Book #5 for 2024. My only experience of Tarzan thus far is the TV version with Ron Ely (which I haven’t seen since I was quite little so don’t remember much) and Looney Tunes parodies of the Johnny Weissmuller films, so reading the original book (which I was spurred to do by Burroughs enthusiast Michael Vaughan on YT) was a fascinating experience. Tarzan, of course, is raised by anthropoid apes in Africa, rescued after the deaths of his parents who were stranded somewhere in Africa by a crappy mob of mutinous sailors; the young human boy is obviously unlike the other members of his “family”, and as he grows and sights other humans for the first time, he discovers he is in fact much more like these other creatures. It must be said the book’s handling of racial issues is… of its time, perhaps, and makes H. Rider Haggard look relatively progressive, although Tarzan’s first encounters with other white people are about as confusing to him as the black villagers who’ve fled the Congo (and Burroughs is clear about the latter’s hatred of white people being justifiable given the atrocities perpetrated there by the Belgians). And the intro to the Modern Library edition does make it clear that Tarzan’s whiteness is kind of the point, it’s what makes him the near superhero the book paints him as. Unsubtle, but undeniably rip-roaring stuff, I liked this a lot; I did it find the last part a bit unlikely, in that Tarzan adjusts to Western civilisation with almost undue haste, to the point of having learned to drive somehow before the fiery climax, I found this a bit hard to swallow—as opposed, obviously, to the gritty realism of the rest of the book—although certainly not enough to put me off the whole book too much. Must read more Burroughs.
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