Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Book Review

(Book Review--Classics, Pulp Fiction Classics, Children's Literature)

Started: October 7, 2022

Finished: November 9, 2022

(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.) 

Background Information

I was reading this book at work a couple weeks ago, and a co-worker commented, "Tarzan?  I didn't know there were books as well!"

I suppose Tarzan has become so well-known as a movie icon that perhaps there are people out there who don't know that he started out life as a series of books.  But he did--a series of 24 books, of which this book is the first one.

Tarzan of the Apes was originally serialized in pulp magazines in 1912, and then released as a novel in 1914.

Author Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prolific pulp writer (in addition to the Tarzan series, he also wrote the John Carter of Mars series.) 

In writing Tarzan, Burroughs was reportedly influenced by the African adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard and The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.  But whereas H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling both knew intimately the terrains about which they wrote (H. Rider Haggard had spent years in South Africa, Kipling spent years in India), Edgar Rice Burroughs had famously never left the United States.  So the African jungle in the Tarzan novels is one that's completely from Burroughs' imagination, and is consequently completely fantastical.  So while this novel gets no points for realism, it is fun to visit the lush, dense, deadly tropical jungle of Burroughs' imagination.

My History with Tarzan

I was never a huge Tarzan fan as a kid.  Although I was curious about him.

Growing up in the 1980s, I had managed to pick up from cultural osmosis that Tarzan had once been a huge pop-cultural phenomenon in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and then had subsequently gone out of style.  (In the old days before the Internet and Wikipedia, it was difficult to get information on pop-cultural phenomenons from before your birth, but you picked up little things through overheard conversations, or references on TV shows, etc.)

As a kid, I was more interested in the phenomenon itself than in Tarzan--that is, I was fascinated by how something could be such a huge part of 1950s pop culture, but then be so unfashionable by the 1980s.  What exactly separated us from the kids of the 1950s?  How had humanity changed in the intervening years to make Tarzan unmarketable?

As for the Tarzan movies themselves, my memory is that they were hard to come by in the 1980s.  I don't remember them being available at the local video store.  I don't remember them being on cable TV.  (I don't know, what are your memories of the 1980s like?  Was I missing something, or was it just hard to find this stuff back then?)

If Tarzan had been more widely available, I totally would have watched all of those old movies.  (As a kid, I loved that old cheesy retro stuff.)

As it was, though, the only Tarzan movie I came across as a kid was the 1932 movie Tarzan the Ape Man (W). I think I was in 4th grade.  We were on a family vacation somewhere in the mid-west, and while staying at a hotel, I was scanning through the television listings, and saw that Tarzan the Ape Man was playing.

My parents were very strict about what I watched back in those days, so everything was a negotiation.  My mother eventually decided that since the movie was from 1932, it couldn't be that violent, and agreed to let me watch it.

Then, when we all watched it together that evening, the movie was more intense than my mother was expecting, and I remember during a few scenes of the movie, my mother would turn to my father and remark in surprise, "1932!"  (The intonation in her voice conveying the meaning of: Imagine that this is from a 1932 movie.)

(Upon consulting Wikipedia, it looks like 1932 was actually pre-code Hollywood (W), which probably explains why it was more intense than my mother was expecting.  But I haven't seen the movie since then, so at this point my memories of it are foggy and scattered.  But I do have a vague memory of Jane and her father travelling into the jungle with a group of African guides.  They encounter numerous jungle dangers along the way, and at each danger point one or two of the African guides will die.  When I was reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean 3, I used this as an analogy to talk about how the Chinese crew were used.)

Also, in 2016, I saw The Legend of Tarzan when it was playing in theaters (and reviewed it on this blog).

Why I Read This Book

I’ve been slowly working my way through the pulp fiction classics on this blog.  So it was only a matter of time before I eventually worked my way around to Tarzan.

I did read some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s other series, John Carter of Mars, way back in 2006, and wasn’t particularly impressed with it.  (I gave it a mostly negative review).  I suppose that experience didn’t make me overly eager to rush into Tarzan.

