Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Stellara!” he cried. “My darling!” But the girl turned her face away from him.

“Do not touch me,” she cried. “I hate you.”

“Stellara!” he exclaimed in amazement. “What has happened?”

It is time to read the third Pellucidar novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tanar of Pellucidar, which first appeared as a six-part serial in Blue Book in 1929.  We've already read the first two Pellucidar books, At the Earth's Core and Pellucidar, the saga of the development of the empire of American David Innes in the savage inner world that lies far beneath our feet, a world whose sun sits forever at the zenith so your shadow always lies directly beneath you, a world that is home to stone age humans, psychic matriarchal pterosaurs, giant cave bears, plesiosaurs, and an endless array of other dangerous people and animals.  It looks like this novel will shift gears and star not an imperialist reformer from the surface but a native of Pellucidar.  

Like most of Burroughs' output, Tanar of Pellucidar has been reprinted many times.  I'm reading the $1.95 Ace copy my brother sent to me back in 2019 when he mailed me our combined Edgar Rice Burroughs collection.  This paperback, over 240 pages of text (like 60 pages longer than my Ace Pellucidar), has a brilliant Frank Frazetta cover; the composition is terrific--the curve of the muscleman's body, the way the wind pulls his hair, etc., --as are the moody colors.  The man's face and expression are also good--sometimes Frazetta's faces are a little flat or lack expression, but this one is fully realized graphically and emotionally.  A flawless Frazetta classic.

OK, Tanar of Pellucidar, taken as a whole, is the least of the Pellucidar books so far.  It feels long and it feels repetitive, what with people getting captured, escaping captivity, and then getting captured again and how an apparently endless series of love triangles and repeated instances of irrational jealousy keep the love birds at the center of the story apart; and then there are some elements of the story that are derivative and a little silly.  However, some parts of the book (mostly in the last quarter or so) are as good as anything in either of the two previous Pellucidar volumes, and amidst the repetitious escapes and fits of jealousy Burroughs gives us some satirical social commentary about sexual mores and some mind-bending science fiction concepts, so I am still recommending Tanar of Pellucidar, and looking forward to my next forays into Pellucidar and into the wider Edgar Rice Burroughs canon.  

For a blow by blow recounting of the novel's plot and a look at its themes, and my own little criticisms, read on.

Five of the six issues of Blue Book in which installments of Tanar appear 
have cover illustrations promoting Burroughs' serial that focus not on
how Tanar's love interest is constantly jealous but rather on how Tanar has to
fight one oversized mammal after another

**********

The Prologue to Tanar of Pellucidar is about how Burroughs has a friend, Jason Gridley, who has discovered a new radio wave; tuning into this wave on his receiver exposes him to some mysterious signals.  Eventually, somehow, he starts receiving Morse code transmitted by Abner Perry, David Innes' right hand man, from the other side of Earth's 500-mile thick crust.  Then comes the Introduction of the novel, which is in the voice of Perry, who reports that Innes and his empire are in trouble!  A piratical sea-faring race of humans, previously unknown to the region of Pellucidar familiar to Innes, Perry and us readers, has been raiding the empire of Innes and, among other crimes, carried off Tanar, the son of one of Innes' closest native friends, a king of one of the principal constituent kingdoms of the empire.  Innes has set out after Tanar in a boat with one other comrade and with a captive pirate as a guide.  

The main text of Tanar of Pellucidar is written in the third person omniscient, and begins with Tanar captive aboard a pirate ship.  The humans Innes encountered when he first arrived in Pellucidar had a stone age technology, but these pirates bear Renaissance or Early Modern equipment like high-decked sailing ships, arquebuses, and that sort of thing.  Burroughs leans into the stereotypical pop-culture image of a pirate pretty heavily, in a way that I found kind of silly; these troublemakers hail from a country called Korsar and wear gaudy brightly-colored head scarves and sashes, carry cutlasses, and make people walk the plank.  After the exotic and original Mahars and Sagoths of the last two books, a bunch of cartoonish pirates are a real let down, although I should perhaps count my blessings--one of my pet peeves is the romanticization of pirates, and Burroughs portrays these pirates as totally evil.

