Return of Tarzan is the second Tarzan novel, first appearing in a magazine in 1913.  The book has gone through many editions, many with fine cover art.  If you want to see a great selection of art related to Return of Tarzan, and all kinds of cool publication info, check out ERBzine's awesome page on the novel.   I went the cheapass route with this one, and read a free electronic text.  I don't mind reading on the computer or the i-phone, but the texts I found did not have italics, which is a little annoying, as foreign words which Burroughs put in italics, like douar or spahi, appear in all caps.  Burroughs, stop yelling at me!

Jane Porter, Southern belle, is engaged to John Clayton, a good guy whom most of the world believes to be the legitimate Lord Greystoke, even though she loves Tarzan the Ape-Man, the real Lord Greystoke.  Tarzan spends months on an ocean liner and in Paris, hanging out with his naval officer buddy D'Arnot, reading books and going to art exhibits, attending the opera and drinking absinth.  Sounds like the good life!  But Tarzan is lonely, missing both Jane and his jungle life.  And of course he gets involved with some Russian spies.

Russian beauty Olga is married to a French government minister, and both seem like good sorts, but Olga's brother Nikolas is an unscrupulous jerk off who is always trying to use Olga's position to steal some French government secrets to sell to the czar or maybe some other foreign power.  When Tarzan foils his various schemes to blackmail Olga or her husband, Nikolas hires ten thugs to murder Tarzan in a disreputable part of Paris.  Tarzan outfights these creeps hand to hand and declares that this is the only entertainment he has had since he left the jungle!  Are you forgetting the opera, Tarzan?

His time spent in civilization provides Tarzan numerous opportunities to put on his misanthrope cap and opine that the jungle is safer, and jungle beasts more admirable, than civilized human beings.  You can only imagine what Tarzan is going to say about us civilized people when we've got World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, World War II and the Holocaust under our belts.  You don't like civilization now, Tarzan?  We're just getting started!

In Chapter 7 Tarzan is in North Africa on an espionage mission for the French government, disguised as an American hunter.  Burroughs, who in Chapter 6 informed us that Frenchmen are impulsive, lets us know in Chapter 8 that "if there is one thing an Arab despises, it is a talkative man."  Luckily our man Tarzan is a man of few words, and he makes several valuable Arab friends.  In fact, Tarzan prefers the Arabs ("stern and dignified warriors") and their lives ("filled with danger and hardship") to the "effeminate civilization of the great cities he had visited."  Tarzan, are you dissing the opera?

Tarzan gets on a ship for South Africa, and the Russian spies toss him overboard.  Tarzan is of course a great swimmer, and luckily the Russians threw him overboard close to the very jungle where he grew up!  Tarzan is thrilled to be back home, and even makes friends with a tribe of elephant hunters.  The Africans in Tarzan of the Apes were all cannibals with filed teeth whom Tarzan would kill out of hand, but the members of this tribe, the Waziri, are a better sort.  Evincing an attitude that today might land Tarzan (or Burroughs) in sensitivity training, Tarzan notes that these blacks don't have flat noses and thick lips like the "typical West African savage."  (This actually reminds me of something Henry Miller says about W. E. B. DuBois in The Rosy Crucifixion.)  It turns out that this tribe arrived down here a generation ago, fleeing from Arab slavers.

The Waziri guide Tarzan to the lost city of Opar, which is full of gold and a race of degenerate men; luckily the women of Opar have not degenerated, and are still sexy.  The high priestess of Opar protects Tarzan from the men, and gives Burroughs a chance to take a dig at religion - the high priestess is a sham who does not believe her own religion, and even says in Chapter 22, "The more one knows of one's religion the less one believes...."  

While Tarzan is busy with the Waziri and the high priestess of Opar, the bulk of the remainder of the cast - Jane, her father and servant, Clayton and Nikolas - gets shipwrecked on the West African coast.  I thought the scenes in the boat, with everybody starving and considering cannibalism, effectively macabre.  Once they make it to the jungle Jane is so disappointed in Clayton's inability to fight lions that she calls off their marriage.  The Oparians, looking for the fugitive Tarzan, capture Jane, and Tarzan rescues her.  Clayton dies of a fever, D'Arnot's ship arrives to rescue everybody and arrest Nikolas, and Tarzan steals a bazillion dollars worth of gold from Opar, so the way is paved for Tarzan and Jane to be married in the final chapter, Chapter 26.  This book has a high body count, but still a happy ending for our hero and his "mate."          