Confession time: Back in 2006, I actually bought a copy of Tarzan, and just never got around to reading it.  It was a copy from Signet Classics that combined Tarzan with The Prisoner of Zenda (available on Amazon HERE).  It contained an introduction by Gore Vidal.  At the time, I read the Gore Vidal essay, but never got around to never got around to reading the actual book.  (Again, I think my experience with John Carter or Mars had dampened my enthusiasm).  Then, when I went back to Japan in 2007, this was one of the many books I just had to get rid of without reading.    

Despite, I've still been meaning to get around to it someday.

More recently, this past August there was also some increased chatter about the Tarzan series on booktube for Garbaugust, which pushed this series toward the top of my mind.

And so, when I saw a copy of Tarzan in SC Vivo City here in Vietnam, I snatched up a copy.  

(I don’t think I’m going to have any luck finding any of the rest of the series out here in Vietnam, but the bookstores were at least selling the first book.)

Links

* The introduction by Gore Vidal that I mentioned above (the one that Signet Classics used for their 2006 edition) actually comes from a 1963 essay that Gore Vidal did for Esquire Magazine called Tarzan Revisited.  It's available online HERE, and is worth reading for a couple of different reasons--both for Gore Vidal's dissection of Burroughs' plot and prose, but also for Gore Vidal's musings on how common it is for people to maintain a running adventure stories in their heads.

As someone who all through childhood was always imagining adventure stories in my head, I found Gore Vidal's musings on this subject to be of personal interest.  But my personal thoughts on all this are another whole subject for a different post some other day.  

* I've been linking to Mari Ness's reviews on Tor.com throughout my reviews of The Land of Oz.  But Mari Ness also has an excellent review of Tarzan on Tor.com, entitled: Heredity, Environment, and a Few Dead Lions: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.  This is worth reading in its entirety--Mari Ness is a very insightful, but also humorous reviewer.  She's a lot of fun.  I'll just quote a paragraph to give some of the flavor:

Fortunately, before he can suffer too much from his responsibilities, a number of people—not ape people, human people—start randomly arriving, including, in no particular order: two easily distracted scholars; Tarzan’s cousin Clayton, under the understandable impression that he is the real Lord Greystoke; various evil sailors (Tarzan doesn’t like them); a black woman named Esmerelda, who, after seeing the various skeletons, wild apes, and so on, really wants to return to Baltimore (she has a point); various Frenchmen; and oh, yes, Jane. She’s the daughter of one of the two scholars. Esmeralda appears to have come along as her chaperone, although a remarkably ineffective one. Various encounters and near-encounters occur, then lions appear, all eventually leading to this:

"He took his woman in his arms and carried her into the jungle."

I have more than a few things to say about this—notably, uh, Tarzan, I get the whole raised by apes thing, but just a few seconds ago, Jane was striking Tarzan’s giant breast with her tiny hands (it’s that sort of book) protesting Tarzan’s burning kisses (as said, it’s that sort of book) and repulsing him, so what is this “his woman” stuff? Anyway, off to the jungle they go, where, after a night of gift giving including fruit and a golden locket Jane falls headlong in love with him. (Did I mention it’s that sort of book?)

Plot Summary and Commentary ***SPOILERS***

In my 2006 review of the first 3 books in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian series, I wrote:

From a literary standpoint however these books are pretty awful. I doubt they could even get published today. Burrough’s doesn’t pause for any description at all. The whole book is one long fight scene. It reads like something a 12 year might write:

“So there I was, stuck on Mars. All of a sudden all these green men attacked me. I fought bravely, and I had almost beaten them all, when all of a sudden a giant spider came out of the ground and attacked us. I battled the spider until these giant birds descended on us and tried to eat me....”

I exaggerate, but not by much. 

I was expecting to find the same thing in Tarzan, and was therefore surprised to find out that Tarzan of the Apes is actually pretty well written.

(I may have been too harsh in my 2006 review of The Martian Tales Trilogy.  I don’t know.  I’m going to have to go back and re-read those books one of these days.)

But in contrast to my memories of The Martian Tales Trilogy, Tarzan is not simply a mad-rush from one fight to another.  It actually has decent pacing and development.  The story is told in sufficient detail, and the scenery and characters are also fully described.

This is clear right from the beginning, when we are still on Tarzan’s backstory.  I expected Tarzan’s parents to be killed off very quickly, but we actually spend 35 pages with them before they finally die and Tarzan gets adopted by the apes. 

