Reading pulp fiction has consequences.
Last night I was completing my reading of the latest part I have found of the Mars sequence of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the author of the Tarzan books). These books concern the adventures of John Carter, the Virginian Gentleman, who manages to get himself transported in some ethereal way to the Red Planet from a skeleton filled cave in Arizona.
As I indulged myself in the fourth or fifth of these novels in my trusty e-book reader the heavens around me opened up and to accompany the swashbuckling, bloody adventures of the hero on Mars I had a thrilling sound track of the most extraordinary lashing hail storm that I have every heard. With a couple of hours of flashing lightening and absurdly melodramatic thunder I continued to follow my hero’s bloody trail across the dusty, dry sea beds of the dying planet. At some points it was almost as if my reading was directing the choreography of the storm!
Within months of his arrival on the dying planet John Carter has killed a vast amount of the indigenous life; evaded being eaten by various multi appendage monsters;
united warring factions that had been mutually antagonistic for millennia; fallen in love and won a Princess of Helium; been made a high ranking chief in the horde he first met and learned the language. There is obviously nothing like a nineteenth century Virginian Gentleman for integrating fully into a non human extra terrestrial society!
The stories are dreadful and yet strangely compelling and I can’t really pretend that I was reading them to use their narratives and character portrayals as some sort of comment on the first two decades of the twentieth century when they were first published. They are ‘rattling good yarns’ with clunking plots and audaciously predictable twists. The characters are paper thin and everything seems to be settled by violence. The central character of John Carter is presented to the reader as a sort of modern day Viking, heroic of proportion and subject to a recurring form of blood lust – but with a gentle side which shows itself in the way he trains his monstrous beast companions.
The books were published between 1914 and 1922 and from the evidence on the internet they are still widely read. The turbulent times are certainly reflected in the action of the novels and the constant struggle for equilibrium, the bringing together of nations and the heartfelt plea to live in peace all have clear resonances in the chaos which marked these years. It is perhaps facile to attribute earthly national characteristics to the various green, white and red nations on Mars but it is almost overwhelmingly tempting and not very difficult to do!
Perhaps the most interesting book in the series is ‘The Gods of Mars’
which describes the mythic religion which is established on Mars and demonstrates the falsity of its basis showing how the corrupt priestly caste had used credulity and superstition to establish the religion and then live in spectacular institutionalized hypocrisy. John Carter is, of course, the motivating character who is instrumental in showing up the lies of the religion and destroying its hold on the planet.
I suppose that the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion is a fairly easy target and there are, after all, shocking numbers of flamboyant charlatan religious characters to choose ranging from some of the more rumbustiously worldly and lascivious popes to the sadly human prostitute haunting High Life living tele-evangelists of the present day. ‘The Gods of Mars’ still makes interesting reading even if one does feel that what one is reading in the literary equivalent of the Saturday morning serials which used to run in cinemas when I was a schoolboy.
Not, of course that I went to the cinema on Saturday morning. My school was The Cardiff High School for Boys. This institution should not be confused with the present Cardiff High School which has merely appropriated the name of what used to be a pair of highly selective single sex grammar schools and affixed it to a renamed school in a comfortably middle class catchment area.
The ‘real’ Cardiff High had lessons on a Saturday morning in emulation of the minor public schools which comprised much of our fixture lists. This means that for the whole time that I was in secondary school my family could never go away for a weekend on a Friday evening. On the plus side it did mean that in my first year I had games on a Monday afternoon and then I had Tuesday and Thursday afternoons ‘off.’ From the second year onwards we had games either on a Tuesday or a Thursday afternoon with the other being ‘free.’
It was only when I started teaching that I found that I was expected to go to school five days a week and all day! A salutary experience and something I had not done since the age of eleven.
It is hardly surprising therefore with this signal lack of the staple ‘with a mighty bound he was free’ type of entertainment in my youth that I should turn to it with more studied relish in my ‘maturity.’
I fear that I shall find that I have but scratched the surface of the library of Mars stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and that a whole shelf of further adventures of John Carter will be lurking somewhere in the electronic universe waiting for me to download.
