In peace he [Tantor the elephant] had lived with Dango the hyena, Sheeta the leopard and Numa the lion. Man alone had made war upon him. Man, who holds the unique distinction among created things of making war on all living creatures, even to his own kind. Man, the ruthless; man, the pitiless; man, the most hated living organism that Nature has evolved.
(I have to report that my Ballantine edition has some pretty distracting typos. Tsk, tsk, Ballantine!)
Characters in genre fiction get knocked unconscious all the time, and this commonplace occurrence befalls Tarzan on the third page of the text when the elephant Lord Greystoke is riding is spooked by musket fire from a member of a Bedouin hunting party. Tarzan is captured by the Muslims, who, we learn, are members of an expedition led by Sheik Ibn Jad. The sheik (whose title is variously spelled "sheik," "shiek" and "sheykh" here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, a novel noteworthy for inconsistent spellings--e.g., "Beduw" or "Beduwy" or "Beduin" for "Bedouin"--and the exotic plural "'Aarab"--this word bears an initial apostrophe--for "Arabs" ), at the head of a large party of Arabs and black slaves, is marching through Tarzan's realm on the way to the little-known city of Nimmr, Ibn Jad having been told by a magician that a great treasure and a beautiful woman await him there.
Burroughs tries to build atmosphere by having the Muslims and their black slaves say "thy" and "thou" and use words like "menzil," "thob" and "thorrib;" my brief internet searches suggest that last word is rarely used outside of this novel. A more substantive component of the Islamic facet of the novel is the relationships among the Arabs and blacks in the sheik's expedition. One of the senior slaves, Fejjuan, a member of the Galla people, was seized as a child by Arab slavers; the Galla live near the supposed site of Nimmr and Fejjuan plots to escape bondage and return to his childhood home. Sheik Ibn Jad wants his beautiful daughter Ateja to marry one guy, Fahd, but she is in love with another guy, Zeyd. And then there is the sheik's brother, Tollog, who is plotting against the sheik; if anything happens to Ibn Jad, Tollog will inherit leadership of the expedition and ownership of any treasure it discovers.
Tarzan presents a problem to the Arabs, seeing as Lord Greystoke forbids the hunting of elephants and the taking of slaves in this region, and of course these are precisely the practices the sheik's party has been engaging in as they pass through. If Ibn Jad releases Tarzan, Lord Greystoke will round up a posse to force the expedition back to the desert from whence it came. But just killing Tarzan is dangerous, as the ape man is popular among the local blacks, and if word gets out that the Arabs have killed the hero, the local tribes will gang up on the Bedouins and render their mission impossible, maybe kill them all.
A recurring theme of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is how humans are worse than animals and white people are the absolute worst of the worst. On the very first page of the novel we get this kind of material from the narrator as he describes the feelings of that elephant, and elsewhere in the novel we get additional helpings of this sort of material from other animals and from Tarzan. In the fourth of the novel's 24 chapters, a Western white man shows up to embody the book's denunciation of humanity of the paler persuasion. Middle-aged stock broker Wilbur Stimbol and sophisticated young man James Blake are New Yorkers on safari, the former seeking trophies and treating the black porters cruelly while the latter hopes to photograph animals and treats the natives kindly. These two Americans get in so many arguments that they decide to split up their safari. While Blake is divvying up the supplies, Stimbol runs off after a gorilla, rifle in hand, and bumps into Tarzan, who rescues the gorilla from a huge snake and then from Stimbol.
 |
| J. Allen St. John's cover for the first book edition of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle seems to be inspired by Frederic, Lord Leighton's sculpture Athlete Wrestling a Python |
In a totally predictable but still effective scene, none of the black hirelings wants to go with Stimbol; they all want to accompany the kind Blake. Stimbol is amazed by this turn of events because he thought the porters respected him because he was hard on them. (This scene is of particular interest because in the last Tarzan novel, Tarzan and the Ant Men, Burroughs made it clear that women will admire men who treat them roughly, show them who is boss; I guess the logic that applies to relations between the sexes doesn't apply to white people's relations with black people.) Tarzan has to order some of the natives to accompany Stimbol, whom he commands go directly to the nearest railhead; Tarzan also prohibits Stimbol from hunting. Tarzan permits Blake's party greater freedom so Blake can take photos.
Stimbol ignores the ape man's ukase against hunting and so the blacks assigned to him feel justified in abandoning him. All alone in the treacherous jungle, the stock broker eventually stumbles into the camp of Ibn Jad's expedition where he becomes a new component of the scheming among the Muslims. Fahd frames Zeyd for the attempted murder of the Sheik, but he escapes execution the next day thanks to Ateja's clandestine aid. Zeyd flees into the wilderness. Zeyd is no match for the jungle on his own, but Tarzan appears and saves him from its hazards. Fejjuan is sent ahead by Ibn Jad to negotiate with his fellow Galla, whom Ibn Jad figures can guide his expedition to Nimmr, and Fejjuan reunites with his family at his home village.
