Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: Dawn of a New Era?

It might seem anachronistic and hopelessly optimistic in the all-digital-all-the-time 21st century, but it still happens: studios still release actual printed-pulp books as part of the advertising onslaught that precedes most big-budget movies. The assumption that there's any real connection between movie-goers and book-readers, between the experience of movie-going and book-reading, is bizarre on its face, but quixotic and charming even so. And if that kind of connection was tough to credit back when Alan Dean Foster was cashing a quick paycheck by adding participles to the "Clash of the Titans" script, how much more tenuous must it seem today, when movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars and hurl themselves at their hapless audiences in 200-mph sensory-enhanced 3-D with scratch-n-sniff vibro-massage? Once upon a time, perhaps, reading a book and watching a movie were roughly analogous: in both cases, you were the passive recipient of someone's creative output. But there's nothing passive about watching big-budget special effects movies anymore - with their Dolby eviscero-sound systems and their compulsory sensory overload, going to one is like having a rectal exam while tripping on LSD: you've never experienced anything like it, yet it leaves you stunned, sore, and vaguely unsatisfied. With high-resolution video games playing on every personal electronic device in the world, movie studios can no longer rely on anything so quaint as audiences actually paying attention, so they do their best to reach out of the big screen and grab movie-goers' faces between thumb and pointing finger, like Great Aunt Estelle zeroing in for a holiday kiss.

Surely the divide will soon be so great that studios just won't bother with the whole book-thing, but right now, they still do - especially if the original source of their movie embarrassingly happens to be literary. Such is the case with the new Lionsgate movie epic "Conan the Barbarian" starring Jason Momoa: it was born, as we've seen in the course of our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza, of Robert E. Howard's cheesy, heartfelt pulp stories almost a century ago. And let's give Lionsgate credit where it's due: facing the dilemma of producing and liscensing boring old printed books, they did the job right.

First, they commissioned somebody to do the aforementioned participle-sprinkling to the screenplay. That somebody was veteran sci-fi writer Michael Stackpole, a merry old hack who's never written a bad sentence in his entire professional career. No idea if Stackpole is, like most other sci-fi geeks, a Conan fan of long standing, and no idea what strictures the studio placed on him in the task of adapting the final screenplay, but the end result speaks for itself: his novelization, Conan the Barbarian, is that rarest of rare birds: an adaptation that can be read with enjoyment just for its own sake, without reference to (or even knowledge of) some gallumping-great movie in a google-plex near you.

Stackpole has always excelled in adding that one keen little twist, the little detail that suddenly humanizes even the most inhuman characters (this knack is on full and continuous display in his quite enjoyable Star Wars novel I, Jedi). In his Conan novelization, he slips it in at the end of a villain's rant, seen from the viewpoint of his equally-villainous daughter:

Khalar Zym began pacing, his face tightened with fury but his eyes focused distantly. He began to spin for the monks a story - yet telling it more to himself. Marique had heard it many times, told many ways, with her father in moods that ranged from the depths of despair to the heights of triumph. He spun it as a great tragedy - the defining moment of his life. It was the reason he was born and the reason he continued to live.

And yet in every telling, he forgets that I was there.

But the most intriguing sub-aspect of Stackpole's book is the string of hints he adds about our main character's past. One of his present-day fighting companions alludes to that past and gets only a guarded reflection from Conan himself, with a classic bit of Stackpole business added on at the end:

"I do wish I knew of your previous life as a corsair, for it was there you changed. Not unexpected, the loss of carefree youth ... but something replaced it."

The Cimmerian stared at the distant horizon. "I was born to battle. Courage and cunning are what Crom gives us, and I have made the most of them. Of comrades and companions I have had legions. Most have died. Many I have mourned. A few, however ..." One ...

Conan fans won't be surprised to read in Stackpole's book that one of the tales being sung about our young hero is called "The Song of Belit."

That same rich sense of the character's past is caught best in the companion paperback sporting a new movie cover: Del Rey has issued a neat little mass market paperback reprinting six of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories - easily the six best: "The Phoenix on the Sword," "The People of the Black Circle," "The Tower of the Elephant," Red Nails," "Rogues in the House," and  "Queen of the Black Coast." This is a great way to introduce those mythical movie-motivated readers to delve directly into Howard's work - including that last-named story, which features Conan's time serving as a corsair with the legendary pirate-queen Belit whom we've met before (especially in John Buscema's great visual of her coming back from the dead to protect Conan from a marauding winged ape). It's in this story that Conan comes the closest to outlining his life's axioms, in a little speech I'm pleased to see carried over to the movie, since it makes a much, much better anthem for the character than some droning lines about "the lamuntashun of dare vimmin":

"Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content."

Fitting enough that we bring our summer's Cimmerian 'Stravaganza to a close with those lines! All that's left is for America to go to the movie theaters this weekend and make "Conan the Barbarian" a hit. I'll cross my fingers and hope that it's the number 1 movie in the country come Monday - it's hugely talented young star deserves it, and more importantly, this great enduring character deserves it too.

Conan the Derivative!

