The first two Tarzan books display a high mythicity, and, going on memory, the third, BEASTS OF TARZAN, at least displays some interesting motifs. However, the fourth book—THE SON OF TARZAN, the only entry in the Tarzan series not to star Tarzan himself—lacks the imaginative free play seen in the earlier books. SON’s plot consists of dozens of melodramatic incidents piled chock-a-block on top of one another. This is not a bad thing in itself, since Edgar Rice Burroughs remains one of the best blood-and-thunder writers in pop culture history.
Jack Clayton, son of Tarzan and Jane, makes a couple of brief appearances in earlier novels as an infant, but SON begins with the character as a pre-teen in the England of 1915. Despite knowing nothing of his aristocratic father’s history as an “ape man,” Jack displays an unstinting fascination with all things jungle-related. This fascination leads him into contact with one of Tarzan’s enemies from previous books, one Paulvitch, and an attempt to return a captive ape to Africa. The latter task causes young Jack to become stranded in Africa, where in jig time he’s transformed into a junior version of his father through contact with Tarzan’s old ape tribe. They dub the boy Korak, and he drifts away from his memories of civilized life and his parents with extraordinary ease. Like Tarzan, Korak immediately starts making enemies in Africa, due to his possession of an un-beastlike strain of compassion.
Whereas the second Tarzan book benefitted from a resourceful main villain, SON splits its focus with three more limited dastards. A cannibal king, Kuvudoo, has the least to do, followed by a nasty Swedish ivory-poacher, Malbihn and an Arab chieftain, known only as the Sheik. All three are brought into conflict by Korak by their attempts to prey upon the novel’s female lead Meriem, who plays “Jane” to Korak’s Tarzan.
Meriem presents a more interesting character than Korak, if only because she’s the subject of an involved Dickensian foundling-plot. The Sheik, desiring revenge on Meriem’s French father, kidnaps the child, takes her to his own tribe of Arabian bandits, and raises her as his own offspring. The Sheik subjects Meriem to a series of parental cruelties that make the abuses of Tarzan’s ape-father look like benign neglect. Korak rescues her and schools her in jungle-survival, though this doesn’t keep her from being the constant prey of the book’s villains. Nevertheless, Meriem is a more dynamic character than Jane, and though she’s not a formidable fighter, she defends herself ably on a couple of occasions, hearkening back to the female lead of Burroughs’ “Mucker” series. Meriem also learns how to swing her way through the African jungle, and arguably this makes her one of the first “jungle girls” in pop fiction.
Jane was menaced by the threat of rape once in the first book and by romance with someone other than Tarzan in the second book. Meriem is threatened with rape by the Swedish raider, with cannibalistic consumption by Kuvudoo’s tribe, and with illicit romance with a young English nobleman. Further, although the Sheik fades in importance after Korak first rescues Meriem, the Arab leader comes up with the most horrific doom for the young girl: attempting to marry Meriem to his half-brother, who is both a half-caste (described as looking “black”) and an apparent victim of syphilis, since part of his face has been eaten away by “disease.” Though the Sheik does not state his game plan outright, his overall plan seems to be not just to despoil Meriem by having her “uncle” rape her, but to have her impregnated with a non-white child as well.
Though SON OF TARZAN boasts no positive characters of color, it must be admitted that the blonde Swede Mailbihn is just as rapacious as any denizen of Africa. Further, though the young English nobleman, Morison Baynes, doesn’t want to rape Meriem, he does plot to take her back to England as his mistress, which rates as a lesser form of degradation. Baynes starts out as an egotistical bounder and a coward, a loose satire on the entitlement of the sons of civilization. However, Baynes’ feelings toward Meriem become protective and he ends up sacrificing himself for her, which is the much same fate Burroughs meted out to William Clayton, Jane’s most prominent suitor in the first two books.
The jungle romance of Korak and Meriem never becomes as ardent as the early lovemaking of Tarzan and Jane. This is certainly because the two of them begin their relationship as pre-teen youths and implicitly only develop romantic feelings in a gradual and decorous fashion. One assumes that Jack Clayton learned something about the birds and bees before his jungle sojourn, but Meriem doesn’t get any such schooling at the hands of her nasty adoptive father, and initially can only think of Korak as a “big brother.” The author inevitably is obliged to show the two young people fall in love, but Burroughs never seems very comfortable with these scenes, and remains vague about the characters’ respective ages during their largely chaste interactions.
Burroughs doesn’t really elaborate a distinct myth-persona for Korak, and toward the book’s end Korak himself states, “There is only one Tarzan; there can never be another.” I take this as the author’s tacit admission that Tarzan is his superior creation, and in future books Korak only appears a few times in supporting roles. The character only became a regular headliner in the 1960s, when Gold Key Comics published KORAK, SON OF TARZAN, a well-done juvenile series loosely based in Burroughs’s concepts, accrue any great personality, appearing to be nothing more than “Tarzan Lite,” an athletic ape-boy who’s never quite as lusty or as savage as his old man.
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