Started: April 14, 2023 | Finished: April 15, 2023
The Beasts of Tarzan
The Beasts of Tarzan starts with the kidnapping of Tarzan's young son by that old villain Rokoff. This kidnapping leads to Tarzan being marooned on an island, the perfect opportunity for Lord Greystoke to revert to his wilder persona. While in this jungle, Tarzan manages to tame and command a tribe of apes and a panther. He then meeets up with some Africans and kills all but one of them, the chief, who has no choice but to tag along with Tarzan and his menagerie.
At this point I stopped reading.
The kidnapping of Tarzan's son had me questioning why Rokoff would, on escaping, call such attention to himself and go for such expenditure as to kidnap the young Greystoke. I let this pass. Now when I read about Tarzan's beast-taming activities I began to have problems with my suspension of disbelief; after all these are wild beasts not house pets. Then Tarzan causes the death of an entire group of natives except for their chief. My expectation of the Chief was that he would be at least grief-stricken if not possessed of a blood-mad anger at Tarzan; but he just goes along as if nothing happened.
After being thrown wave after wave of implausibilities I began to notice something about the prose. The level of prose quality of the first two Tarzan books is not in this one. Burroughs writes in a very lackadaisical and uninspired way; making me come to the conclusion that he was just writing this for the money and not for the story.
If that is the case then why shoud I read it? Answer: I won't. I so wanted this book to be good but it turned out to be a disappointment.