Meanwhile, a freak accident separates Blake from his safari, and he blunders into a valley where live thousands of white people, the descendants of medieval English crusaders who got shipwrecked over 700 years ago, and the black African natives who have joined their cause and self-identify as Englishmen. These people wear medieval European clothes and wield medieval weapons, their buildings have medieval architecture, etc. Way back in the 12th century the crusaders split into two hostile camps, and a sort of cold war has endured ever since between the two rather prosperous fortified cities built by the shipwrecked Englishmen; the valley has but two entrances, one to the north, one ot the south, and guarding each is a city and castle. Blake enters the valley at the southern city, Nimmr, the very city that Ibn Jad is seeking. Blake finds that no crusader has ever left the valley because they think a huge Muslim army has the valley surrounded.
Tarzan leaves Zeyd at a village where he will be safe and goes to Ibn Jad's expedition with the intention of forcing them to return to North Africa. Ibn Jad decides, again, to have somebody murder Tarzan in his sleep, this time manipulating Stimbol into assaying the dirty deed, he telling the stock broker that Tarzan has scheduled Stimbol's execution for tomorrow. Burroughs makes a mistake his editor should have saved him from by portraying Stimbol as reluctant to murder Tarzan.
Stimbol had been an irritable man, a bully and a coward; but he was no criminal. Every fiber of his being revolted at the thing he contemplated. He did not want to kill, but he was a cornered human rat and he thought that death stared him in the face, leaving open only this one way of escape.
The quoted paragraph is compelling drama and characterization, but when he composed it Burroughs apparently forgot that 60 pages earlier Stimbol came upon an unconscious Tarzan and tried to kill the ape man (the New Yorker was stopped by a gorilla) and in that scene the Manhattan money grubber had no qualms about assassinating a sleeping man, in fact actually come up with the idea himself. Tsk, tsk, ERB!
After Tarzan is believed killed (in the dark Stimbol didn't realize the sleeping man he killed was Tollog, Ibn Jad's brother, whom the wily Tarzan had left in his place) the Muslims are guided to the valley by the Galla in return for surrendering all the Galla slaves they have in their party. The Galla are confident they will never see the Muslims again, as no Galla who has gone into the valley has ever returned.
The Bedouins enter the end of the valley opposite that where Blake arrived, at the northern English city. Ibn Jad's adventurers arrive at an opportune moment. Every year, the two English crusader cities suspend their cold war unneighborliness to hold a magnificent tourney where they have jousts and duels and as the climax a big sort of melee. Ibn Jad's band of Arabs arrives during the tourney, so they are able to take and loot the northern city, it being almost entirely unguarded.
Meanwhile, there is drama at the site of the tourney. When the melee ends, the king of the northern city kidnaps the princess of Nimmr with whom Blake is in love and rides off with her; Blake and the other Nimmr knights pursue them. Tarzan, looking for Blake, arrives at this moment and joins the fracas. Blake is able to rescue the princess because he uses the automatic pistol he has with him to kill a bunch of the Northern knights; for his part, Tarzan uses his African hunting skills to get a leg up on the Northern knights. One of the more memorable passages of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is Burroughs' description of Tarzan's reaction to the knights' behavior.
Never in his life had Tarzan seen such fierce, bold men, such gluttons for battle. That they glorified in conflict and in death with a fierce lust that surpassed the maddest fanaticism he had ever witnessed filled Tarzan’s breast with admiration. What men!
Before Tarzan can get to Blake, Blake and the princess are captured by Ibn Jad. The English princess of Nimmr is the best-looking woman the Arabs have ever seen--more beautiful than a houri! So they seize her and leave Blake bound up to be eaten by a leopard. Tarzan saves Blake from the leopard--over the course of his career Tarzan saves people one second before they get killed, and is himself similarly saved, more times than can be counted, and even minor characters get into the act, as we see a few pages later.
The Muslims escape the valley but their camp erupts into chaos when Fahd tries to murder the sheik so he can carry off the crusader princess himself. Ateja saves her father the sheik from eating poison with like one second to spare, but Fahd escapes with the English princess and with the hapless Stimbol. Blake is captured by the Northern crusaders and chained up in a dungeon, but, before their wicked king can have him tortured to death, two Northern knights free him in recognition of Blake's chivalry during the tourney. (These kinds of feel-good virtue-will-be-rewarded scenes are much more appealing than the "Tantor...avoided men--especially white men" passages that tell the reader the world and his life are deplorable.)
