Conan of the Isles

By L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

Originally published by Lancer, 1968

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

Conan has ruled Aquilonia for over twenty years and now nears his mid-sixties. After the death of Queen Zenobia in childbirth, Conan wearies of ruling Aquilonia. A sudden attack of mysterious 'Red Shadows' spirits away Count Trocero and many other people of Aquilonia. In a dream, Conan sees the prophet Epemitreus, who tells him he must cross the Western Ocean to stop the evil of the Red Shadows. The Prophet gives Conan a phoenix-shaped talisman to aid him. Conan abdicates in favor of his twenty-year-old son Conn and secretly heads to the west on his last adventure. In the Argossean port of Messantia he meets an old companion from his days with the Brachan pirates, Sigurd of Vanaheim. King Ariosto of Argos, who has also suffered from the Red Shadows, approaches Conan in a tavern to offer to fund his voyage over the Western Ocean. Conan, under his old guise of Amra the Lion, picks a tough crew and sails with Sigurd on the ship the Red Lion. What they find out in the Western Ocean will put them face to face with the last remnants of sunken Atlantis, Demons from the Darkness, and a strange city of sacrifice, dragons, and evil labyrinths.

Comments

The "Conan Saga" as L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter imagined it concludes with this novel. Conan's story, as reported in the fictitious Nemedian Chronicles, ends when he passes out of the knowledge of the Hyborian Lands. De Camp and Carter based the novel on vague hints Howard left in a letter, but they fly off into some odd speculative territory and create what must count as one of the strangest of all Conan pastiches. It doesn't feel much like Howard's Conan, but it contains some of the most unabashed fun sword and sorcery that de Camp and Carter wrote for the pastiche series. The two veteran writers conjure up a breezy fantasy adventure with a pulpy sense of excitement.

Conan of the Isles puts to the test the reader's taste in post-Howard Conan. Which is more important: adherence to Howard's spirit, or fun adventure? If you can have both, that's wonderful. But I think most of us would prefer to have a good sword and sorcery adventure instead a poor, boring, and slavish attempt to imitate Howard. You will never mistake Conan of the Isles for genuine Howardian Conan, but you won't mistake it for a boring novel either. The plot barely pauses to take a breath: like a movie serial or an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure, this is "One Damn Thing After Another." Where a Tor novel would develop a story around different character subplots, interactions, and conspiracies, Conan of the Isles just points Conan in a direction sends him on his gory way. The novel flies along a linear path: monster, fight, escape, rescue, monster, sorcerer, duel, escape, rescue, etc. Imaginative weirdness appears throughout. Character drama takes a back seat—the only supporting characters are Sigurd and Metemphoc the master thief—and action hurtles nonstop across the page.

Thankfully, most of the action works. Conan's horrific contest against the horde of huge rats ranks as one of the best-written suspense sequences in a pastiche novel. The navel battle scenes are also exciting, and plenty of giant monsters show up to threaten our aging hero. (I personally adore big monsters, so the book earns extra points with me.) The finale is just what you want from a fantasy adventure: constant action, monsters, magic, horror, and ironic turnabout.

The personal interests of the two authors emerge strongly; more than any other Conan piece they authored, Conan of the Isles belongs to de Camp and Carter. Carter provides the pulpy delirium and the nonstop rush of insane events. De Camp provides a fascination with the Atlantis legend and the origins of myths in general, as well as his "logical fantasy" approach to mythic events. He even suggests that Conan will become the basis for the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, "the Feathered Serpent" who sailed out of the west to their lands.

Where Conan of the Isles deviates from Howard's vision is in its pseudo-scientific gadgetry and the outlandish culture of Antillia. Howard made the Hyborian Age realistic, injecting historical cultures into a hodgepodge fantasy setting and adding doses of supernaturalism. De Camp and Carter, however, toss Conan out of the Hyborian Age and into lands beyond knowledge, and all convention collapses into a science-fantasy parade of peculiarity. The Antillians sail impractical dragon boats, use 'super metals' like orichalcum, wear breathing helmets, don glass armor, hurl stun-gas grenades, and wield crystal swords. Their culture has hints of meso-American Indians (a de Camp touch, based on the pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century bestseller Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly, who theorized an Atlantean origin for Central and South American empires), but otherwise the Antillians might have leaped out of one of Burroughs's Martian novels.

The writers treat the older Conan with admirable realism. They pile on reminders of the past, which gives a sense of closure for the final story of Conan's career (at least in de Camp's chronology). There's also an effective moment of reflection for Conan: "Now that [Zenobia] was gone, he found himself often thinking of her, in moods of black depression that were unlike him. While she lived, he had taken her devotion as his due and thought little of it, as is the way of the barbarian. Now he regretted the words he had not said to her and the favors he had not done for her." Conan has matured and has aged; facing the approach of the 'Long Night' of death gives him a sense of regret and loss appropriate for someone his age. Howard himself would have approved of this touch of reflective darkness.

The novel's major flaw comes from the authors' predilection for overstuffing their prose, possibly to imitate Howard. This is especially noticeable in the dialogue: Conan chats too much, and Sigurd gets too many 'salty dog' speeches. Here's a good example of often heavy-handed writing: "The northman grinned broadly and gave a bellow of joy that would have summoned a hippogriff in the mating season had one been within earshot." A hippogriff is an unlikely Hyborian animal. (One of the authors must have had Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in mind, since they use both the name 'Ariosto' and Ariosto's invention, the hippogriff.) In a few places, their word choice falls flat, or else they strain too hard to use an obscure term. I have never seen anyone use the word 'decardiate'—to remove the heart—in a work of fiction before, and I doubt I will see it again. In places the plot moves too fast, and de Camp and Carter rely on coincidences (such as Conan running into Sigurd and Ariosto in the same bar) that seem a bit too much.

You can't expect all of it to makes sense or adhere to traditional Conan, but at least this pastiche lives up to the Sword and Sorcery obligation to entertain with fast, fun, imaginative action. Compared to many of the later Conan novels, Conan of the Isles is fast, fun, and imaginative indeed.