Chapter 1 opens with the premise of a narrator who is reconstructing the history from various documents and eyewitnesses:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

When my convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of his remarkable narrative.

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.

The yellow, mildewed pages of the diary of a man long dead, and the records of the Colonial Office dovetail perfectly with the narrative of my convivial host, and so I give you the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.

If you do not find it credible you will at least be as one with me in acknowledging that it is unique, remarkable, and interesting.

From the records of the Colonial Office and from the dead man’s diary we learn that a certain young English nobleman, whom we shall call John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, was commissioned to make a peculiarly delicate investigation of conditions in a British West Coast African Colony from whose simple native inhabitants another European power was known to be recruiting soldiers for its native army, which it used solely for the forcible collection of rubber and ivory from the savage tribes along the Congo and the Aruwimi. The natives of the British Colony complained that many of their young men were enticed away through the medium of fair and glowing promises, but that few if any ever returned to their families…. (and so forth)

But this conceit is not continued beyond the first chapter.  From the second chapter onwards, the story continues with the standard 3rd person omniscient narrator. (Ordinarily one imagines these kind of inconsistencies would be fixed in the drafting process, but because this novel was originally serialized in the pulps, I suppose redrafting earlier chapters wasn’t possible.) 

As you can see from the above quotation, it turns out that the reason Tarzan’s parents end up in the African jungle in the first place is because they are sent by the British government to investigate the abuses of Belgians in the Congo, but then while en route there’s a mutiny on their ship, and they end up getting marooned on the coast of the jungle by the mutineers.

(In the first two chapters, we get the whole story of how the mutiny came about.  As it turns out, the captain of the ship seems to do everything he can to provoke a mutiny in a way that remind me of the captain from Mutiny on the Bounty).

What happens next is so well-established in pop-culture that I think everyone knows it whether they’ve seen a Tarzan movie or not.  Tarzan’s parents die in the jungle, and Tarzan is raised in the jungle by the apes.

I suppose I should pause here and talk about the jungle.

In my review of King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard, I wrote:

I didn’t know much about this book before I started, and I confess that it was quite different from what I had expected.

I was expecting much more of a jungle adventure story--men hacking their way through thick green jungle foliage, boating down a jungle river, battling crocodiles and piranhas and tigers.

Instead, this is much more of an African savannah story. They cross through the great plains, there is a bit of elephant hunting, and then the real meat of the journey takes place crossing a desert.

H. Rider Haggard spent years living in Africa, so he knew the terrain he was writing about.  And this got me thinking: are there actually tropical jungles in Africa, or is Africa mostly deserts and savannahs?  When I think about lush thick tropical jungles, am I imagining Africa? Or am I actually imagining South America or India? I don’t know--I’ve never been to Africa.  

Edgar Rice Burroughs has also never been to Africa, and so he creates the African jungle of his imagination--it’s described as being thick with green plants and vines, and Burroughs uses the adjective "impenetrable" frequently when describing the jungle foliage.  This thick foliage also offers a complete camouflage for all the deadly animals that live within.  (In chapter 8, when describing Tarzan’s encounter with a lion, Burroughs writes “For a moment the two eyed each other in silence, and then the great cat turned into the jungle, which swallowed her as the ocean engulfs a tossed pebble.”).

Suffice it to say, Tarzan of the Apes gives me exactly the jungle adventure atmosphere that I had felt cheated out of in King Solomon's Mines.

There’s about 100 pages of Tarzan’s adventures in the jungle before Jane arrives.  During these pages, Tarzan fights for leadership in the ape hierarchy, learns how to fight against the other animals, and also fights against the black tribe in the jungle.  

The Tarzan described in these pages is a savage. He’s been raised in the jungle, and knows only the jungle laws. He both kills other gorillas in his battles for dominance, and he kills and terrorizes the black tribe that live in his area of the jungle.

  For example, one of the black warriors kills Tarzan’s adopted gorilla mother, and in revenge Tarzan stalks him for a couple days before garroting and stabbing him to death.  (You can understand Tarzan was upset that his gorilla mother was killed, but this poor black warrior thought he was just hunting an ordinary gorilla.)