Burroughs wraps things up in the last few chapters, all the characters getting their just deserts. A gorilla seizes the princess of Nimmr from Fahd, Tarzan rescues her and takes her back to Nimmr, where she is eventually joined by Blake. Zeyd kills Fahd and reunites with Ateja--the lovers are given a job on the Greystoke estate. The rest of the Muslims are killed by Tarzan or, like Ibn Jad, enslaved by the Galla. It seems that the jewels Ibn Jad looted from the northern crusader city end up in Tarzan's hands. Stimbol is humiliated and sent back to America. (Stimbol gets off pretty easy--after all, he did try to murder Tarzan!) One of the problems with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that there is no real climax--Blake shooting down a bunch of Northern knights and saving the princess would have made sense as a climax, but the novel has over 30 pages to go and both Blake and the princess get captured and rescued multiple times before they are happily reunited in Nimmr, and we've also got various other plot threads to resolve. Instead of the novel building to a final crescendo, the level of excitement rising and then being relieved after a final explosion, the level of tension remains at a steady boil, people getting killed, captured and liberated all the way up to the final page.
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the eleventh book of Tarzan, is a good novel, but I feel it is a step down from the tenth, Tarzan and the Ant Men. Tarzan and the Ant Men put us into three alien milieus--a cannibal village full of schemers, a matriarchal society of savages, and an urban civilization of quarter-sized slave-owning aristocrats. All three of these weird societies was more interesting than Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle's Bedouin expedition full of schemers and medieval towns full of knights; Book 10's locales are horror and science fiction settings new to the reader, and Burroughs developed crazy architecture and economies and sexual mores for the latter two that served as satires that had the capacity to challenge the reader. The Arabs and the English crusaders in Book 11 are just fictionalized reconstructions of real societies, and ERB's efforts to make them compelling or immersive consist largely of putting clunky words like "y-clept" and "mukaad" in the mouths of their inhabitants. Burroughs does very little to make them satirical; the humor in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle revolves around Blake using Jazz Age slang and other artifacts of and references to 1920s New York which befuddle the medieval Englishmen.
In the same paragraph as that questionable assertion about war, Burroughs declares mankind "the most hated living organism." But then in the third paragraph of the novel Burroughs asserts that animals do not feel hate, greed or lust. I suspect some animals actually do have these feelings, and that they express them in the pages of Burroughs' fiction, and if animals don't hate, how can man be the most hated organism? Maybe in Burroughs' day people didn't know about the chimps making war thing, and maybe in lawyerly fashion you can argue the "most hated organism" line is a reference to self-hate, but these issues with Burroughs' declarations make Burroughs' argument feel shoddy.
Another problem with the sort of misanthropy we see in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that it is sterile virtue-signaling at best, and at worst enervating. Burroughs' attacks on feminism, high taxes, and Prohibition in Tarzan and the Ant Men imply policy solutions, like supporting traditional gender roles, lowering taxes and permitting the sale and consumption of alcohol; Burroughs identifies problems and offers prescriptions for resolving them. Saying people are worse than animals and white people are worse than nonwhites here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is just a pointless counsel of despair--what can we do about this alleged problem? Are we supposed to burn down New York and Chicago and abandon the corn fields of Iowa and cattle ranches of Texas and devote our lives to catching bugs and squirrels with our bare hands and sticks? It is simply ridiculous.
As for the characters, Book 10's Esteban Miranda and the witch doctor who lost his daughter are more interesting than the Bedouins and knights in Book 11. Stimbol had real potential as a bad man pushed to see how bad he really is and to then repent if Burroughs hadn't made the blunder I point out above. Fejjuan the Galla slave is interesting but is underused--I expected him to become friends with Tarzan or Blake or save Stimbol or join the crusaders or have to choose between the Muslims who enslaved him but treated him decently enough and offered him wealth and his own people or something cool like that, but Fejjuan is just discarded after he reunited with his people. Blake is OK as the protagonist of like a third or half the chapters. The intrigue among the Muslims isn't bad, but the disputes among the Englishmen aren't interesting because we learn very little about the Northern king.
As for the action scenes, Tarzan against the snake and Blake killing knights with a .45 are pretty good, but the escape from imprisonment and rescue of the Minunian princess in Tarzan and the Ant Men is better than the tourney and the desultory fighting between the crusaders and Saracens in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. (After worrying about the Saracens for 700 years the English crusaders' encounter with them should have been monumental, but instead there are just little skirmishes that demonstrate that the Bedouins' muskets are very accurate when they aren't shooting at Tarzan.)
Having leveled all these criticisms, I will reiterate that I like Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, but it is obviously inferior to its predecessor. We've got more Burroughs coming up--let's hope our next ERB excursion will achieve a higher level of satisfaction than this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment