THE READING RHEUM: AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1914)

 

I never read the entire Pellucidar series back in the day, and frankly didn't remember much about the books I did read. But given that Pellucidar might be deemed ERB's third best-known series-concept and given that I enjoyed 1929's TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, I got hold of the entire series. Whether I get them all read and reviewed here is anyone's guess.  (Quick illustration note: pleasant though Roy Krenkel's cover-painting is, no one in CORE rides dinosaurs, though it's possible that something similar happens in later books.)                                                                                                     

The Pellucidar series resembles that of ERB's second-best-known series-concept: the Mars books, which had one really famous hero but also devoted one-shot stories to other protagonists on Mars. Yet CORE's main hero David Innes is not nearly as evocative as John Carter or Tarzan. Innes is something of a cypher even compared to some of ERB's more obscure characters. The young hero makes it financially possible for scientist Abner Perry to design the drilling-machine, "The Iron Mole," that burrows down beneath Earth's crust and finds a totally independent pocket-world with dinosaurs, cavepeople, and its own independent light-source. I don't think even in 1914 most readers believed in the possibility of a "hollow earth," but there's something enormously evocative about the idea of digging down into the earth-globe and finding a whole world therein. Additionally, the natives of Pellucidar supposedly doesn't experience linear time as do residents of the surface world. ERB doesn't really develop this notion, and all I can say is that the author had some attraction to the idea of characters being able to escape "time's winged chariot, hurrying near."                                                                                                         

The Pellucidar books also resemble the Mars books in that the hero falls in love with a native woman of this savage world and thus becomes fired with the desire to remake the domain into a place of higher civilization. However, ERB takes an odd approach to his standard formula. While in captivity of slavers, Innes encounters, and promptly offends, the hyperbolically named maiden "Dian the Beautiful." Then Dian disappears from most of the first two-thirds of the book. She finally reappears in the last third, gives Innes a hard time for a couple of chapters, and then true love asserts itself. Like Innes, Dian's not much more than a sketch of a formula-character. Her main function in the plot is that from the first she's being pursued by a hulking warrior, the Biblically-named "Jubal the Ugly," whom Innes must defeat in single combat at the conclusion. The fight's the best action in the novel, and ERB even gives it a patina of the old "civilization defeats savagery" trope.                                               

   If there's any concept into which ERB did invest a lot of thought, though, it's that of Pellucidar's master race, the Mahars. These intelligent pterandons command a race of gorilla-men, the Sagoths, who capture human slaves and turn them over to the Mahars for scientific experimentation and, more often than not, for eating. ERB worked more than a few commentaries on omophagia into his stories, and in all likelihood the Mahars represent his best example of man-eating monsters. He even makes the point that to the Mahars, humans are no more than the beasts that humans themselves consume-- though that rationale doesn't make the creatures any less horrific.                                                                                                     

   All of ERB's books are episodic, but CORE seems particularly so, as very few of Innes' adventures add up to much in terms of emotional impact. ERB also doesn't come up with any compelling society except that of the Mahars, though many modern readers will be offended by the first society Innes encounters: tree-dwelling humanoids with tails, who bear a strong resemblance to the Negroes of the surface world. I have seen ERB use Black characters as the butts of jokes, not least in the first TARZAN novel, but I didn't glean any particular agenda this time. Innes gets carried around by the Black tree-dwellers for a while, but they don't do anything malicious or stupid. Then Innes is captured by Sagoth slavers, and the tailed tree-dwellers aren't seen again in CORE. ERB is justly famous for his studied ignorance of his era's evolutionary theories, though he often used his version of evolution to explain a lot of his fantastic creations. I'm not sure the writer was even aware of the distinction between the major primate groups of monkeys and apes: that the former usually have tails and the latter never do. I theorize that for ERB it was a jape to put tails on humanoids who were not related to monkeys in the least, but who acted like humans in having dwellings and domesticated animals. Seven years later, in the book TARZAN THE TERRIBLE the jungle-lord visits a different prehistoric land, Pal-Ul-Don, and there he meets two groups of tailed (but not tree-dwelling) humanoids, one white and one black. My guess that the tree-dwellers of CORE were just a one-off may be confirmed if, as I suspect, that particular society makes no further appearances in the Pellucidar book-series.