The
first Conan novel – indeed, the first Sword & Sorcery novel –
was Howard’s own The Hour of the Dragon, which was
serialized just before and just after his death, and later put out in
book form in 1950 by Gnome Press. The first post-Howard Conan novel
was The Return of Conan by L Sprague de Camp and Bjorn Nyberg,
also put out by Gnome. Though Gnome was a giant among fan
publishers, it was a tiny press that put out less than a hundred
books over fourteen years in business, and thus these made little
impression on the public at large.
After
Lancer and then Sphere took up the Conan business, there was more
money and exposure to go around, and so de Camp and Carter tried
again to create a genuine Conan novel with the 1968 release of Conan
of the Isles. The novel is rather interesting, as it seeks to
add the one thing Howard never got around to doing with his barbarian
hero – a capstone. Every great legend needs an ending, and
while Howard simply wrote tales in the order they occurred to him,
without much thought toward a larger continuity, he did at least
contemplate Conan’s end.
The
book is set some twenty years after Conan’s usurpation of the
Aquilonian throne. His wife Zenobia – who he met in Hour of the
Dragon – has died in childbirth, and his son Conn is of age to
take the crown. The authors clearly wanted to get Conan off his
throne and back to wandering, so they cooked up a boring magical plot
device called “red shadows” - phantoms who come from the sky and
carry people away. Conan has a dream where he gets told only he can
stop the magical bullshit and to sail west.
With
that out of the way, the book actually gets kind of fun. Conan
rounds up a ship and a crew and sails off into the mysterious western
ocean in search of bad guys to kill. There’s a pretty vivid sea
battle, and when he gets plunged underwater, he gets in the middle of
a battle between a giant squid and a giant shark that is pretty bad
ass.
Coming
ashore, he finds he is in the mysterious Antilles, where the last
remnants of ancient Atlantis built a civilization that is essentially
depicted as being Aztec. It’s pretty obvious the authors did some
research, and the depiction of the city of Ptahuacan is vivid and
well thought-out. Conan’s crew was taken prisoner and are due to
have their hearts ripped out, and so he sets off to rescue them.
This mostly takes the form of blundering around in tunnels under the
city, trying to find a way to the main temple.
On
the way, he discovers a cave where giant lizards are kept to eat the
bodies of the sacrificial victims, and turns them loose on the
priests and the city in a rather gleeful scene of mayhem. He rescues
his crew, they steal a ship and sail away, heading westward for new
adventures. The whole “red shadows” nonsense is resolved in
typical Carter fashion. The evil god who controls the phantoms is
confronted by the god Mitra, who comes out of an amulet Conan got in
a dream and the ensuing battle ruins the entire temple. It’s
boring and stupid, and even the narrative doesn’t spend much time
on it. It’s a standard Lin Carter deus ex machina where the
good magic bullshit defeats the evil magic bullshit, while the hero
stands and watches.
That
aside, this is not badly done. Conan actually spends some time
waxing melancholy about his past adventures, and we see him starting
to decline a bit, physically – he’s not the iron-armed young man
in his twenties any longer. The pacing is pretty good, and the
action actually has some grit to it. The major problem is that it
needs a silly magic plot device to get the story moving, and then
uses another stupid plot device to resolve the first one, without
much of any involvement from our hero.
As a
pirate tale, this is agreeably breezy and entertaining. As an
attempt to set an ending for Conan it fails miserably. If Howard
were going to put finish to Conan’s story, he would have done it in a
furious battle with rivers of blood, and Conan would go down fighting
and he would fucking die at the end. You can’t tell me Howard the
fatalist would have shied away from that. So de Camp and Carter get
points for attempting to tie up the saga, but lose them all for not
having the nerve to actually kill their hero off at the end.
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ReplyDelete"So de Camp and Carter get points for attempting to tie up the saga, but lose them all for not having the nerve to actually kill their hero off at the end."
ReplyDeleteSeriously? The "nerve"? More like the gall. Nobody but Robert E. Howard could possibly have the right to tell the tale of Conan's death.
Are you're suggesting that this book, the "agreeably breezy and entertaining" Conan of the Isles, would be better if the iconic barbarian actually died at the end?