The Korsars' gunpowder is inferior to that developed by Perry and used by the people of Innes' empire, so Tanar manages to get better treatment from his captors by suggesting to the supreme leader of the Korsars, a man known as The Cid (good grief), that if he and his fellow prisoners are kept healthy they can teach the pirates how to manufacture superior powder.  

Burroughs' heroes generally develop relationships with princesses, and, sure enough, the daughter of The Cid, Stellara, is aboard and Tanar and she see something, each in the other, that is intangible but alluring, much to the envy of Bohar the Bloody One, The Cid's lieutenant, a particularly ugly and emotional pirate.  A freak storm wrecks the ship, leaving many aboard dead or facing an uncertain fate on the ship's scattered boats; when the storm passes the only living souls aboard the drifting hulk are Tanar and Stellara.  Tanar learns Stellara is not really a Korsar, which he sort of expected because she was the only person among the pirates who wasn't acting like a total jerk.  Stellara explains that she is the daughter of a woman of a stone age tribe resident on the island of Amiocap, the island of love.  The Cid captured mom and took her as his mate--according to mom, Stellara was conceived just a few days before her mother was captured, so the Korsars think Stellara half-Korsar, but Stellara is confident she is 100% Amiocapian.

The derelict ship drifts to an island that turns out to be Amiocap.  The stone age people there are skeptical of Starella's claim to be of their race, and similarly doubt Tanar's tale that he is from a kingdom and an empire they never heard of.  While imprisoned and scheduled for execution, Stellara and Tanar begin to get an inkling that they are in love with each other, but they are too shy to open up about their feelings, dooming their love to travel a rocky road.  The first actual expression of that love is Stellara's jealousy when a local girl who brings the prisoners food voices her great admiration for the handsome Tanar.

Mammoths attack the village and in the excitement Tanar and Stellara escape.  Tanar, earlier in his career, was captured by a tribe of the monkey people we saw briefly in At the Earth's Core and they taught him how to travel in the jungle canopy and our hero uses this ability--which he teaches to Stellara--to flee the natives without leaving a trail.  I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see Burroughs pulling a gag out of the Tarzan tool box so soon after giving us the trite pirate stuff and a guy named "The Cid." 

They can't spend all their time aloft, and back on terra firma Tanar and Stellara are forced to contend with a Coripie, the bane of the humans of Amiocap, a sort of subterranean ghoul.  Stellara pitches in during the fight; in fact, the Coripie would have killed and eaten them both if not for her participation in the struggle.  Our heroes then meet a human mammoth hunter; he is fleeing an enraged mammoth, and Tanar helps him kill the beast.  As we readers have been led to expect from earlier in-your-face foreshadowing, this man turns out to be Stellara's father, chief of a nearby village.

Tanar and Stellara take up residence in her father's village.  Here Burroughs hits us with some social commentary.  The people of Amiocap are very open about love; men and women have no compunctions about and face no social pressure against expressing their attraction to each other.  Burroughs tells us that this is psychologically and sociologically healthy and that much of the unhappiness experienced in our own world here on the outer surface of the crust is the result of men and women failing to make manifest their love for members of the opposite sex.  Of course, Tanar is not of this island, and while Stellara has the blood of these people, she was raised among the evil Korsars, so even in this free-love environment neither of our main characters directly reveals his or her love to the other, and this reluctance causes them a lot of trouble, with Stellara, for example, manipulating people to make an oblivious Tanar jealous.

