Scan barcode
A review by baronvonchop
Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke by Philip José Farmer, Philip José Farmer
2.0
The premise of this book is that Edgar Rice Burroughs met Tarzan as an old man, and Tarzan (Lord Greystoke) told Burroughs the 'true' story of Tarzan's life, which Burroughs used when writing his novels. Philip Jose Farmer expands on this by making himself a character in the narrative and investigating the truth behind Burroughs' stories and the lineage of Tarzan. Along the way, Farmer 'discovers' that Tarzan is related to a number of other literary characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger.
I was hoping for more of a literary crossover, but the main plot of the novel sticks closely to the Burroughs novels. Farmer goes through them, arranging the events in chronological order ('correcting' Burroughs' chronology, which sometimes presents events out of order). The closest the novel gets to crossing over with other fiction is when he describes how Tarzan's grandfather is a minor character in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and how Tarzan's adopted son marries the granddaughter of Phileas Fogg.
The book has several appendices that expand on the relationships between various literary characters, but Farmer does not do anything interesting with these relationships other than describing who is related to whom. It's interesting to think that Sherlock Holmes is the father of Nero Wolfe (whoever that is), or the idea that two pulp characters (the Spider and the Shadow) were actually the same person, who had been driven insane by the stress of his life as the WWI pilot G-8.
I was hoping for more of a literary crossover, but the main plot of the novel sticks closely to the Burroughs novels. Farmer goes through them, arranging the events in chronological order ('correcting' Burroughs' chronology, which sometimes presents events out of order). The closest the novel gets to crossing over with other fiction is when he describes how Tarzan's grandfather is a minor character in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and how Tarzan's adopted son marries the granddaughter of Phileas Fogg.
The book has several appendices that expand on the relationships between various literary characters, but Farmer does not do anything interesting with these relationships other than describing who is related to whom. It's interesting to think that Sherlock Holmes is the father of Nero Wolfe (whoever that is), or the idea that two pulp characters (the Spider and the Shadow) were actually the same person, who had been driven insane by the stress of his life as the WWI pilot G-8.