THE SHIP OF ISHTAR was the third of eight metaphenomenal novels which journalist Abraham Merritt wrote between 1919 and 1934. I think it fair to say that none of Merrit's essays, poems or short stories have enjoyed any repute with either his contemporaries or later generations it's all about the novels, or the three movies adapted from the books.
SHIP is the only Merritt novel that I categorize as a "magical fantasy," specifically the subtype described in this essay by the "portal into another world" category, where a character (or characters) will pass out of the mundane world into a fantasy-realm, spending nearly the whole narrative in the otherverse. SHIP's hero, archaeologist John Kenton, is an extreme example of such a protagonist. He has no background aside from his profession and one very minor reference to his Irish-American heritage. Kenton encounters the fantasy-portal in a room at his private residence, and he returns to that very room only for brief transitions out of the fantasy-verse, but never goes anywhere else in the "real world" for the entirety of the book.
Kenton receives a Babylonian artifact from an archaeological colleague, a stone block. When Kenton taps the block with a hammer, it splits apart, and inside is a highly detailed crystal carving of a ship at sea. As Kenton studies the carving, he physically transitions to the fantasy-world represented by the carving, a world where Babylonian gods and magic still exist, even though the Babylonian civilization has fallen to dust in Kenton's time.
I'll note in passing that while the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books in 1912 made it sound as if hero John Carter's spirit might have left his mundane body to manifest on Mars, Kenton's real body definitely makes the journey. Whenever he returns to his room in the real world, he retains any changes that occurred to his form in the Babylon-verse, such as physical wounds.
Like most Burroughs books, Merritt's novels are usually about heroes undertaking grand adventures for the sake of winning a beautiful woman. Unlike most Burroughs works, SHIP manages to make the quest for romance serve a deep metaphysical myth-thread-- one complicated enough that it will require a separate post to explore.
Sticking to the plot only then, Kenton finds himself on a ship that might be called a "mobile temple," and one devoted to two warring deities. (This might be an extension of a frequently used trope in Burroughs; that of warring sister-cities.) Kenton's romantic interest, beauteous Sharane, rules over the light-hued half of the ship, which is dedicated to Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and in this she's served by a small coterie of warrior-maidens. The black-hued half of the ship is ruled by Nergal, Babylonian God of Death, and his servants are an ugly gang of black-robed monks, ruled by their leader Klaneth. Three good males-- a Persian, a Norseman and a Ninevite-- serve as unwilling bondsmen to Klaneth, so inevitably they end up being Kenton's allies in his quest to defeat the death-god's servant and to woo the servant of the love-goddess.
Part 2 will go into the metaphysical setup as to why the bisected temple-ship exists at all. Here I'll confine myself to the base action. After being cruelly treated by Klaneth, Kenton leads a rebellion with his allies, tosses Klaneth and his men off the ship, and wins Sharane. However, the Nergal-priest survives being deep-sixed, possibly thanks to his deity. He comes back to attack the Ishtar-ship with a Babylonian bireme, presumably taken from the only other location in this fantasy-world, the sorcerers' isle Emaktila. Kenton happens to get spirited back to his own world by chance while the attack transpires. When he returns to the ship, he learns that Klaneth's forces have abducted Sharane and have taken her back to Emaktila to suffer some dire fate. No one will be surprised that the rest of the story concerns how Kenton and his friends launch a rescue mission. This naturally involve san encounter not only with a Babylonian society-- apparently preserved in its otherworld by the gods-- but also the other five deities in Babylon's septet of planetary rulers.
I'll pass over the fates of Kenton and Sharane, because those tie into the deeper metaphysical myth of the novel, which I tend to codify as "cosmic sex," and which I'll detail further in Part 2. I think anyone can enjoy SHIP just as a kinetic adventure story, though Merritt's prose won't be for all tastes. I find him able to paint enchanting visual pictures better than the majority of prose writers, but I imagine a lot of modern readers would find Merritt a little too rococo.
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