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.
