The “Conan Saga,” as L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter imagined it, concludes with this novel. Conan’s story, as reported in the fictitious Nemedian Chronicles, ends when he passes out of the knowledge of the Hyborian Lands. De Camp and Carter based the novel on vague hints Conan’s creator Robert E. Howard left in a letter, but they fly off into some odd speculative territory and create what must count as one of the strangest of all Conan pastiches. It doesn’t feel much like Howard’s Conan, but it contains some of the most unabashed fun sword-and-sorcery that de Camp and Carter wrote for the series.

The story follows upon the other pastiches that de Camp and Carter wrote about Conan after he seized the crown of the greatest kingdom of the Hyborian Age, Aquilonia. As the action begins, Conan has ruled for over twenty years and now nears his mid-sixties. After the death of Queen Zenobia in childbirth, Conan wearies of ruling Aquilonia. A sudden attack of mysterious “Red Shadows” spirits away Count Trocero and many other people of Aquilonia. In a dream, Conan sees the prophet Epemitreus, who tells him he must cross the Western Ocean to stop the evil of the Red Shadows. The Prophet gives Conan a phoenix-shaped talisman to aid him. Conan abdicates in favor of his twenty-year-old son Conn and secretly heads to the west on his last adventure. In the Argossean port of Messantia he meets an old companion from his days with the Brachan pirates, Sigurd of Vanaheim. King Ariosto of Argos, who has also suffered from the Red Shadows, approaches Conan in a tavern to offer to fund his voyage over the Western Ocean. Conan, under his old guise of Amra the Lion, picks a tough crew and sails with Sigurd on the ship the Red Lion. What they find out in the Western Ocean will put them face-to-face with the last remnants of sunken Atlantis, Demons from the Darkness, and a city of sacrifice, dragons, and evil labyrinths.

The two veteran writers conjure up a breezy fantasy adventure with a pulpy sense of excitement, but Conan of the Isles puts to the test the reader’s taste in post-Howard Conan. Which is more important: adherence to Howard’s spirit, or fun adventure? If you can have both, that’s wonderful. But I would prefer to have a good sword-and-sorcery adventure instead a poor, boring, and slavish attempt to imitate Howard. You will never mistake Conan of the Isles for genuine Howardian Conan, but you won’t mistake it for a boring novel either. The plot barely pauses to take a breath: like a movie serial or an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure, this is “One Damn Thing After Another.” Where a Conan novel in the 1980s and '90s series would develop a story around different character subplots, interactions, and conspiracies, Conan of the Isles just points Conan in a direction and sends him on his gory way. The novel flies along a linear path: monster, fight, escape, rescue, monster, sorcerer, duel, escape, rescue, etc. Imaginative weirdness appears throughout. Character drama takes a back seat—the only supporting characters are Sigurd and Metemphoc the master thief—and action hurtles nonstop across the page.

Thankfully, most of the action clicks. Conan’s horrific contest against the horde of huge rats ranks as one of the best-written suspense sequences in a pastiche novel. The navel battle scenes are also exciting, and plenty of giant monsters show up to threaten our aging hero. (I personally adore big monsters, so the book earns extra points with me.) The finale is just what you want from a fantasy adventure: constant action, monsters, magic, horror, and ironic turnabout.

The personal interests of the two authors emerge strongly; more than any other Conan piece they authored, Conan of the Isles belongs to de Camp and Carter. Carter brings the pulpy delirium and the nonstop rush of insane events. De Camp provides a fascination with the Atlantis legend and the origins of myths in general, as well as his “logical fantasy” approach to mythic events. He even suggests that Conan will become the basis for the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, “the Feathered Serpent” who sailed out of the west to their lands.

Where Conan of the Isles deviates from Howard’s vision is in its pseudo-scientific gadgetry and the outlandish culture of Antillia. Howard made the Hyborian Age realistic, injecting historical cultures into a hodgepodge fantasy setting and adding doses of supernaturalism. De Camp and Carter, however, toss Conan out of the Hyborian Age and into lands beyond knowledge, and all convention collapses into a science-fantasy parade of peculiarity. The Antillians sail impractical dragon boats, use “super metals” like orichalcum, wear breathing helmets, don glass armor, hurl stun-gas grenades, and wield crystal swords—Jack Kirby would’ve loved to illustrate this! Their culture has hints of meso-American Indians (a de Camp touch, based on the pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century bestseller Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly, who theorized an Atlantean origin for Central and South American empires), but otherwise the Antillians might have leaped out of one of Burroughs’s Martian novels.

The writers treat the older Conan with admirable realism. They pile on reminders of the past, which gives a sense of closure for the final story of Conan’s career (at least in de Camp’s chronology). There’s also an effective moment of reflection for the hero: “Now that [Zenobia] was gone, he found himself often thinking of her, in moods of black depression that were unlike him. While she lived, he had taken her devotion as his due and thought little of it, as is the way of the barbarian. Now he regretted the words he had not said to her and the favors he had not done for her.” Conan has matured; facing the approach of the “Long Night” of death gives him a sense of regret and loss appropriate for someone his age. Howard himself would have approved of this touch of reflective darkness.

The novel’s major flaw is the authors’ predilection for overstuffing their prose, possibly to imitate Howard. This is especially noticeable in the dialogue: Conan acts overly chatty, and Sigurd shouts too many “salty dog” speeches. Here’s a good example of the often heavy-handed writing: “The northman grinned broadly and gave a bellow of joy that would have summoned a hippogriff in the mating season had one been within earshot.” A hippogriff is an unlikely Hyborian animal. (One of the authors must have had Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in mind, since they use both the name “Ariosto” and Ariosto’s invention, the hippogriff.) In places, their word choice falls flat or else they strain too hard to use an obscure term. I have never seen anyone use the word “decardiate”—to remove the heart—in a work of fiction before, and I doubt I will see it again. In places the plot moves too fast, and de Camp and Carter rely on coincidences (such as Conan running into Sigurd and Ariosto in the same bar) that seem a bit much.

You can’t expect all of it to makes sense or adhere to traditional Conan, but at least this pastiche lives up to the sword-and-sorcery obligation to entertain with fast, fun, imaginative action. Compared to many of the later Conan novels, Conan of the Isles is fast, fun, and imaginative indeed. ( )

Even though Howard did not write any of the stories in this particular volume, it's his character and creation, and part of the ongoing series of his works, so I'm including him as the primary author to keep it in the series. ( )

The introduction may be the best part of this pastiche novel, to quote one part:

"The purpose of heroic fantasy is neither to solve the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose defects in the foreign-aid program, nor to expound the questions of poverty or intergroup hostility. It is to entertain. It is escape reading in which one escapes clear out of the real universe. But, come to think, these tales are no more 'unreal' than the many whodunnits wherein, after the stupid police have fallen over their own big feet, the brilliant amateur - a private detective, a newspaper reporter., or a little old lady - steps in and solves the crime.
Heroic fantasies combine the color, gore., and lively action of the costume novel with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today. If you read for fun, this is the genre for you."

However, this book is perhaps a little light on the fun, unfortunately, in the last of the Lance books.

King Conan is getting on, as de Camp introduces the story, and feeling generation gapped from the kids, etc.

What to do? How about a spot of pirate action?

Time for a bit of the Amra persona, with Sigurd Redbeard and the Sea Monsters.

Not one of the better efforts.

http://superprose.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )