiently describes their behavior and their psychologies in a way that is captivating.  These people, the Alalus, are a vehicle for Burroughs to present a satire on gender roles--the women among the Alalus are bigger and stronger than the men, and they do most of the hunting and initiate the sex act, and as a result, life among the Alalus is not only brutal (hey, everybody's life is brutal in Burroughs' Africa) but marked by a total absence of any form of love--between sex partners, between parents and children, and among siblings!  

The hideous life of the Alalus was the natural result of the unnatural reversal of sex dominance. It is the province of the male to initiate love and by his masterfulness to inspire first respect, then admiration in the breast of the female he seeks to attract. Love itself developed after these other emotions. The gradually increasing ascendency of the female Alalus over the male eventually prevented the emotions of respect and admiration for the male from being aroused, with the result that love never followed.

The huge muscular female Alalus live in crude villages with their offspring, while the adult males cower solitary in the forest, to be periodically hunted and captured by the females and forced to impregnate them before being sent off again.  Upon adulthood Alalus are sent off to live on their own and do not even remember who their parents are. 

Burroughs also uses the Alalus to voice an opinion more palatable to our tender 21st-century ears.  After regaining consciousness, Tarzan quickly escapes the compound of the female Alalus who seized him while he was out like a light after crashing his plane, and one of the young timid males accompanies him.  Lord Greystoke, who has spent so much time in London and Paris among European middle-class and aristocratic people, as well as among African savages and actual animals, reflects on how little separates civilized from primitive man, and Burroughs, as does Raymond Douglas Davies in one of his many fine compositions, demonstrates that the difference between the civilized and the primitive is education.  Tarzan endeavors to teach this Alalus man to be brave, to use tools, and to fight, and his efforts are rewarded.  (Woah, teachers really do change the world!)  After Tarzan is separated from this new and improved Alalus male, we return to his adventures at intervals, and observe as he gathers together a bunch of male Alalus who were living individually like hermits in the jungle, hiding from the larger women Alalus, and teaches them how to fight and exhibit courage; before long these men are revolutionizing Alalus society, beating the Alalus women into submission and reviving the natural order of male supremacy.  Under patriarchy the men and women of the Alalus relearn love and become happy, and Burroughs does not skimp on scenes of the men beating the women nor on the women groveling at the men's feet, looking up at their masters with eyes filled with love.

A third subplot to which we occasionally return concerns a diamond-studded golden locket of Tarzan's mother which the ape man loses during his captivity among the Alalus.  Tarzan and the Ant Men is full of bloodshed and depictions of death, and this locket, taken from the unconscious Tarzan by an Alalus male, gets caught around the neck of a vulture who is among the flock that devours the thief after he gets killed in a fight.  Via an unlikely series of events that involves additional episodes of carrion eating--and not just by vultures!--the locket returns to its rightful owner at the end of the novel.    

After leaving his Alalus student behind, Tarzan becomes acquainted with another race of humanity new to him, this one quite civilized: the Minuni, the ant men of the title.  Tarzan makes fast friends with the Minuni of the city state of Trohanadalmakus (oh, brother!) when he rescues their prince who has been seized by an Alalus female.  The Minuni are between one foot and a foot-and-a-half in height, and their cavalry ride little teeny antelopes; they have swords and spears and build tall towers (I guess like those ant and termite hills we see in nature films about Africa) and dig deep mines, but have not developed the bow and arrow--they are amazed when Tarzan makes short work of the Alalus woman with his own bow.

Burroughs spends a lot of time on "world-building" the civilization of the Minuni; we learn all about their architecture and politics and economies.  Basically, the ant-men live in competing city-states of like half a million inhabitants each; these are aristocratic slave states where slaves do all the labor and also form the middle class of businessmen and professionals while the aristocratic ruling warrior class is wholly devoted to preparing for and conducting the constant raids each city state inflicts on the others.  The walled city states never actually get conquered; the raids just yield slaves and other booty.  Slaves are essential to Minunian society--members of the warrior class are more or less obligated to marry members of the slave class, to prevent the inbreeding that might weaken the aristocracy and leave it easy prey for the warrior class of enemy city states.  Another aspect of Minunian society that Burroughs emphasizes is how efficient it is; when he describes Minunian military maneuvers he tells us that "not a motion is wasted."  One of the novel's science fiction touches is how the air of the labyrinthine and hive-like towers and mines is rendered breathable.   

Tarzan, a curious sort with no fear of fighting, decides to stand on the front lines during a raid on his new adoptive city of Trohanadalmakus by the forces of rival city Veltopismakus and gets knocked unconscious yet again during the engagement and captured; the prince is also taken by the Veltopismakians.  Tarzan awakes in the rival city and finds himself shrunken to the size of the Minunians!  The tyrannical and ambitious king of Veltopismakus has in his employ a scientist who has been trying to invent a ray that can grow Minunians to Alalusian size, but so far he has only been able to use it to shrink people, not grow them, and the unconscious Tarzan was chosen to be a test subject.  The king, who envisions taking over all of the Minunian kingdoms, hopes to grow soldiers to a war-winning six feet high.

