Tarzan: Return to Pal-ul-don

As a boy, I decided to indulge my love for Tarzan movies by acquiring and reading some of the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For Christmas when I was 10 years old, I received the first 5 Tarzan books in a slipcase. These were all the editions with cover art by Neal Adams and I dove in with zealous fervor. I was so hooked that my first attempt at original writing was a Tarzan pastiche involving the apeman and dinosaurs that has sadly been lost to the ravages of time, unlike my later attempt at a Kung Fu action adventure novel that still exists in a mostly intact form (all 176 hand-written pages of it!).

Years later I re-read almost the entire Tarzan run again (along with much of the Mars and Venus series and various trips to Pellucidar. I found myself genuinely marveling at what still works, while being aware of many of Burroughs' shortcomings. Action and sweep were abundant, along with heaping doses of imagination. There too, though, was the occasionally sloppy plotting, a reliance on coincidence that stretches credibility, and a variety of plot tropes that begin to be seen well before they are introduced for the umpteenth time. Churning out regular installments for the pulp era had to have been a difficult grind at times.

I have previously read some of Will Murray's other works expanding on the legacies of characters originally created by other authors, both with The Destroyer series and the Doc Savage series. I rather enjoyed the Destroyer books of his I read, and while I found his newer Wild Adventures of Doc Savage tales to be competently written, I ultimately found them to be repetitive and predictable to a severe fault. 

Sadly, the same can be said about his stab at resurrecting Edgar Rice Burroughs' Lord of the jungle. In Return to Pal-ul-don, which also shares the distinction of being the first in a new series of The Wild Adventures of Tarzan, things bog down quickly into an episodic series of danger and escape predicaments that begin to feel like stitched together mini-adventures desperately seeking any form of narrative cohesion as a forward-moving plot. Unfortunately there is no recovery from this for the novel's length.

There is zero sense of urgency to any of the proceedings other than to get out of one situation in order for Tarzan to stumble into the next challenge. Burroughs was always a master at keeping a clear primary plot line alive as he steered the apeman into adventure. And even when he would become sidetracked in some unexpected plot twist, there was always an overarching sense of purpose and narrative drive to the action. 

Not so with this adventure which bogs down into unending and unnecessary descriptions and ultimately is guilty of the one thing that could never really be said about Burroughs—it becomes lethargic and boring. I really wanted to not only like, but to love this book. I have waited a long time for a continuation by someone who genuinely understood both the character of Lord Greystoke and the fiercely visceral action that came so easily to Burroughs. Alas, this book was not it for me.

Review by Steve Carroll