Return of Tarzan is a great adventure story, with a surfeit of exotic locations and people, beautiful girls, monstrous villains, and plenty of fights with men and with beasts (Tarzan really puts a dent in the lion population in this one.)  Part of the book's charm is in how appealing a character Tarzan is.  Burroughs does a good job with the fish out of water aspects of Tarzan's character, even using it as a source of jokes, like this one in Chapter 10:

He longed for a friend who loved the same wild life that he loved. He had learned to crave companionship, but it was his misfortune that most of the men he knew preferred immaculate linen and their clubs to nakedness and the jungle. It was, of course, difficult to understand, yet it was very evident that they did. 

I am skeptical of comic relief in adventure stories, as it is often distracting and diminishes the tension that I think is an important element of a good adventure story, but this kind of joke doesn't take you out of the story, and is entirely based on the character, and even helps give you a feeling for the character and his emotions.

(We get an example of a distracting joke when Jane's father, the absent-minded professor, while stranded on the West African coast, suddenly recalls there is a book he wants to read and gets in a row boat and tries to row his way to a New York library.)

Tarzan is also appealing because of his passion, his big emotions, his enthusiasm about life.  Burroughs conveys how much Tarzan enjoys the hunt, enjoys fighting, enjoys eating the raw meat that he himself has brought down.  Tarzan several times is compared to a child; each time a new adventure comes his way Tarzan is eager to embark on it, like a child discovering a new toy.  Tarzan (in the jungle at least) is not only free of laws and social obligations, but is free to express his emotions: when Olga is in his arms he impulsively kisses her, when Jane is in danger he explodes in a furious rage, when he defeats a foe he puts his foot on the cadaver's neck and lets loose a triumphant animal scream, announcing to the world that he is still alive, a survivor and a winner.  So much of the time we have to follow the rules, do what we are told, stifle or hide our emotions, that it is exciting to see someone who need not do so.

Return of Tarzan isn't without problems.  As Gore Vidal points out in his article "Revisiting Tarzan," Burroughs uses too many incredible coincidences.  Everything seems to happen when Tarzan is around: the slavers have not attacked the Waziri in decades, but they attack right after Tarzan joins the tribe; Jane and Tarzan are apart for months, and then the exact minute Jane is about to be killed by a lion or as a human sacrifice is the minute Tarzan comes on the scene.  Some people may be dismayed by the book's racial, class and gender politics.  (Women are always falling in love with Tarzan; when the survivors on the boat vote on what to do, Jane doesn't get to vote!)  I didn't find it difficult to just shrug these things off; fiction is full of wacky coincidences, and Burroughs has admirable as well as despicable Russians, Arabs, and blacks, and Jane and other women sometimes display bravery and level heads in danger.

Return of Tarzan is great fun, and I am looking forward to the third Tarzan caper, Beasts of Tarzan.   
      

I first read Tarzan of the Apes, the first Tarzan book, while I lived in New York, probably over ten years ago. I don't recall what edition I read, maybe one my brother loaned me. I thought it was a great novel. Soon after I read it my wife (then my girlfriend) and I went with my father to the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, one of the many fascinating attractions which abound within the confines of NYC. I got on my wife's nerves by pretending I had lived my early life as had Lord Greystoke, and kept looking at a tree or flower and observing, "Ah, yes, it was in just such a tree that I lay in wait that time I ambushed a ferocious jaguar," or "It was into a patch of aromatic orchids such as these that one of my rivals among my tribe of apes threw me that time, into the path of a stampeding herd of elephants." The more annoyed she became, the funnier these ridiculous jokes seemed to me. Perhaps it is surprising that she married me.

Anyway, in the last two years I bought a copy of Tarzan of the Apes from a Goodwill a short distance from where I now live, the Signet Classic paperback edition from 1990.  The publisher, trying to class up this pulp action adventure, chose as a cover painting a 19th century depiction of Victoria Falls by Thomas Baines (which I believe is printed in reverse, to put the negative space on the back) and includes an "introduction" by Gore Vidal.  The publisher's scheme seems to have worked; my copy was at one point purchased from a University bookstore.  The cover painting choice does make the print on the back cover hard to read, though.  Well, there probably aren't many people who see the front cover and say, "What the hell is a tarzan?" 

Burroughs's novel first appeared in magazine form in 1912.  British aristocrats Lord and Lady Greystoke are marooned in West Africa by pirates, and struggle to survive.  They are killed shortly after giving birth to their son.  In a bizarre turn of events, a female ape, bereft after the death of her own son, takes up little Lord Greystoke, suckles him and raises him.  Given the name of Tarzan, which means "white skin," by the tribe of apes, Lord Greystoke grows up to be a skilled jungle hunter with animal-like senses and reflexes.  At the same time, Tarzan is able to take advantage of the books and other artifacts his parents left behind, and the weapons of a native tribe which moves into the area, so that his human cunning, knowledge and tools make him more than a match for the dangerous primates and felines who inhabit the savage jungle.

