TARZAN AND "THE FOREIGN LEGION"
Review contributed by Doc
Hermes ERB Reviews
Written in 1944 but not published
until 1947 (and with no magazine serialization), this was the last Tarzan
book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, penned only a few years before his death.
It`s also one of the very best in the entire series.
Stationed as a war correspondent
in Hawaii, Burroughs broke with tradition in many ways with this book.
Where the preceding dozen novels had become increasingly repetitious and
predictable, here there are real surprises. The writing style is crisp,
wry, with sharper pacing and neater characterizaton than had been seen
in years. With this last book, Burroughs seemed to take a fresh look at
his most famous creation and see him from a different angle.
TARZAN AND THE "FOREIGN LEGION"
is set on the country-sized island of Sumatra, where the Japanese forces
have been terrorizing the natives and massacring the Dutch colonists. On
an American bomber doing recon work, our hero is shot down and finds himself
stranded abruptly on Sumatra with a handful of Amrican aviators, soon joined
by a succulent blonde teenager. On one level, the storyline is the basic
plot that had served Burroughs well for many years. Take Tarzan and a few
friends, set up some vicious enemies, throw in some bystanders who could
go either way, and mix them all in a junlgle full of natural dangers and
wild beasts. There`s not exactly a plot as much as there is a succession
of escapes and captures, battles and journeys, with good luck and complete
disaster taking turns.
But against the basic action-filled
narrative line, Burroughs sets the characters interacting with each other
in new and insightful ways. He also loved to match up couples who were
obviously meant to get together and then make them suffer as they had misunderstandings
and tiffs, and he loved to juggle a large cast with wildly differing motivations,
but here he does all this more smoothly and convincingly than ever before.
Most significant is that
this book reveals many of Tarzan`s secrets and shows him in sharper definition.
For the first third of the book, he is known to the other characters (and
referred to by the narrator) as Colonel Clayton of the RAF. Obviously,
readers know his true identity but it`s still a stunning moment where it`s
revealed.
Tarzan drops naked from a
tree onto a tiger about to kill his friends and he slays the enormous cat
with his knife (as he has done so many times before). Then he lets loose
a horrifying nonhuman victory cry and glares at his friends, lost for a
moment in his animal nature. They`re frightened and uncertain, until he
shakes if off and almost literally turns back into Clayton. It`s a terrific
moment, one of the most impressive scenes in the series and it would hit
audiences hard if it were put on the screen.
To cap it off, one of the
survivors suddenly recognizes him. ("John Clayton," he said, "Lord Greystoke
--- Tarzan of the Apes!"), leading a slightly dim comrade to ask, "Is dat
Johnny Weismuller?" Later in the story, when his identity is being challenged,
a guerilla fighter says, "And there`s the scar on his forehead that he
got in his fight with the gorilla when he was a boy." This is surprising
and amusing. The genuine Tarzan knows of all the books and Hollywood movies
about him, which in some strange way makes him seem more real.
As good as the book is, it
does have a few drawbacks. For one thing, whiles Burroughs obviously did
some serious research, he has the orang-utans acting like his typical Mangani
apes from back in Africa... challenging Tarzan to a death duel, carrying
off a nubile young lady for some intended cohabitation. All of this goes
way against what we know now about these primates, but that has to be overlooked.
And Tarzan seems pretty casual about tackling tigers; it always seemed
more impressive when his fights with big cats were desperate, risky last
resorts instead of "oh well, another tiger to kill." Actually, it would
have been interesting (considering tigers are bigger and faster than lions)
if Tarzan had found himself with his hands full. [I have since been informed
that the tigers of Sumatra are in fact considerably smaller than the big
equivalent cats of India. If you spot any similar factual mistakes or dumb
typo errors in these pages, please e-mail me.]
(I personally have always
been irritated by Burrough`s way of idealizing animals into pure incarnations
of virtue and constantly putting humans down, but I seem to be the only
one annoyed by this practice.)
Also, remembering how Burroughs
later apologized for his vicious anti-German speeches in earlier books
like TARZAN THE UNTAMED, it`s a little sad to find him twenty years later,
once again going on about the sub-human `monkeymen` Japanese and how a
righteous hatred against the enemy is a noble thing. (The young heroine
says, "I have not killed a man, I have killed a Jap." with her face lit
up with "a divine light of exaltation.") But it was 1944 and you have to
put yourself in that year to see why a writer would say that.
There are other points worth
noting. Tarzan here relates how he has not aged, seeming to be in his twenties
while actually in his sixties. He tells the story of the grateful witch
doctor who gave him the voodoo treatment years ago and he also mentions
the more recent Kavuru drug which he and his family share. But Tarzan is
realistic enough to realize he`ll inevitably die one way or another. ("Death
has many tricks up his sleeve beside old age. One may outplay him for a
while, but he always wins in the end.") From that brief scene, Philip Jose
Farmer was inspired to tell his own stories of the Apeman, and of the pastiche
heroes Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban.
The rest of the cast is drawn
well, if a bit broadly in the WW II multi-ethnic tradition, and the dialogue
has a more natural ring to it than in most of the earlier books. The Americans
admit they`re scared when facing execution, talk about what war does to
people and the nature of hatred, and they all develop emotionally as the
story goes on.
In addition to the American
aviators of different ethnic and educational backgrounds, there are the
toughened Dutch resistance fighters, the heroic young Corrie Van der Meer
and the intriguing Sarina, a pirate Eurasian woman descended from headhunters
but who sees the light and tries to do the right thing. These people make
up the "Foreign Legion", no relation to the famous French Foreign Legion
and therefore a bit of a misleading title.
