Flight to Opar

© 1976, by Philip Jose Farmer

A nice, fast, entertaining read. Nothing deep, nothing life-changing, nothing earth-shattering. Just a nice, fast, entertaining read.

I liked it.

Now, I don’t know anything about Tarzan, or Edgar Rice Burroughs (a sad lapse in my literary adventures). From a one-page Forward in the book we learn that this series is based on a map from one of Burroughs’s books. A map of central Africa, c. 10,000 years before Christ, when the world was warmer and the Sahara was lush and verdant and harbored two inland seas. Pre-historic civilizations flourished, armies ranged across the plains, and gods walked the earth. Life was cheap, bought with the price of a sword.

At least, that’s Farmer’s vision, His swordsman is a pre-historic Tarzan name of Hadon, heir-apparent to great southern kingdom of Opar. Now, since this is book two of the series (and I honestly don’t know if there is a third book), we catch Hadon in mid-venture. He’s fleeing an evil king with the queen who’s rebellion against her husband, with a score of warriors and hunting dogs minutes behind. Aiding Hadon are his trusted comrades – dwarfish Paga, Hinokly the scribe, and bard Kebiwabes, three musketeers to his D’Artagnan. Oh, and beautiful, seductive witch-beyond-the-northern-Sea (which I’m taking to be the pre-Mediterranean), Lalila, accompanies them, bearing both Hadon’s unborn child and a broken ankle.

Needless to say, Hadon manages to save his companions, and many more adventures ensue in Hadon’s flight to Opar. Farmer’s forte is in the people and places who populate this part of the world, six millennia ago. Colorful character pop into and out of the story for pages at a time, and seem so fully enfleshed you’d think you read entire biographies of them. Ocean cities built on stilts, goddess-temples where trespassing is paid for with death, subterranean secret passageways, piranha-filled rivers, demon-haunted cities where the sound of a flute is the only sound you hear before death takes you ...

My immediate impression, which lasted throughout the book’s 212 pages, was that Flight to Opar was a modernized (for 1976) H. Rider Haggard novel. Haggard is famous for his “lost world” epics written at the end of the 19th century, making him the Stephen King or Dean Koontz of his day. (See reviews on this website for She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Allan Quatermain.) His novels are set in the Africa of his time, and involved similar adventure tales of lost cities and civilizations which turn out to be not-so-lost. Well, I thought, take away the extravagant dense Victorian prose, take away the first-person narrative, add twice as many characters (and a lot more gore and violence), and you get Farmer’s novel. In light of the note in the Forward linking the novel to Burroughs’s Tarzan, I wonder how much closer Flight to Opar would be to that work, not having read the “source” material.

So, after a couple months of somewhat heavy reading, I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would: a nice, fast, entertaining read, emphasis on entertaining.

Grade: strong B+.