TARZAN ON FRANKENSTEIN'S ISLAND OF FREAKS
Review by Dr.
Hermes ~ May 6, 2010 ~ Dr.
Hermes Reviews
This was one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' earliest books, written just after
his initial explosion of intense creativity in which he created Tarzan,
John Carter and Pellucidar in a little over a year. THE MONSTER MEN has
some interesting ideas and wild images, but it also features a lot of crude
and uninspired prose. What really ruins it for me is that it sets up a
fascinating dilemma for its two central characters and then undermines
it with an abrupt twist ending which is not only disappointing but a real
cheat. In fact, I have to wonder if the conclusion wasn't a last minute
revision because the ending seems to contradict most of the story I had
just read.
We're dealing here with what is essentially TARZAN ON FRANKENSTEIN'S
ISLAND OF FREAKS. It's pretty lurid and over the top stuff. "A Man Without
a Soul" was first run in ALL-STORY for November 1913 but not published
in book form as THE MONSTER MEN until 1929. This is old-fashioned melodrama
at its outrageous and blatant best, the way I like it. A research scientist
named Professor Arthur Maxon (formerly on Cornell University) has figured
out how to grow nearly human life forms in vats of chemicals. This was
long before DNA was discovered, and there's no mention that Maxon might
be using human tissue samples to start a cloning process or anything like
that. Nope, he just brews together an assortment of chemicals in coffin-shaped
vats and lets them ferment and darned if they don't assemble into living
creatures. You might ask a biologist how likely this is.
Maxon is rapidly losing his mind from the overwork and world-shaking
signicance of his discovery. He sails off to an isolated island not far
from Borneo where he can carry on his experiments in peace without the
pesky police asking about these freaky corpses produced in the course of
his work. Maxon drags his luscious young daughter Virginia along with him
for no good reason that I can see; he certainly doesn't pay any attention
to her, and she has nothing useful to do on the island. Virginia may be
good-looking but she meekly goes along to live with her father and his
crew on a jungle island halfway around with the world, not once even asking
what he's up to. Later on, Maxon promises her hand in marriage (no matter
what she might think of it) to his partner, the scoundrel Von Horn, as
casually as if he was selling a used car. 1913 seems like a different planet
sometimes.
Well, the experiments run about as smoothly as you might expect, that
is to say, like a double train wreck. Maxon produces twelve horribly disfigured
and unattractive monsters of limited intelligence. We're only given a description
of the first (and most gruesome) of them, the appropriately named Number
One, as "a great mountain of deformed flesh clothed in dirty, white cotton
pajamas. Its face was of the ashen hue of a fresh corpse, while the white
hair and pink eyes denoted the absence of pigment; a characteristic of
Albinos." Its eyes are out of whack, one twice as big as the other and
an inch higher; it has one arm twelve inches longer than the other, its
feet stick out sideways, and in general, it doesn't make a good first impression.
Each of the monsters, though, seems to be constructed a little bit better
than the one before it, and Maxon keeps tinkering with the formula, hoping
he will eventually turn out one that meets FDA standards and can pass as
human. In the meantime, he has brewed up twelve of these unruly superstrong
brutes that his assistant Von Horn keeps in line with the free use of a
big bull whip. (And Virginia, living in the same compound they built on
the island, has no idea what's going on. That girl is not MENSA material,
if you ask me.)
Luckily, experiment Number Thirteen turns out to be a success. This
is a buff young man who is both good-looking and sharp enough to be quickly
taught conversational English. (These creatures don't emerge from the vats
as embryos or anything, they pop out fully grown.) Thirteen is the hero
of the book, the one who really raises all the disturbing questions about
what is a soul, what makes something truly human, all that sort of thing.
After Number Thirteen is on the scene, the story rapidly turns into
a typically energetic Edgar Rice Burroughs carnival. Everyone for a hundred
miles around is after either Virginia's nubile young body or the mysterious
treasure chest Maxon brought along, or both. The twelve monsters, Dyak
headhunters, Malay pirates, Dr Von Horn, even a tribe of aggressive orang-utans...
Virginia and the chest are pursued and captured and rescued and caught
again by someone else for the rest of the book. Coming to her aid is Number
Thirteen (who has tumbled completely for her in a chaste Galahad sort of
way), leading his brethren of horrifying misshapen freaks. It's all slaughter
and chases and agita until the last page.
Much of the story, though, frets over whether or not Number Thirteen
(who has picked up the handle Bulan from the natives) has a soul. Maxon
and Von Horn take it for granted that he doesn't. Since he and the other
lab spawn were formed out of a chemical recipe in vats, they are by definition
not human and cannot have souls. Bulan spends a lot of time agonizing over
this, as he has a serious crush on Virginia but cannot see her marrying
"a man without a soul". Your own religious convictions might lead you to
either dismiss all this as irrelevant or else to agree that Moxon's experiments
as blasphemous and doomed. Since Virginia is starting to think that this
guy is the one for her (he looks like Buster Crabbe, has risked his life
rescuing her a dozen times, and is the perfect gentleman even when they're
lost deep in the jungles of Borneo for days), this could be a real problem.
SPOILER Warning
Okay. Virginia learns the truth, that her beloved Bulan is actually
Number Thirteen of her father's goon assembly line, and she doesn't care.
She loves him anyway and will stick with him, no matter what the rest of
the world says. Good for you, Virginia! That's the spirit. Bulan himself
has decided that, regardless of what Maxon's doctrine says, he does have
a soul because he knows right from wrong. Great, these two have suffered
a lot and they've earned some happiness; they should tell her father to
go climb in one of his vats himself and set it to 'Boil'.
But then Burroughs does a severe cop-out. Here it comes. It seems Bulan
is actually a wealthy upper-class twit named Townsend J. Harper, Jr. He
got one glimpse of Virginia back in Ithaca NY in Chapter One and followed
her to Borneo in the family yacht because he was so smitten with her, (thus
winning the "Oh, Come On!" Award for 1913). Somehow, he ended up washing
ashore with severe amnesia in a small boat. The Chinese cook Sing Lee*
took him in and substituted him for the real Number Thirteen (who had not
congealed at the time). Boo! Hiss! What a gyp.
Aside from the way I felt cheated by this development after watching
Bulan wrestle with his existential puzzle, the story itself contradicts
this explanation. The narrative keeps referring to Number Thirteen as soulless
and one of the monsters. Sing Lee (who rescued this newcomer) thinks and
reacts as if Number Thirteen were in fact a vat boy. And if Bulan was actually
just some preppy guy named Townsend, how in the world was he strong enough
to tangle with all eleven superhuman lab monsters at a time? How could
he wrestle with three adult orang-utans in a brawl, breaking the neck of
one and thrashing the other two?