Burroughs' Africa seems to resemble the Africa of real life little more than his Mars (of the John Carter books) resembles the Mars of real life.  The apes who adopt Tarzan are a fictional species of relatively high intelligence who have a language and use crude musical instruments, for example, and I am skeptical that coconuts and pineapples grow in the wild in the real West Africa.  Still, if we suspend disbelief, as we do when reading so many other science-fiction and fantasy stories, we find that Burroughs' Africa is a thrilling setting for an adventure story.

I found the story of Tarzan's growth, both as an ape (he fights his way from strange interloper to leader of the tribe) and as a human (he gradually learns about his true heritage, how to read and how to use weapons) satisfying, and Burroughs has a good writing style that carries you forward smoothly; I was truly curious to see what would happen next to Tarzan, even though, of course, there is no chance Tarzan is going to get killed or humiliated.  Burroughs' speculations about how an intelligent ape or a man raised by apes would respond to human beings, their behavior and artifacts, are convincing and entertaining.  I don't understand how Tarzan learns to write his name in English, though, as he doesn't know what sounds correspond to what letters.

The story suffers a bit with the introduction of Jane Porter and her party in the second half of the book.  The American Porter, her academic father and his equally well-educated assistant, Porter's black servant Esmeralda, and English nobleman Clayton, are marooned by (a different set of) pirates in the same spot Tarzan's parents were marooned like 20 years before.  Besides the distracting coincidences (Clayton is Tarzan's cousin, for example), Professor Porter and his assistant, and Esmeralda, are all distracting comic relief characters.  The academics are caricatures of absent-minded professors (they are so busy arguing over the merits of Muslim civilization in the 15th century that they don't notice a lion creeping up on them) and Esmeralda is an hysterical "mammy" figure who faints when there is danger and says things like "Fo de good Lawd's sake, ain' Ah daid?" when she wakes up.

Strange to relate, the apes who adopt and raise the baby Tarzan: his loving foster mother, his put upon and jealous step father, and Tarzan's rivals for leadership of the tribe, are more compelling characters than the civilized humans in the novel.

The second half of the novel is also inferior plotwise to the struggles and education of Tarzan in the first half; Tarzan rescues the members of the Porter party, and a French naval officer, again and again, and there is a love quadrangle, Jane being pursued by Tarzan, Clayton the nobleman, and Canler, a rich American businessman.  I actually liked the scenes between Tarzan and Jane, the way each thinks the other is so beautiful and falls in love in a flash (we have all felt this way, or at least dreamed of feeling this way, right?) and how each fears that their being from different worlds makes a lasting relationship impossible.  The scenes with Clayton and Jane are not very well done and the scenes with Canler and Jane are worse.  Burroughs has reasons for including these characters, among them pointing out that the primitive man of action is more attractive to women than the traditional aristocrat or the modern bourgeois, but, looking at the book as a piece of entertainment, sometimes Clayton and more so Canler feel like needless complications that slow the book down and dilute the feelings of the reader. 

There are hundreds of interesting things to say about Tarzan of the Apes related to imperialism, racism, social class, nature vs nurture, the noble savage vs debased decadent civilized man, American perceptions of Englishmen and Frenchmen, Darwinian evolution and religious skepticism, but I'm sure they have all been said already.  Suffice to say that as well as being a good adventure story Tarzan is interesting as a view into the attitudes and beliefs of people a century ago.

The first half of Tarzan of the Apes is very good, the second half just OK.  We'll see what I think of the second Tarzan book soon enough.   

I read "Tarzan Revisited," the article by Gore Vidal that serves as introduction, after I had read Burroughs'  novel (and drafted all the paragraphs above), as I wanted to go into the book without any kind of preconceived notions, and because I figured it might be full of spoilers.  I've never read any fiction by Vidal; his books always seem to be about topics which don't interest me, like satires of Hollywood or fictionalized biographies of American politicians.  If I wanted to know about Aaron Burr wouldn't I just read a legit biography of him, or a history of the early American Republic, by a serious historian?

It could be that by avoiding Vidal I'm making a mistake and I'm missing out; this essay by Vidal, which first appeared in a magazine in 1963, is pretty good.  It is definitely better than what I have written here.  C'est la vie.  Vidal talks about his own relationship with Burroughs' books, compares Tarzan and John Carter to James Bond and Mike Hammer, criticizes Burroughs' style and praises Burroughs' action sequences, and laments that modern society increasingly stifles and bores the individual.  I think anybody interested in  Burroughs and genre fiction would enjoy it.