THE READING RHEUM: MORE MARTIAN BOOKS

 

A hardcore devotee of Edgar Rice Burroughs might know how thoroughly the author plotted his books ahead of publication. Thus it’s only my opinion when I state that A PRINCESS OF MARS, reviewed here, feels rather made-up-on-the-run, with Burroughs devoting most of his story to John Carter’s “wild Indian” battles with both “redskinned” humanoid Martians and the monstrous four-armed green Tharks. In the two subsequent books, though, Burroughs seems to be giving more thought to the makeup of Mars and the role that Carter would play in the planet’s destiny—to say nothing of his providing some perhaps unintentional meditations on his notion of a hero who supposedly never ages.

PRINCESS concludes on what must be deemed one of the best cliffhangers in literary history. After Carter wins and weds his beloved princess Dejah Thoris, duty forces him to attempt saving Mars by re-activating the atmosphere plants that keep the planet’s denizens alive. Before Carter even knows whether or not he’s been successful, his sojourn on Mars comes to an end and he finds himself back on Earth. Twenty years pass, both on Earth and on Mars, before the hero is once more able to return to Mars through a process loosely modeled on (but never explained as) the concept of astral-body travel.

Providentially Carter’s second sojourn takes him to the very heart of both Martian biology and Martian religion: the Valley Dor. Many Martians believe that when they perish, they will float down the River Iss (clearly indebted to the mythos of Egyptian Isis and her association with her river-borne husband Orisis) and enjoy eternal paradise in the Valley. Carter, as both a new culture-hero and a debunker of myths, learns the truth: whether alive or dead, Martians who go to the Valley end up having their blood drunk by bizarre plant-men, and their flesh eaten by giant white apes. And if that’s not enough, the Valley also plays host to a contingent of white-skinned Martians, called Therns, who also drink the blood of wayfarers—and they are in turn preyed upon by a race of black-skinned pirates. (Carter, a Virginia-born veteran of the Civil War, passes the comment that it’s unusual for a Southerner such as himself to think that the Black Martians are all surprisingly handsome.)

The reality of Dor is one of religions deception, best represented by an elderly Thern woman who pretends to be the Goddess Issus. (Burroughs probably borrowed this image of an evil old witch-woman from Haggard’s character Gagool in KING SOLOMON’S MINES.) However, not all of Dor’s mysteries are so easily dispelled. One of the Black Martians tells Carter a fabulous story of the origin of all Martian races. There was in distant times a Great Tree that manifested buds attached to its branches, some of which became the mindless plant-men later, while others developed into the forms of the apes, the Tharks, and of the Black Martians (who deem themselves “the First Born” among humanoid Martians). Carter never proves or disproves this impressive myth, since the Great Tree is long gone, but Burroughs invites the reader to take this particular story “on faith,” as it were.

While sojourning with the Therns and the Black Martians, Carter encounters many avatars of War, just as he did in the first book. But only in GODS and the sequel does he find his faithfulness to Dejah Thoris—who is kept offstage for most of the book—challenged by two avatars of Love. Red Martian Thuvia and White Martian Phaidor—both implicitly of a later generation than that of Dejah, and thus symbolically “daughter-figures”—both throw themselves at Carter. For his part, he remains comically confused by this development, since he has absolutely no lady-killing abilities, except those that stem from his ability to slaughter enemies. GODS ends with a cliffhanger which sots out the young women in terms of morality: Phaidor is the “bad daughter” who tries to slay Dejah Thoris, while Thuvia, “the good daughter” who renounces her affection for a married older man, tries to save Dejah from Phaidor.

The mythic events of the first half of GODS are rather undercut by its second half, wherein Carter goes back to chasing around Mars getting into bloody fights. WARLORD, the final book in the “Carter trilogy,” reverses this tendency. Two of his enemies, the Thern Matai Shang and the First-Born Thurid, manage to capture Thuvia, Phaidor, and Dejah Thoris, forcing Carter to chase the villains hither and yon. Yet all this derring-do, impromptu though it is, makes him so prominent that he ends becoming the planetary “warlord” to the entire planet, thus allowing him to organize the strife-filled nations of Mars in a manner that later generations would condemn as imperialistic. Toward the end of the book Carter meditates, “Today, by the might of my sword and the loyalty of the friends that my sword has made for me, black man and white, red man and green, rubbed shoulders in peace and good fellowship.”

I won’t sneer, as might some critics, at Burroughs’ conception of his hero as an ultimate fantasy of martial competence. However, at times this focus keeps Burroughs from letting his hero relate to others in any other terms save martial ones. In one case, this is inadvertently amusing. Partway through WARLORD, Carter, absent from Mars for twenty years, fights at the side of a handsome twenty-something warrior who manages never to state to Carter his name or lineage, so that eventually Burroughs can spring the Big Surprise: he’s Carthoris, whose name combines the names of his father John Carter and that of his mother Dejah Thoris. Apart from being a little thrown by this development, Carter never relates to Carthoris as father to son; the younger man is just another boon battle-companion. Clearly the author didn’t want to clutter his martial fantasy with lots of emotional baggage, which may be another reason that Carthoris is a deadly dull character. The youth’s only other function in WARLORD is to serve as a consolation prize for Thuvia; if she can’t have the already married “father,” she can at least enjoy a romance with the age-appropriate “son.”

To be sure, romance doesn’t go that easily for the couple in the fourth book. Just as the Lord of the Jungle stepped back from the spotlight to let his son Korak shine in THE SON OF TARZAN, John Carter is conspicuously absent from THUVIA, MAID OF MARS. Carthoris and Thuvia remain in love as they were at the end of WARLORD, but Thuvia’s father affiances her to an older ruler to maintain a treaty. The young lovers seem doomed by the forces of societal commitment, but to their good fortune, a gang of schemers abscond with Thuvia to unexplored parts of Mars. This gives Carthoris an excuse to chase after them, even if he’s pledged to defend her engagement to a man she doesn’t love.

The potential for young-love angst would have been enhanced had either Carthoris or Thuvia been particularly memorable, but both are dull characters, far less lively than their counterparts in the Tarzan saga, Korak and Meriem. Carthoris, who has inherited some of his father’s fantastic abilities, gets almost all of the physical action rescuing the lady fair. That said, Thuvia gets a little more to do than a lot of Burroughs-heroines, and so I judge THUVIA to be one of the few novels in which hero and heroine deserve to share co-billing, in contrast to the status of Jane Porter and Dejah Thoris, who are both adjuncts to their respective paramours. In addition, Thuvia may be the only Burroughs-heroine who has her own “superpower.” When she’s introduced in GODS OF MARS, Thuvia manifests an unexplained ability to control animals, which may have been the author expanding upon Tarzan’s rapport with jungle creatures. Thuvia uses her power against some of Carter’s enemies in her first appearance, but in the novel named for her, she only employs her skill to stop lion-like “banths” from attacking their prey, be it her own self or one of her adversaries.

The most amusing section of THUVIA places Carthoris in the isolated city of “Lothar” (a possible influence on the name of Superman’s enemy, perhaps?) Lothar only has two occupants, both of whom can call up “phantom bowmen” via their fantastic mental powers. One Lotharian calls himself a “realist” and the other styles himself an “etherealist,” which philosophical stances are meant to parody some of the philosophies extant during Burroughs’s era. Both men prove eager to put aside their high-minded thoughts for the chance to copulate with the Maid of Mars, and both are ultimately routed by the masculine superiority of Carthoris.

I don’t judge THUVIA to share the deeper mythic resonances of the first three Martian novels, and as memory serves, most of the rest of the Martian novels share the fourth book’s relative lack of ambition.