Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The ape-man held no great love for the Gomangani as a race, but inherent in his English brain and heart was the spirit of fair play, which prompted him to spontaneous espousal of the cause of the weak.  On the other hand Bolgani was his hereditary enemy.  His first battle had been with Bolgani, and his first kill.

The poor blacks were still standing in stupefied wonderment when he dropped from the tree to the ground among them.  They stepped back in terror, and simultaneously they raised their spears menacingly against him.

"I am a friend," he said.  "I am Tarzan of the Apes.  Lower your spears."

Let's continue reading the adventures of John Clayton AKA Lord Greystoke, AKA Tarzan of the Apes, with the ninth Tarzan novel, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, which first appeared in 1922 in serial form in the magazine Argosy.  Like all the Tarzan novels, which constitute an immortal pillar of popular American culture, Tarzan and the Golden Lion has been reprinted many many times.  I am reading the 1984 Ballantine paperback edition I own, which has a Boris Vallejo cover; I think this was originally in my brother's collection and is one of the books he handed over to me when he was downsizing.   

Tarzan and the Golden Lion begins with a detailed description, full of fancied insight into the minds of beasts and a hearty helping of violence, of how a tiny little lion cub became an orphan.  On their way back from their last series of adventures, chronicled in Tarzan the Terrible, Tarzan, Jane and Korak the Killer come upon this sad cub and Lord Greystoke decides to adopt it!  He names the great cat Jad-bal-ja (oy, Joe the Lion would have been easier to remember and to type) and spends two years training the beast; Tarzan's relationship with Jad-bal-ja is much like his relationship with all the animals and peoples of Africa--he helps the creature when it is in trouble, and forever after it obeys the ape-man and will do anything for him.  Throughout this book we are presented episodes in which black people and various animals who already know of Tarzan express and demonstrate their respect and love him, follow his orders and go out of their way to do him favors; when Tarzan meets new peoples or beasts, we see him win their love and respect by doing them good turns and demonstrating his superior abilities and his expansive generosity and sense of fair play.  One of the interesting facets of Tarzan and the Golden Lion is how a villain takes advantage of Tarzan's stellar reputation, rides the ape-man's coattails a while and even threatens to sully that sterling reputation. 

Tarzan and the Golden Lion has multiple plot threads that often proceed independently; we might see them as a sort of Goofus and Gallant or Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle series of contrasts.  After our introduction to Jad-bal-ja and some time spent observing the happy Greystoke family, all their little jokes and their good relationship with the Waziri, the tribe that has accepted Tarzan as their chief, the scene shifts briefly to London where we meet six ne'er-do-wells.  Most prominent among them are an attractive Englishwoman, Flora Hawkes, who uses her sex appeal to manipulate men, and a tall and muscular stage actor, Spaniard Esteban Miranda.  Hawkes knows where there can be found a huge store of gold, and has assembled the other five crooks, all men, to help her get it--no easy task, as the gold is in a wild part of Africa and so an expensive expedition into dangerous territory must be mounted.  We later learn Hawkes was in the Greystoke's employ as Jane Clayton's maid and the treasure the woman is aiming to seize is a portion of the hoard of gold ingots hidden in the lost Atlantean the city of Opar, the very hoard that is the source of the Greystokes' wealth.  

Hawkes' gang is a multicultural one, and I suppose Burroughs here indulges in some ethnic and class stereotyping here as as he gives each crook a distinctive personality.  The Spanish actor, Esteban Miranda, is a hot-blooded and hot-headed lover, and has as a rival for the affections of Flora in handsome Russian dancer Karl Kranski.  There are two English prizefighters, who are perhaps indistinguishable from each other, and finally a cowardly German, Bluber, short and fat, who handles the money.  The English "pugs" have a manner of speaking that I took to be working-class, though Burroughs calls the pugilists "meaty fellows of the middle class"

"This 'ere Tarzan bounder he bumped off Esteban, which is the best work what 'e ever done.  Too bloody bad you weren't 'ere to get it too, and what I got a good mind to do is to slit your throat meself."

and Bluber a pronounced German accent; the former are ignorant brutes, and the latter, besides being cowardly, is always talking about money.

