When Heroes Were Heroes and Pulp Was Pulp

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wanted to read Tarzan for myself, interested in experiencing the story in a more direct way than the old cartoons and movies, so I picked it up a bit ago. Even though I have a soft spot for old pulp, I didn't have terribly high hopes. However, I liked it better than I expected. With the usual caveats, I found it entertaining and reasonably sophisticated; one can see why it spawned so many sequels and movies and retellings.

The pace is brisk, the action is exciting, and the prose is pretty good, actually--though my surprise is not intended to be condescending. Dude could write. Putting aside (if you can) the inevitable awkward language used for peoples and cultures, and overlooking (if you can) the problematic early 20th Century attitudes toward race and gender, one might find that the tone is more modern than expected. The easy callousness toward the fictional native tribesmen was unfortunately expected; the explicit anti-colonial stance was not.

Two steps forward, one step back.

(If he were writing today, I expect Burroughs would do better. No way to know, though.)

Some old pulp can only be read as a curiosity, IMO, in an ironic way (like Flash Gordon, which I didn't much like), but this is a better class of story. I think many readers could enjoy Tarzan as just a regular action novel. I did, anyway.

However, the reader should expect a few bumps.


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