Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes. 1912. Amazon Digital Services, 2012.
———. The Return of Tarzan. 1913. Amazon Digital Services, 2012.

Somehow I missed Tarzan books when I was a boy. I did Hardy Boys and Tom Swift but missed Tarzan. These are the first two of the many Tarzan stories Burroughs wrote. They are a very good introduction to the Tarzan mythos.

I had a friend who had read many of them. I can see why. They are a lot of fun. Tarzan really is a kind of superhero. In these first two books of the series, he kills at least five lions single-handed. He does it a little different each time, too.

Even the way the books describes Tarzan’s feelings about Jane are a lot like the way a boy might feel when he first discovers that he is attracted to a certain girl.

But mostly the books are about the action. There is a new conflict in every chapter, whether it is Tarzan being raised by his defensive ape foster mother Kala or conflict with carnivorous beasts or murderous people or Russian spies. The stories are really pretty wild. Today they would probably be categorized as science fiction.

Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa that are bigger than chimps but smaller than gorillas. They have a rudimentary language, which at one point is described as the original language. There are also other ape-men that are further along the evolutionary path than Tarzan’s apes but not as far along as the humans.

From the first book, one gets the idea that Burroughs bought into the Darwinian idea that black Africans were the missing link between apes and men, but that becomes a little muddled in book two, The Return of Tarzan. Anyhow, do not look for science here.

Tarzan of the Apes is the origin story. His marooned parents die in West Africa; baby Tarzan is raised by the apes. He is very muscular and intelligent. By observing native Africans, whom he does not trust because the apes don’t, he learns about spears, knives, and bows and arrows. He even learns to read—he cannot pronounce the words but he sees books with pictures and learns that many of the letters symbolize objects. It does not explain how he learned to spell his own name, though.

Not only is there a lot of conflict, a lot of the conflict is fun. To the natives at first he is like some kind of god. To white people he is a mysterious and handsome savage. He saves the lives of numerous people. Everywhere he goes, people are in his debt for saving their lives. One of the men he saves is a French Captain D’Arnot, who is independently wealthy, so Tarzan lacks for nothing when he enters civilization.

When he is first civilized, he is kind of a curiosity not only because he was a wild jungle ape man (he is called the ape man throughout both books) but also because he could read English but spoke French. Eventually he learns English, one or two African languages, and Arabic. Indeed, one of his deadliest encounters was probably taken from the pages of the news at the time the books were written. He and some villagers defend themselves against Arab slave and ivory traders and their lackeys.

I review the books together because The Return of Tarzan is a true sequel. Tarzan of the Apes ends with some serious unresolved conflicts which are resolved, more or less, in the sequel. I thought I was just going to read one book to get a flavor for the tales, but I had to read the second one to find out what happens.

To give an idea of his adventures just in these two books, Tarzan visits numerous countries. He is apparently raised in the Congo and then goes to French West Africa with D’Arnot, then to Paris, then England, then the United States in both Baltimore and Wisconsin. He gets recruited into French espionage and goes to Morocco and saves the lives of some people there. He ends up back “home” in Africa, becomes a tribal leader there, and then discovers the hidden city of Opar—possibly equated with the Biblical Ophir (see, for example I Kings 10:11). Whew!

Tarzan is not just a solo act, either. He organizes a true guerrilla battle with his tribal allies to fight the Arab slave traders. This is something out of Heart of Darkness. It is almost certain Burroughs was familiar with some of the stories out of the Congo detailing the abuse of the Belgian colonials and the Arab slavers such as Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy if not the Conrad novel.

Burroughs portrays Tarzan sympathetically. We really do care about what happens to him and to Jane and some of Tarzan’s other friends. Tarzan is a good guy. He seems to instinctively know right from wrong and true from false. The suggestion is that it is combination of nature (son of truly noble English nobility) and nurture (extreme survival and learning what is important).

It is pretty evident that Burroughs wants the reader to understand that civilized people can be just as brutish and savage as wild animals and tribal people. There are some real villains here, especially the Russian spy Rokoff. If we are reminded of a leopard or gorilla that Tarzan faced earlier, it is no coincidence.