2023 read #120: The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

91 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 20 to October 21

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Somehow I’ve gotten to age 40 without reading any Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suppose it isn’t difficult; I haven’t read anything by Lovecraft, either, and don’t feel like either one has been a great loss to me. But Burroughs fit so precisely into the “boys’ adventure” pigeonhole — basically all that my abusive, controlling father permitted me to read as a kid — that I’m mildly surprised I never read him before. Particularly this trilogy, his attempt to emulate and cash in on Doyle’s The Lost World.

I did try to read The Land that Time Forgot in that same dino-obsessed period when I first read The Lost World; I found a copy in a library when I was 12 or 13. But there’s so much unnecessary crap to wade through just to get the story started. A man on a Geeenland rest-cure finds a Thermos bottle with a narrative inside; it relates how some dude named Bowen Tyler survived a U-Boat attack with a young woman named Lys La Rue, how they were rescued, were sunk again, wound up in a U-Boat with Lys’ German fiancée, blundered their way into the South Pacific, and so on and so forth. It’s all deadly dull. We don’t even reach Caspak until almost halfway through. It defeated my interest, and not just as a kid — I tried to read this several times as an adult before now.

(I’ll take this moment to note that I had some confusion about whether the Caspak series was three novellas, as it was originally published, or one novel, as it was later printed. I’m going with three novellas in my bookkeeping here, because they seem — from a casual glance — to have different narrators and represent separate adventures.)

Contrasting this slim but tedious book with Doyle’s The Lost World serves only to make me wonder why Burroughs was ever popular. Where Doyle’s brisk storytelling wove an engrossing adventure with lively characters, atmosphere, and memorable incidents, Burroughs pens a plodding, forgettable affair, full of flimsy plot contrivances and banal fistfights. Like, how do you make pulp boring? Burroughs found a way.

Once we get to Caspak, this trend continues. Contrast Doyle’s evocative Maple White Land, with its then-current scientific depictions of iguanodonts, stegosaurs, and allosaurs, with Burroughs’ slavering multitudes of indistinguishable saurians. We rarely get descriptions more exact than “huge thing.” Even worse, the shitty racism of the time is even more front and center here than it is in the (already very racist) book by Doyle. “Each race of proto-man evolves toward the white man” was the detail that made me give this book a worse rating than anything I’ve actually finished for this blog.

In short, I found nothing whatsoever to recommend The Land that Time Forgot. And I still have two more Caspak novellas to go. I’m just stubborn enough that I think I’ll finish them just so I can check them off and never think about them again.