"Two t'ousand pounds, two t'ousand pounds!" wailed Bluber.  "Und all dis suit, vat it cost me tventy guineas van I can't vear it again in England unless I go to a fancy dress ball, vich I never do."

I complained that some of the characters in Tarzan the Terrible were lacking in personality, but Burroughs here in Tarzan and the Golden Lion succeeds in making all the characters distinct and memorable, at least if we consider the English thugs as a single unit.

From the get go these jokers are at each others' throats, bitching and moaning at each other, competing over Flora, trying to get larger shares of any stolen goods by cutting each other out or bumping each other off, a dramatization of the adage that there is no honor among thieves.

The Greystoke family is running low on funds, having donated so much of their funds to the Allied cause in the Great War, so Tarzan leads an expedition of fifty Waziri to Opar to collect more gold.  On the way down to Opar he finds a dead deer, slain not by a native's arrow but an arrow bought in a Western store.  Tarzan investigates, following a trail to a tribe of apes whom he expects to welcome him--instead these apes accuse Tarzan of murdering one of their fellows.  

We readers are soon appraised of something we have already guessed--Esteban is successfully impersonating Tarzan as he acts as a sort of spearhead or figurehead for Flora Hawke's own expedition to Opar.  Tarzan comes upon the Hawkes camp; Esteban is not around and Hawkes keeps her face hidden, and Kranski, the second smartest of the criminal crew, incapacitates Tarzan by putting a drug in his coffee.  (Just like so many people you know, Tarzan loves coffee!)  The European crooks leave behind the unconscious Tarzan, and Lord Greystoke falls into the clutches of Oparians; these particular Oparians are members of the anti-La faction and set about sacrificing Tarzan to their sun god.  Luckily the beautiful La, queen of Opar and president of the Tarzan fan club, helps our hero escape.  In fact, La accompanies Tarzan out of the city--she feels she hasn't long to survive in Opar, that the anti-La faction led by the high priest will soon dethrone her.

Instead of leading Lord Greystoke back towards his estate and the jungles with which he is so intimately familiar, La strikes out into uncharted territory inhabited by strange races she knows only by repute and Tarzan has never even heard of.  Divergent evolution in an isolated region was a theme of Tarzan the Terrible, and the same sort of thing is at work here in Tarzan and the Golden Lion.  Tarzan and La meet some black Africans who are even more primitive than those Tarzan usually deals with, and again and again we hear how these people are low on the evolutionary scale and how this determines their behavior.  (Burroughs here elides distinctions between cultural and biological evolution.)   

These primitive blacks, who have few words, never smile or laugh, and don't cook or make their own tools, are groaning under the tyrannical rule of gorilla-men who are more advanced, further along on the scale of evolution, than any apes Tarzan has ever seen--they walk upright like men, for example, and wear loads of diamond jewelry.  (One of Burroughs' oft-used narrative strategies is to offer radical contrasts.)  Tarzan witnesses the kinds of atrocities these bling-clad gorilla-men inflict on the local humans, and is moved to take the side of the blacks.  The gorilla-people capture La, and Tarzan has to rescue her from their strange building covered in diamonds.  In this Tower of Diamonds, Tarzan meets an old white man who has been a captive there since boyhood, and Burroughs generates tension and suspense by making it unclear (at least to Tarzan) whether this fellow Englishman will help Lord Greystoke or betray him to the gorilla-men who have been his masters for so many decades.

There is a lot of fighting as Tarzan performs regime change in the lost valley of diamonds and back in Opar.  I think the fighting in this novel is a little more interesting than that in Tarzan the Terrible, even if the gorilla-man society and Opar aren't as vividly described as the locations in that earlier novel; more crazy, surprising stuff happens.  The most remarkable thing about the gorilla-people is that their "emperor" is a chained lion to whom they feed human flesh (La, Queen of Opar, is on tonight's menu.)  The lion emperor is just a wild beast, not a lion-man or anything, and is just a sort of figurehead or god or mascot or something.  After Tarzan kills this lion, Jad-bal-ja, having escaped from the Greystoke estate, suddenly bursts on the scene to take part in the fighting--Jad-bal-ja rescues Tarzan more than once over the course of the novel, and for a brief period sits on the throne in the Tower of Diamonds, playing the role of the legitimate emperor of the valley.