Tarzan later goes on to regularly terrorize this black village, regularly killing the black warriors in order to take their weapons and jewellery.  From Chapter 12:

 …he [Tarzan] commenced picking up solitary hunters with his long, deadly noose, stripping them of weapons and ornaments and dropping their bodies from a high tree into the village street during the still watches of the night. 

 These sections of the book reminded me of the flavor of Conan the Barbarian. Just like Conan, Tarzan is portrayed as a savage and brutal barbarian.  You are rooting for him, because he is the protagonist, but you’re also chilled by his level of casual cruelty and violence.  But also, as with Conan, the target audience for these books (12 year old boys) no doubt also get a little thrill from the dark savagery.  (These are the pulps, after all, so the chilling savage violence is part of the appeal.)  

But this angle of Tarzan the barbarian is dropped once Jane and her family arrive in the jungle.  From this point on, Tarzan is portrayed as a perfect gentleman and protector.

The in story explanation for this is because Tarzan recognizes Jane and her family as being white just like himself, and thus he feels an affinity for them that he did not feel for the black Africans, and that causes him to act much more chivalrous around them than he did with the black tribesman.  But I also felt like there was a rather sudden change in Tarzan’s character at this point in the story from brutal to noble, and I’m not entirely sure the in-story explanation was sufficient to account for it.  (Or did I miss something?) 

Accompanying Jane is her father Professor Archimedes Q. Porter and his best friend Samuel T. Philander.

Professor Archimedes Q. Porter is portrayed as the quintessential comically absent minded professor.  In our first introduction to him, he and Mr. Philander get lost in the African jungle, but instead of worrying about how they are going to find safety, they are arguing about the 15th century conquest of Spain:

Several miles south of the cabin, upon a strip of sandy beach, stood two old men, arguing.

Before them stretched the broad Atlantic. At their backs was the Dark Continent. Close around them loomed the impenetrable blackness of the jungle.

Savage beasts roared and growled; noises, hideous and weird, assailed their ears. They had wandered for miles in search of their camp, but always in the wrong direction. They were as hopelessly lost as though they suddenly had been transported to another world.

At such a time, indeed, every fiber of their combined intellects must have been concentrated upon the vital question of the minute—the life-and-death question to them of retracing their steps to camp.

Samuel T. Philander was speaking.

“But, my dear professor,” he was saying, “I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth-century Moors in Spain the world would be today a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves. The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad-minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants—the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find today in America and Europe—while the Spaniards—”

“Tut, tut, dear Mr. Philander,” interrupted Professor Porter; “their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be, a blight on that scientific progress which has marked—”

“Bless me! Professor,” interjected Mr. Philander, who had turned his gaze toward the jungle, “there seems to be someone approaching.”

Professor Archimedes Q. Porter turned in the direction indicated by the nearsighted Mr. Philander.

“Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,” he chided. “How often must I urge you to seek that absolute concentration of your mental faculties which alone may permit you to bring to bear the highest powers of intellectuality upon the momentous problems which naturally fall to the lot of great minds? And now I find you guilty of a most flagrant breach of courtesy in interrupting my learned discourse to call attention to a mere quadruped of the genus Felis. As I was saying, Mr.—”

“Heavens, Professor, a lion?” cried Mr. Philander, straining his weak eyes toward the dim figure outlined against the dark tropical underbrush.

“Yes, yes, Mr. Philander, if you insist upon employing slang in your discourse, a ‘lion.’ But as I was saying—”

“Bless me, Professor,” again interrupted Mr. Philander; “permit me to suggest that doubtless the Moors who were conquered in the fifteenth century will continue in that most regrettable condition for the time being at least, even though we postpone discussion of that world calamity until we may attain the enchanting view of yon Felis carnivora which distance proverbially is credited with lending.” (from chapter 16)

Okay, yes, the oblivious intellectual is a cliche comic stereotype.  But this is pulp fiction after all, so we’re going with the easy comic stereotypes.  And even though it’s not particularly inventive, it works.  These scenes get the laughs that they’re designed to get. (At least in my opinion.)

Also accompanying Jane and her father is Jane's admirer, the gallant young English Lord Greystoke (real name William Clayton).  Once Tarzan meets Jane (and the two immediately fall in love), this will of course set off a love triangle, where Jane will have to choose between the well-mannered young English aristocrat, and the savage virile manly jungle man.

