I don’t remember where I picked up this book, a tattered paperback from the sometime in the mid-century, tiny printing on cheap, yellowing paper, generic cover. I may try the second book in the series at some point but not right away. The first one is over 300 pages long, which makes me wary. There are three more in this series, Kioga of the Wilderness, One Against a Wilderness, and Kioga of the Unknown Land. The ending did have a nice feeling of melancholy about it. The plot is what creates narrative drive and there's just not enough plot here. It was too late to truly salvage the novel. Only in the last third to a quarter of the book, after the arrival of the other white explorers, did an overall storyline emerge. ![]() There's a reason why ERB's books tended to be short. The book is almost 300 pages and should probably have been less than 200. The majority of the book is given over to Kioga's growing up and developing his skills, and this continues at great length until I, at least, grew bored with it. The problem is that there's virtually no overall plot. First, the good thing is that it's very well written and full of wonderful description. There are a number of issues with it that weakened my enjoyment. I would have loved this book when I was in my teens but I'm no longer that naïve reader. The two fall in love with each other but many things happen to keep them apart. Eventually, another exploration party arrives and Kioga meets Beth, a white woman. He becomes known as Kioga, The Snow Hawk. The husband and wife are killed and their baby adopted by an Indian woman, although he ends up fleeing the tribe and living in the wilderness for many years with bears. They are taken in by Indians, who it is suggested in the book are the ancestors of North America's Native Americans. It features a white family exploring to the north who end up wrecked in a wild land called Nato'wa. To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.”Īs others have remarked, this is virtually a pastiche of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Unnatural deedsĭo breed unnatural troubles infected minds Chester writes, “the dark gloomy lines of Macbeth came suddenly to mind:įoul whisperings are abroad. Near the end of the book, Beth, who loves Kioga, listens to her fiancée Kendle tell of how he deliberately left Kioga to die (as he thought). Later, Kioga goes to rescue two white men who are said to be guarded by, “Wrinkled and aged crones, ugly as the witches of Macbeth” (219-20). When Kioga discovers a cache of books in a wrecked ship, the authors are noted as, “Shakespeare, Bacon, Thomas Browne,” and others (87). Ariel is the flying character in The Tempest. To impress how effortlessly the hero can use a rope to navigate his way from tree to tree, Kioga, the Tarzan-like hero, is called the “Ariel of the forest midway” (67). There are four Shakespeare references in this Tarzan rip-off. This is a bad book, whose main interest is in studying Tarzan swipes. The center of the book about Kioga's growth to manhood is long and repetitive. ![]() In addition to the lack of originality, this book is ill written, and could have been cut by 1/3, easily. There are differences: Chester's hero learns English from his human mentor (instead of from books, seriously, Burroughs has Tarzan learn English from books) before bonding with the bears that raised him, the tribes are Indians, and the last part of the book takes place on the Arctic ice instead of the African jungle, but the outline is very close. Other white people show up with a lone woman. He becomes the leader of his animal group. The boy learns to move from tree to tree. Baby raised by an animal, and the child learns English. Shipwreck puts white people in the wilderness. You can almost see Chester checking-off that book's plot points. This is a shameless rip-off of Edgar Rice Burroughs's first Tarzan novel.
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