A bunch of writers I like have always spoken highly of Robert E Howard; adjectives like “muscular” and “gripping” tend to be bandied about his Conan stories, usually alongside notes that much of the Conan-related materialother authors working in the Conan canon, movies, and so onaren’t even a pale shadow of Howard’s writing, so when I happened across this substantial paperback in Unity, I decided to take a punt on it.
I’m not dissapointed. The reason people keep using “muscular” and “gripping” is because Howard’s writing is just that, without being less than very articulate at the same time. It’s the kind of sparse, juicy writing that on the one hand is fairly economical, but on the other is rich enough that it feels like I should be able to eat the page.
There are some interesting strands; Howard’s worship of the noble savage, his regard for atavistic action, his embrace of the physical are obvious; from reading a little about him, his very upper middle class background and complaints of a rather weak childhood put me in mind of a Teddy Roosvelt or, perhaps even more appropriately, a Hemingway. The comparison to the latter is apt, and I suspect that had Howard written a more litcrit acceptable material than classic swords and sorcery (with a dash of horror) one wouldn’t attract giggles for the comparison.
You can see his friendship with H.P. Lovecraft in evidence in his more purple-tinged passages, his ancient gods, and Things Man Was Not Meant to know; whereas Lovecraft’s well-educated gentlemen succumb to madness or hide, though, Howard’s barbarian hacks his way through them. It doesn’t do to think too hard about things that can drive you insane.
There are some caveats, though. The first chapter, on the history of the mythos and where it slips in, as an imaginary age, in Earth’s history, is like one of those bits of the bible that are full of begatting. It’s tedious, to put it mildly. The second is that while Howard has some strong female characters in a few stories, most of them are pretty much slim, round-arsed, big-breasted props who swoon over the hero.
And the third is that Howard is incredibly, appallingly, racist. The Shemites with their curly, black beards, hook noses, and cunning ways. The cannibalistic Negroes. The superstitious, decadent easterners. Conan’s ethos that he will never leave even his worst white enemy to die by the hand of a black man (said so in so many words). This is one of the things people don’t mention so often when praising him.
In spite of all that, though, I found the volume gripping enough to keep me at it more-or-less solidly for a week. Pity the silly bastard shot himself.