But it gets even crazier, because as it happens, Lord Greystoke is actually Tarzan's cousin.  (This is, of course, an incredible coincidence, but these are the pulps, so incredible coincidences are all part of the genre.)  Tarzan is actually the real Lord Greystroke, but because Tarzan and his parents disappeared in the jungle 21 years ago, Clayton now has inherited the lordship that should belong to Tarzan.

But aside from creating a family soap opera, Edgar Rice Burroughs is using the contrast between Tarzan and Lord Greystoke to explore the themes of heredity and environment.  Tarzan and Lord Greystoke both have the same genes, but Tarzan's jungle upbringing has turned him into a superhuman, whereas Lord Greystoke's aristocratic upbringing has made him sort.

Sidenote: I'm indebted to Mari Ness's review of Tarzan for pointing out this theme. I didn't actually catch what Burroughs was trying to do on my own reading.  Although I should have.  Because now that I think about it, it was pretty obvious all throughout the book. There were several passages that go out of their way to contrast Tarzan's jungle life with the life of his uncle and cousin.  Take, for instance, this passage from chapter 9:

But, be that as it may, Tarzan would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner, so he gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return.

And then Lord Greystoke wiped his greasy fingers upon his naked thighs and took up the trail of Kulonga, the son of Mbonga, the king; while in far-off London another Lord Greystoke, the younger brother of the real Lord Greystoke’s father, sent back his chops to the club’s chef because they were underdone, and when he had finished his repast he dipped his finger-ends into a silver bowl of scented water and dried them upon a piece of snowy damask.

So anyway, a love triangle is set-up.  Of course, we all know that Jane is destined to end up with Tarzan.  That's just common pop culture knowledge.  But the thing is, William Clayton (the pretender Greystoke) isn't actually a bad guy.  He's got a good heart.  

In one of my weekly reading vlogs, I wondered what William Clayton's character arc would end up being.  I mean, he's portrayed as a likeable character, but obviously he's not going to end up with Jane, so what was going to be his arc?

Oh, how naive I was.  I had no idea how the story would actually end.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Back to the jungle.

Jane and her family are rescued by the French Navy, and sail back to America.  Tarzan gets left behind, because he's stuck in the jungle nursing one of the French officers back to health.

The French officer and Tarzan then journey together into civilization.  Tarzan learns how to speak French, and then eventually English.  The French officer also discovers who Tarzan really is, and discovers that Tarzan is the real Lord Greystoke.

[By the way, here's an interesting little bit of pop culture trivia for you--there's actually no "Me Tarzan, You Jane" dialogue in either the book or the movies.  That's actually one of those famous misquotes (see article HERE).  When Jane and her family are in the jungle, Tarzan communicates with them only by writing.  (Tarzan had actually learned to read and write by studying the books left behind by his dead parents--I know, I know, but just go with it.  As Mari Ness would say, it's that sort of book.)]

Back in America, Jane is being forced into marriage by an evil rich man.  (Did I mention this was pulp fiction?)  But Tarzan shows up, now speaking fluent English, and saves Jane from the marriage.

Jane is now free to marry whom she chooses, but she once again finds herself between the gentlemanly William Clayton and the virile Tarzan.  After some agonizing indecision, she chooses Clayton.

Tarzan accepts her choice.  He gives her and Clayton the money that he got from the buried treasure.  (Did I mention that there was a buried treasure in this book as well?  No?  Well you can't expect me to cover everything in a short summary.  As Gore Vidal says in his essay, there is actually a lot of plot in this short little book.)

And then Tarzan leaves.  Tarzan also keeps secret that he is the true Lord Greystoke, allowing Clayton to keep the title, and the money, and Jane.

Wait, what?

Jane ends up with Clayton, and not Tarzan?  That can't be right, can it?

Oh, wait.  I forgot there are 23 other books left in this series.  If I want to see how Tarzan and Jane eventually get together, I suppose I need to go read the next book.

The Reading Experience

In his essay on Tarzan, Gore Vidal explicitly links it to childhood reading, and says that although James Bond and Mike Hammer have adult appeal, Tarzan is strictly for the kids.

And this seems pretty much in line with everything else I've read on Tarzan.  By all accounts, this stuff was considered something strictly for the young boys back in its day.  (What do you suppose was the target audience for these books back in the day?  11 and 12?  Or possibly 8 and 9?)