Last night I was completing my reading of the latest part I have found of the Mars sequence of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the author of the Tarzan books). These books concern the adventures of John Carter, the Virginian Gentleman, who manages to get himself transported in some ethereal way to the Red Planet from a skeleton filled cave in Arizona.
As I indulged myself in the fourth or fifth of these novels in my trusty e-book reader the heavens around me opened up and to accompany the swashbuckling, bloody adventures of the hero on Mars I had a thrilling sound track of the most extraordinary lashing hail storm that I have every heard. With a couple of hours of flashing lightening and absurdly melodramatic thunder I continued to follow my hero’s bloody trail across the dusty, dry sea beds of the dying planet. At some points it was almost as if my reading was directing the choreography of the storm!
Within months of his arrival on the dying planet John Carter has killed a vast amount of the indigenous life; evaded being eaten by various multi appendage monsters;
united warring factions that had been mutually antagonistic for millennia; fallen in love and won a Princess of Helium; been made a high ranking chief in the horde he first met and learned the language. There is obviously nothing like a nineteenth century Virginian Gentleman for integrating fully into a non human extra terrestrial society!The stories are dreadful and yet strangely compelling and I can’t really pretend that I was reading them to use their narratives and character portrayals as some sort of comment on the first two decades of the twentieth century when they were first published. They are ‘rattling good yarns’ with clunking plots and audaciously predictable twists. The characters are paper thin and everything seems to be settled by violence. The central character of John Carter is presented to the reader as a sort of modern day Viking, heroic of proportion and subject to a recurring form of blood lust – but with a gentle side which shows itself in the way he trains his monstrous beast companions.
The books were published between 1914 and 1922 and from the evidence on the internet they are still widely read. The turbulent times are certainly reflected in the action of the novels and the constant struggle for equilibrium, the bringing together of nations and the heartfelt plea to live in peace all have clear resonances in the chaos which marked these years. It is perhaps facile to attribute earthly national characteristics to the various green, white and red nations on Mars but it is almost overwhelmingly tempting and not very difficult to do!
Perhaps the most interesting book in the series is ‘The Gods of Mars’
which describes the mythic religion which is established on Mars and demonstrates the falsity of its basis showing how the corrupt priestly caste had used credulity and superstition to establish the religion and then live in spectacular institutionalized hypocrisy. John Carter is, of course, the motivating character who is instrumental in showing up the lies of the religion and destroying its hold on the planet.I suppose that the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion is a fairly easy target and there are, after all, shocking numbers of flamboyant charlatan religious characters to choose ranging from some of the more rumbustiously worldly and lascivious popes to the sadly human prostitute haunting High Life living tele-evangelists of the present day. ‘The Gods of Mars’ still makes interesting reading even if one does feel that what one is reading in the literary equivalent of the Saturday morning serials which used to run in cinemas when I was a schoolboy.
Not, of course that I went to the cinema on Saturday morning. My school was The Cardiff High School for Boys. This institution should not be confused with the present Cardiff High School which has merely appropriated the name of what used to be a pair of highly selective single sex grammar schools and affixed it to a renamed school in a comfortably middle class catchment area.
The ‘real’ Cardiff High had lessons on a Saturday morning in emulation of the minor public schools which comprised much of our fixture lists. This means that for the whole time that I was in secondary school my family could never go away for a weekend on a Friday evening. On the plus side it did mean that in my first year I had games on a Monday afternoon and then I had Tuesday and Thursday afternoons ‘off.’ From the second year onwards we had games either on a Tuesday or a Thursday afternoon with the other being ‘free.’
It was only when I started teaching that I found that I was expected to go to school five days a week and all day! A salutary experience and something I had not done since the age of eleven.
It is hardly surprising therefore with this signal lack of the staple ‘with a mighty bound he was free’ type of entertainment in my youth that I should turn to it with more studied relish in my ‘maturity.’
I fear that I shall find that I have but scratched the surface of the library of Mars stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and that a whole shelf of further adventures of John Carter will be lurking somewhere in the electronic universe waiting for me to download.
I hope there aren't too many!
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