The most boring part of Tarzan and the Ant Men involves court politics in Veltopismakus.  We've got the ambitious and vain king, his scientist, his bitchy daughter, and his cabinet of six ministers, who are outwardly sycophantic towards the king but most of whom are in fact skeptical of the king's acumen and ability and exasperated by king's policies, which include heavy taxation and a prohibition on alcohol consumption. These nine people are all plotting against each other and I find this court intrigue stuff a little tiresome.

Burroughs doesn't just use Veltopismakus to comment on current events like Prohibition (four years old when the serial version of Tarzan and the Ape Men appeared in 1924--it would endure until 1933,) portraying  the Veltopismakians in charge of confiscating booze as corrupt hypocrites who drink the booze to the point of becoming dead drunk and offering scenes in which Veltopismakian business people moan about how taxes are crushing the economy.  Burroughs also engages in some deeper philosophizing.  One of the more competent of the six ministers discourses on decadence and cycles of history, opining that too much peace and prosperity have weakened the nation and that what is needed to make true men of the populace is war and the hard work that it takes to prepare for and recover from war.    

Fortunately for those of us who have spent a lifetime reading people's scribbling and hearing people's blabbing about tax policy and drug policy and are kind of sick of these debates, the action and adventure stuff picks up after Tarzan is put to work in the mines as one of Veltopismakus teeming thousands of slaves.  Lord Greystoke makes friends with a beautiful female slave and defends her when a brutal male slave gets fresh with her.  (If you have read many Burroughs books you won't be surprised when this woman is revealed to be a princess.)  Tarzan hooks up with the prince of Trohanadalmakus and over several chapters they figure out a way to escape captivity and liberate the pretty girl.  These scenes are solid adventure material--the chases, disguises, traps, secret passages, treacherous climbs, fights, and treachery that we read these kinds of books hoping to find.  Burroughs takes advantage of the fact that Tarzan and the prince have to go to all different parts of the city to engage in more world-building exercises.  On the more sciency side, Tarzan's escape is facilitated by the fact that, while he is a quarter of his usual size, he is the same mass as before (I guess) so is super strong.  Burroughs also uses the two princesses to deliver some more commentary on female psychology and sexual relationships  The bitchy princess of Veltopismakus falls in love with Tarzan and, when the hunky ape man rejects her, she tries to murder him and his comrades, but everybody forgives her when they realize she is only an evil bitch because she is rebelling against her evil father, and a few pages later she is one of the good guys.  We also get some brief love-triangle action when the prince of Trohanadalmakus falls in love with the enslaved princess and suffers unfounded fears that she only has eyes for Tarzan.

In the last few chapters, Tarzan and his friends having escaped Veltopismakus, Burroughs ties together and resolves the various plot strands.  Tarzan returns to ordinary size but the process addles his brains; at the same time Esteban Miranda is "unable to reason" because the witch doctor's daughter hit him on the noggin while he was sleeping so she could effect her escape, "killing his objective mind."  This means we've got two big handsome hulks wandering around the jungle in a daze, either of whom the Waziri, Korak, Jane, and the cannibals are likely to believe is the Big Bwana himself.  Of course, in the end things turn out OK for the Greystokes, and even the scoundrel Miranda avoids death, but things don't end well for the cannibals, not even the teenaged girl.

Tarzan and the Ant Men is a good adventure story.  All the episodes of danger and violence, and all the gore, are effective and entertaining.  Most of the individual characters have interesting personalities and behave in ways that at least make sense and sometimes win your sympathy.  I really was curious what would happen to the three main cannibal characters and to Miranda.  The scientist is underutilized, I admit, but the one real problem character is the evil princess, whom I really wish had gotten killed by one of her own traps or nimbly escaped justice to commit more evil, rather than turning good in such an unconvincing way; her transformation into a goody is weak drama, though it jives with the Alalus material by suggesting that women are mere puppets of circumstance who lack agency, that when women lie, cheat, steal, or try to murder you they don't deserve punishment because, hey, you can't expect women to shoulder any responsibility, to make rational decisions, they are just a reflection of the men in their lives the way the moon merely reflects the rays of the sun and generates no light or heat of its own.  

This brings us to the ideology or philosophy of Tarzan and the Ant Men.  The stuff about women and sex roles people nowadays are going to find hard to take, but at least it is fully integrated into the story-- the Alalus and the princess of Veltopismakus demonstrate or represent what Burroughs is trying to say.  All the business about taxes and prohibition and decadence seems just tacked on and distracting, like the six ministers, who are introduced, each with a long silly name and an assessment of his ability to fulfill the role given him by the vain king, and then just forgotten about.  After all the talk about these six jerks and discontent among the populace over high taxes and prohibition I thought there was going to be a revolution in Veltopismakus, but no dice.    

I'm inclined to think Burroughs talks a little too much about the architecture and geography of the Minunian cities in the novel, but all this description does give you a sense of place, makes the action scenes more believable, more immersive, because you can better "see" where Tarzan and his friends are fighting in or sneaking around or riding hell for leather through.  So I guess I am giving a pass to all that stuff, I guess it really does contribute to the whole experience.

It took me a while to finish Tarzan and the Ant Men because I was distracted by family business and, of all things, weather conditions, but I quite enjoyed this tenth Tarzan novel and I am curious to find out what happens next in Burroughs' Africa in Tarzan #11, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.