To me, however, the prose style doesn't read like something written for children.  The sentences seem a little bit too complex, and the vocabulary seems a bit too high for an 11 year old.

I think this is just another example of how popular prose style has gotten simplified over time.

I've made the same observation in my reviews of other classic boys adventure books Treasure Island and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.  It's interesting to compare these books with modern children's literature like The Animorphs and see how different the prose style is.

I'll quote a bit of Tarzan of the Apes below, and you can make up your own mind.

Extended Quotation

Tarzan of the Apes lived on in his wild, jungle existence with little change for several years, only that he grew stronger and wiser, and learned from his books more and more of the strange worlds which lay somewhere outside his primeval forest.

To him life was never monotonous or stale. There was always Pisah, the fish, to be caught in the many streams and the little lakes, and Sabor, with her ferocious cousins to keep one ever on the alert and give zest to every instant that one spent upon the ground.

Often they hunted him, and more often he hunted them, but though they never quite reached him with those cruel, sharp claws of theirs, yet there were times when one could scarce have passed a thick leaf between their talons and his smooth hide.

Quick was Sabor, the lioness, and quick were Numa and Sheeta, but Tarzan of the Apes was lightning.

With Tantor, the elephant, he made friends. How? Ask not. But this is known to the denizens of the jungle, that on many moonlight nights Tarzan of the Apes and Tantor, the elephant, walked together, and where the way was clear Tarzan rode, perched high upon Tantor’s mighty back.

Many days during these years he spent in the cabin of his father, where still lay, untouched, the bones of his parents and the skeleton of Kala’s baby. At eighteen he read fluently and understood nearly all he read in the many and varied volumes on the shelves.

Also could he write, with printed letters, rapidly and plainly, but script he had not mastered, for though there were several copy books among his treasure, there was so little written English in the cabin that he saw no use for bothering with this other form of writing, though he could read it, laboriously.

Thus, at eighteen, we find him, an English lordling, who could speak no English, and yet who could read and write his native language. Never had he seen a human being other than himself, for the little area traversed by his tribe was watered by no greater river to bring down the savage natives of the interior.

High hills shut it off on three sides, the ocean on the fourth. It was alive with lions and leopards and poisonous snakes. Its untouched mazes of matted jungle had as yet invited no hardy pioneer from the human beasts beyond its frontier.

But as Tarzan of the Apes sat one day in the cabin of his father delving into the mysteries of a new book, the ancient security of his jungle was broken forever.

At the far eastern confine a strange cavalcade strung, in single file, over the brow of a low hill.

In advance were fifty black warriors armed with slender wooden spears with ends hard baked over slow fires, and long bows and poisoned arrows. On their backs were oval shields, in their noses huge rings, while from the kinky wool of their heads protruded tufts of gay feathers.

Across their foreheads were tattooed three parallel lines of color, and on each breast three concentric circles. Their yellow teeth were filed to sharp points, and their great protruding lips added still further to the low and bestial brutishness of their appearance.

Following them were several hundred women and children, the former bearing upon their heads great burdens of cooking pots, household utensils and ivory. In the rear were a hundred warriors, similar in all respects to the advance guard.

That they more greatly feared an attack from the rear than whatever unknown enemies lurked in their advance was evidenced by the formation of the column; and such was the fact, for they were fleeing from the white man’s soldiers who had so harassed them for rubber and ivory that they had turned upon their conquerors one day and massacred a white officer and a small detachment of his black troops.

(***ENDQUOTE*** From the beginning of chapter 9.  It goes on, but you get the idea hopefully).

Connections With Other Books I've Read

A few years ago I read and reviewed The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham.  (One of my favorite books of all time, by the way.  Highly recommended if you ever come across a copy.)  In that book, Thomas Pakenham talks at length about the horrible atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo.  It was very depressing reading.  But then another whole part of the book was about the international campaign to try to stop the Belgian atrocities in the Congo.  British and American humanitarians organized a huge campaign to try to raise public awareness of what was happening in the Congo, and pressure the Belgian government.  (For more information see, for example, the Wikipedia article on the Congo Reform Association.)  