I've said it before: has any fictional character ever been so poorly served as Conan the Barbarian? His creator, Robert E. Howard, gave him birth in a slapdash way, ping-ponging around a character chronology he kept largely in his head, and then abandoning that chronology when he blew that selfsame head off his body. The first Conan short story was a rewritten version of an earlier tale originally starring another Howard creation, King Kull of Atlantis (the Kull stories are fantastic in their own right, and although they tend to lack the signature vigor of the Conan stories - where Howard's heart very much resided - they do have something Conan never has: a steady, engaging supporting cast), and after Howard's suicide, the character passed from hand to creative hand like a church collection plate.

A thousand times as many people have seen the Conan movies and watched the various Conan cartoons as have ever actually read one of Howard's stories (the forthcoming big-budget Hollywood version will only multiply this), and for decades reading one of Howard's stories wasn't always as easy a thing as it sounds. Throughout the 1970s, a stream of Conan books were published (many of them "co-written" or "finished" by the great journeyman sci-fi writer L. Sprague deCamp, whose novel Lest Darkness Fall is well worth your time to find and read), many of the sporting now-iconic Frank Frazetta covers, and all of them making fine, fun reading - but they hardly represented Howard's character as Howard meant to write him.


That lack was finally supplied in 2003, when Del Rey began publishing its epic, incredible trade paperback editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, including three volumes of the Conan stories (in a wonderful nod to the pulp-fiction origins of the characters, every volume is heavily illustrated) presented in exactly the order Howard first presented them way back in the '30s.

Here you get the glories (slightly hyperventilating glories, but glories all the same) of some of Howard's best work, including such stories as "Rogues in the House," "Black Colossus," and of course "The Tower of the Elephant." Here you get that particular mixture of heady description and wry self-awareness that shines in even Howard's most, um, titillating passages:

Tanada shook back her long black disheveled hair and faced Conan. She was bleeding from a score of scratches on her breasts and thighs, her locks fell in confusion down her back, and she was as naked as the day she was born; but she stared at him without perturbation or uncertainty, and he gave back her stare, frank admiration in his expression of her cool bearing, and the ripeness of her brown limbs.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Conan, a Cimmerian," he answered.

"What are you doing in Shumballa?"

"I came here to seek my fortune. I was formerly a corsair."

These volumes do great work, but they fight an uphill battle against all the popular entertainment conceptions of Conan, most especially the atrocious movies that launched the "acting" career of a future American president. The problem is that Howard originally envisioned the Conan stories as shards of a single mosaic, random glimpses of one man's whole remarkable life - as freebooter, mercenary, corsair, general, husband, father, and king - but movies, cartoons, and comic books have tended to plop their derivative adventures down squarely in Conan's earliest days as the sword-wielding all-purpose barbarian the general public knows (a welcome exception in the comics world, "Conan the King," was short-lived and unenthusiastically received by fandom). The aforementioned Hollywood movie will continue this - the current rumored front-runner for the lead is Alan Richtson, an incredibly nice kid with lots of untapped screen charisma but who'll land the role for one reason: his muscular body (it's a risk I myself would be willing to run for the chance to get Richtson in the part, since he's especially good at the sardonic-humor-in-the-midst-of-action that is the quintessential Conan trait).

And what of books, you ask? What of the innumerable Conan spin-off pastiche novels that have come and gone since Howard blew his brains out? Well, as you can imagine, they've all stuck to the same formula mentioned above: their Conan is uniformly young, often in his early teens, and reading the books, you get the impression this is done in large part so the respective pastiche writers don't have to bog themselves down with mastering the detailed timeline that governs Conan's more adult life (was Belit after Zamora, or before? That kind of thing).


Robert Jordan's Conan novels are every bit as turgid and boring as his "Wheel of Time" books. The seasoned veteran hack Steve Perry became seasoned in large part through writing Conan books, and his are always reliably entertaining, as in a scene from the less-than-stirringly titled Conan the Formidable (guess Conan the Above Average was taken) where our young barbarian faces a group of would-be robbers on the road:

"Ah" [says the leader of the robbers]. Well, that sword you wave about so dangerously might be worth something. We could sell it."

"I am not disposed to give it up."

The man waved the morning star at his band. "There are six of us and but one of you. Give us the sword and whatever valuables you carry and you may leave here unharmed."

"Pardon me for not trusting you, but I think not."

"There are still six of us to your one."

"That can be changed."

But alas, most of these knock-off novels are ruinously dreadful. The ongoing Conan comic book series is a bright light in this regard, always excellent and well worth your time, but a truly great Conan novel has never been written, not even by the creator of the character himself. This is an odd but consistent failing Conan has in common with a surprising number of other characters from the pulp era - there's no one stand-out great novel of Doc Savage either, or the Shadow. Tarzan has both Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but all three of Robert E. Howard's great creations, King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan, live most fully in the short stories he crafted for them. And until the creative bar is raised - until Conan comes to stand in the reading imagination for more than quaffing ale and beheading people - that's likely to remain the case. Maybe someday a visionary director will come along and make the great, exciting, heartbreaking movie "The Tower of the Elephant" begs to be, and suddenly the character will undergo a renaissance.


But in the meantime, the forthcoming movie has at least one thing going for it: Nicholas Cage won't be playing Conan.