Bohar the Bloody One survived the storm, and, while Tanar is away hunting, Bohar leads a Korsar attack on the village and carries off Stellara.  When Tanar returns and hears this horrible news, he chases after the pirates.  During a brief fight with the Korsars he falls in a hole and lands in the labyrinthine world of the Coripies, who capture him and add him to the local Coripie tribe's larder.  Instead of tearing captives apart to be eaten at once, standard operating procedure among the Coripies, the chief of this tribe of the ghouls has decided to hoard enough captives to hold a big feast at which there will be enough fresh meat for every member of the tribe. 

Most of the captives fated to be eaten alive at the upcoming feast are condemned criminals from this Coripie tribe or captives taken from other Coripie tribes, but with the arrival of Tanar two humans are now on the menu.  The other human is a guy named Jude from the island of Hime.  I wondered if this guy was going to be Burroughs' vehicle to comment on the Jewish people, and I am still not sure if this was Burroughs' intention.  Jude is bitter, depressed, and full of hate for everybody; Tanar suspects this may be because he's been cooped up as a doomed prisoner for so long, and so this may not be a reflection of his original character or the character of his people, but soon enough he will learn the truth.

Jude being so disagreeable, Tanar becomes more friendly with one of the Coripies from a rival tribe of ghouls, Mow, than with his fellow human.  Tanar learns from Mow all about the totally evil culture of the Coripies, who have no word for love in their language; I guess the ghouls are a foil for the free love humans of Amiocap.  Subject to food shortages, the Coripies practice population control, executing any female who gives birth to a third child.  As a result, male Coripies don't have sex with females they like, for fear of setting them up for execution, and instead rape females they don't like, and female Coripies do not love their own children.

Mow knows a secret way out of the cavern that is their prison, though team work is required to use it.  Mow and Jude both hate all the other prisoners, but with his sunny disposition Tanar is able to weld the three of them into a team.  Mow is killed during the escape, but after a long march through dim tunnels, during which Jude's extreme pessimism provides comic relief (this is one of the more entertaining sections of the novel), Tanar and Jude make it to the surface.  Where, in one of the wild coincidences that are so common in Burroughs' work, they immediately stumble upon Bohar the Bloody One who is strangling Stellara because she has refused to have sex with him.

Tanar kills Bohar and he and Stellara finally give voice to their love for each other.  But at the first opportunity Jude of Hime kidnaps Stellara, puts her in a canoe and heads for Hime.  Tanar sets out after them but is delayed by having to fight an array of monsters, one after the other.  Having defeated a sabre-toothed tiger, then crossed the water to Hime, then escaped a herd of bison, Tanar ingratiates himself with a native of Hime by killing a huge wolf that threatens him; this kid is the son of a chief, and he brings Tanar home.    

The people of Hime turn out to be Burroughs' device for attacking the bonds of matrimony.  (It is interesting to see Burroughs presenting this Ted Sturgeon type material as early as 1929--speculative fiction, even adventure-type fiction in which a guy gets captured and escapes every week or so and has to kill a monster every weekday and twice on Sundays, has always been questioning society and proposing alternatives.)  The people of the island are all bitter and angry and the families constantly fight amongst themselves and against others, spouse against spouse, sibling against sibling, spouse against unfaithful spouse's adulterous lover, etc.  Why?  Because divorce and separation are forbidden on Hime, and when the members of a married couple no longer love each other they become so unhappy they not only cheat but get violent and their animosity poisons all relationships around them.  I guess this is the complementary component of the free love philosophy Burroughs demonstrates on Amiocap--people should express their love freely, and then, if you are no longer in love with your lover, you should dump him or her tout suite instead of maintaining the loveless relationship.

Among these endlessly quarreling people Tanar encounters Gura, a young woman who isn't as full of hate and violence as the rest of the Himeans--she is half Amiocapian, her Himean father having kidnapped her mother.  (All across Burroughs' body of work, heredity is very important in determining one's character and behavior.)  Gura helps Tanar escape when her father plots to kill Tanar, he suspecting his wife is in love with Tanar.  In fact it is Gura who is in love with Tanar.  