Edgar Rice Burroughs must have been influenced by this public awareness campaign, because throughout Tarzan of the Apes he repeatedly references the Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

For whatever reason, in the first few chapters, Burroughs seems reluctant to name Belgium directly.  I'm not sure if he was concerned about his liability, or what, but he simply talks about reports that "another European power" or "a friendly European power" were up to questionable things in the Congo region.

But then, halfway through the book, Burroughs drops all coyness, and starts calling out King Leopold II and the Belgians directly.  

For example, in chapter 21, when describing how a savage African tribe had been made even more savage because of what the Belgians did to them, Burroughs says:

To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State—a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.

In my 2016 review of The Legend of Tarzan, I praised the movie for integrating historical details about the real Scramble for Africa and the Belgian Congo into the Tarzan legend.  But as it turns out, I was overly generous in crediting the movie with that innovation.  That historical background is baked right into the source material.

 

********************

In my review of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, I mentioned that:

The idea that an adversary can be hidden somewhere in the room, unseen and unseeable, and can jump out to attack us at any moment is something that definitely triggers our primitive panic impulses.  (I suppose their must be an evolutionary fear trigger here--the fear of unseen predators lurking in the bushes.)

Burroughs is of the same opinion as me.  Hidden predators in the jungle definitely tap into our fear centers--as described perfectly by one of the characters on page 185 of Chapter 24:

“I don’t know about that,” said Lieutenant Charpentier. “I never thought much about fear and that sort of thing—never tried to determine whether I was a coward or brave man; but the other night as we lay in the jungle there after poor D’Arnot was taken, and those jungle noises rose and fell around us I began to think that I was a coward indeed. It was not the roaring and growling of the big beasts that affected me so much as it was the stealthy noises—the ones that you heard suddenly close by and then listened vainly for a repetition of—the unaccountable sounds as of a great body moving almost noiselessly, and the knowledge that you didn’t KNOW how close it was, or whether it were creeping closer after you ceased to hear it? It was those noises—and the eyes.

Other Odds and Ends

* If you've been reading everything in this review so far, no doubt you've noticed that the portrayal of native Africans is a bit problematic.  

I don't want to spend too much time on this, because as far as criticisms go, this is low-hanging fruit.  (I don't expect anyone to give me a reward for recognizing that a pulp fiction adventure book from 1912 is politically incorrect.) But I guess it should at least be noted for the record.

But then, it should also be noted that, as Mari Ness puts it in in her review:

But for all his racism, Burroughs also spends a significant amount of time critiquing white colonialism, blaming it for most of Africa’s problems. He specifically calls out whites for exploiting black labor and workers, and slams Leopold II, King of the Belgians, calling him that “arch hypocrite,” accusing him of approving torture and blaming him for the destruction of the Congo Free State and a proud culture. That culture is black, and if Burroughs does not exactly see it as equal to the glories of America (nothing, to Burroughs, is equal to the glories of America) he strongly disapproves of its destruction.

* I'm not sure if I'm going to continue with the other books in the Tarzan series or not.  I don't think I'd find any of the other books out here in Vietnam, but some of the sequels are available on Project Gutenberg.  (Not all, but some of them.)  And I did order a Kindle for precisely the purpose of trying to make use of all the free stuff on Project Gutenberg.  Maybe I'll try out some of the other books.  I'm not sure yet.

* Digging around on the Internet for background information on this book, I'm starting to get contradictory information about whether or not it was serialized.  Some websites say it was, some websites say it wasn't.  Some people say that although it was originally published in the pulps in 1912, it was published as a whole story, and not serialized.  Wikipedia, as of  this writing, says "serialized".

Tarzan of the Apes is a 1912 story by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the first in the Tarzan series. It was first serialized in the pulp magazine The All-Story beginning October 1912 before being released as a novel in June 1914.^[1]

 I don't know. But if you do, let me know in the comments.

Rating: 

8 out of 10 Stars.  Keep in mind, of course, that all books are rated against their genres, and not against any objective standards of good.  It's a cheesy pulp fiction book, but as a cheesy pulp fiction book, I'd rate it about 8 out of 10 against the other books in the same category.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:

October 9, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.1-20

October 16, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.20-102

October 23, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.102-116

October 30, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.116-162

November 6, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.162-170

November 13, 2022 Tarzan of the Apes p.170-224

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Book Review