After liberating the local blacks from the gorilla-men, Tarzan reorganizes the societies of these two peoples.  Recognizing that the local blacks are too primitive to run their own lives, Tarzan makes that old white prisoner their king.  This is an interesting scene as it embodies multiple ideological or philosophical themes of the Tarzan books.  The old white guy, understandably, wants to go back to his homeland in Europe, but Tarzan delivers a speech on how civilization is disgusting, how everybody in Europe is greedy and corrupt and this old English geezer will be happier ruling over these blacks than living among his own race and he will be doing a good deed besides!  And the dude actually buys it!

As for the gorilla-men, Tarzan convinces those who have survived the fighting to become La's bodyguard.  Why would Tarzan and La put any trust in a bunch of gorillas who cover themselves in diamonds and enslave and casually murder human beings--including women and children!--and whom they have just humbled in a tremendous bloody battle and deposed from their lofty station?  Well, unlike humans, it seems the gorilla-men never betray anybody.  At least that is what they say, and Lord Greystoke and the Queen of Opar buy it.  The sympathetic characters in these Tarzan novels are very credulous, very trusting.  Anyway, Tarzan and these gorilla-men janissaries lead the overthrow of the high priest of Opar and secure La's overlordship of the city.        

While Tarzan and his lion are engaged in beneficent nation-building, Miss Hawkes, Senor Miranda, and the other European crooks are living through a long series of dramas of deception and treachery.  Miranda manipulates people by tricking them into thinking he is Tarzan--even the noble Waziri, Tarzan's metaphorical children, fall for his act!  Esteban betrays his fellow thieves and steals the Oparian gold they have collected.  The Europeans make friends with some Arab traders with the idea of stabbing them in the back and stealing their ivory.  The blacks the Europeans have hired as guides and porters betray them and the whites are left in the jungle alone.  Jane comes looking for Tarzan and she gets mixed up in all this mess--at one point she thinks Tarzan has left her for another woman, and she also has to fight off a rapist.  When Tarzan comes back from Opar he has with him some diamonds from the gorilla-men's empire, and Kranski steals them and runs out on the other European criminals, only to end up dead by Esteban's hand.  Tarzan for a while thinks Jane has been killed in a fire.  Esteban goes insane, thinking himself Tarzan, and then ends up imprisoned forever by some cannibals who suspect he is some kind of supernatural creature.  This is all pretty entertaining, in part because the various characters all have distinct personalities and are driven by powerful, easy to identify with, emotions.  

I guess to demonstrate that lying and stealing are no way to live, all the schemes of Hawkes and her compatriots come to disaster, but while most of the malefactors suffer terrible punishments, Burroughs also puts in a good word for forgiveness and redemption.  Even though her adventures have led to the deaths of scores of people (mostly blacks and Arabs, admittedly), Lord and Lady Greystoke forgive Flora Hawkes her sins and hire her back into their employ!  John and Jane Clayton, you are too good for this fallen world!

The novel ends with Tarzan acquiring the gold Hawkes and crew took from Opar, thanks to the ingenuity of one of the many chiefs loyal to Tarzan, who tricks the treacherous guide who stole it from the Europeans into delivering it right to the Greystoke estate.

If you can overlook the fact that the same things happen again and again in these Tarzan novels--people get captured and escape, people are about to be sacrificed to some bogus god and are rescued in a nick of time, people think their loved one is dead only to find him or her alive, etc.--Tarzan and the Golden Lion is a fun adventure novel and of course I am recommending it.

Since the same sort of thing happens again and again in these books, it doesn't make sense, at least for me, to read lots of them in succession, so we'll be taking a healthy ERB break here at MPorcius Fiction Log and reading short stories by famous genre fiction writers for a while.  Until then, don't lie or steal and even though the world is full of liars and thieves, take everybody at face value and always forgive.