Tanar and Gura, Jude and Stellara, and the eighteen Karsars who were previously under the command of Bohar the Bloody One all wind up in the same cave.  Stellara, seeing the half-Himean/half-Amiocapian girl with Tanar, gets jealous and tells Tanar she hates him.  The wily Jude escapes, but Stellara, Gura and Tanar all end up on a ship to Karsar--Tanar is separated from the women and doesn't see them aboard ship or when they arrive at the big city (population half a million) that is the capital of Karsar.  We learn a little about the city, perhaps the largest and most technologically and economically advanced in Pellucidar; for example, the bearded and brilliantly attired people of Karsar lord it over a vast countryside of smooth-faced stone age slaves who grow the food the city dwellers eat.  Societies in Burroughs' fiction that aren't absolutely stone-age seem often to have an economy based on slavery.

The last 60 or 70 pages of Tanar of Pellucidar, the parts after Tanar's arrival in the city of the Karsars, are more entertaining and interesting than almost all of what came before in the previous chapters.  The monsters are more gross.  The escape attempts are more tense.  The satire and social commentary is gone, there is more gore, and more of a horror vibe, and the details all feel more unusual and more original.  Did Burroughs draft this stuff at the end and the early chapters first and then pad out the novel's length by writing the repetitive middle?  

Among the captives in the giant-rat-infested dungeon into which Tanar is thrown is David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar.  Innes and Tanar convince The Cid to treat them well and give them some freedom of movement so they can set up a manufacturing capability in Karsar for the production of  decent gunpowder.  (Karsar gunpowder fails to ignite like half the time.)  They eventually manage to escape with Stellara and Gura after hatching a scheme that is sort of interesting, certainly more compelling than earlier escapes in the novel.  They venture through and beyond the slave-inhabited countryside to cold regions few Pellucidarian have ever explored.  Amazingly, their shadows lengthen, and off in the distance, beyond some kind of weird ocean, Innes sees what he believes to be Sol, the sun about which Earth orbits!  This must be a passage between Pellucidar and the Arctic!  The existence of this passage is among several clues that suggest that the Karsars are the descendants of 16th-century pirates who somehow made their way from the surface of the Earth down here to Pellucidar 400 or so years ago.  (Remember how English crusaders got stuck in Africa in the medieval period and maintained their jousting culture all the way up to the 20th century in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle?  I guess these pirate jokers similarly are still building sailing ships and making people walk the plank after four centuries.)  This revelation, which I guess I should have predicted, makes the silly names and derivative behavior of the Karsars a little less annoying.

Having made this mind blowing discovery, the party turns back and starts the long march to Innes' empire, but they manage to get captured and imprisoned by Karsars yet again.  Tanar and Innes are put in a different dungeon than last time, separately, in solitary confinement.  In probably the best section of the novel, Tanar struggles to maintain his sanity in a tiny lightless cell where he is tormented by swarms of nonvenomous serpents.  Of course he eventually figures out how to escape, but this is the most compelling escape attempt yet in a novel full of escape attempts.  And of course the first people he runs into once he has escaped the dungeon are Stellara and the man who is about to beat her because she refuses to have sex with him, but the ensuing fight, in which Tanar kills this guy, is a pretty exciting fight.  Tanar then cuts off this guy's beard to use in making disguises for himself and Stellara.  The lovers bluff their way out of the city and a long chase follows, and then Tanar and Stellara make it back to Innes' empire.  The novel ends inconclusively, however, with David Innes, apparently, still stuck in solitary under the Karsar city, and on a cliffhanger--in the "Conclusion," Burroughs' friend, Jason Gridley the radio inventor, declares he is going to do something to help Innes.  What could this be?  I'm curious to find out!

Well, stay tuned because ERB will be back on MPorcius Fiction Log soon, after some more recent short stories by divers hands.