Customer Reviews

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

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It's been said that the golden age of Burroughs is 12 or, sometimes, 14. Well, I tried to read Burroughs at both ages, and it didn't take. Way too many coincidences for me.

Well, it's been more than 25 years since I've read Burroughs. Inspired by watching the latest movie version of this book and hearing the Caspak series praised as his best outside of the Tarzan and John Carter series, I decided to give ERB another try.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Narrator Bowen Tyler has his ship torpedoed out from under him in 1916. He is picked up by a British tug - but not before meeting the instantaneously recognizable love of his life, Lys La Rue, another passenger, as they float around in the water. Said ship is then sunk - by the same German U-Boat that torpedoed Bowen's ship, and Bowen, Lys, and several of the tug's crewmen are taken prisoners aboard the sub. A struggle for control of the vessel ensues. Not to fear, though. Our narrator just happens to belong to a submarine manufacturing family out of Santa Monica, and they built the sub he's now on. Of course, the situation is a bit complicated by Lys being the U-Boat commander's fiancé.

And the coincidences are just beginning. But, after about 50 pages into this slender, 126 page book, the real story begins after landfall on Caspak - a lost continent full of what should be extinct animals from Earth's distant past. Naturally, dinos are going to be fought, Prussians are going to be surly and treacherous, and Lys is going to get kidnapped. And Burroughs does do something genuinely novel with the primitive humans of this land.

Burroughs, whatever his other faults as a writer, is a master of pacing. And, however melodramatic the scenes of Bowen and Lys acknowledging their love for each other are and their philosophical discussions, there are some moments of grandeur and poignancy as they face their solitary fate on Caspak - all related in the manuscript Bowen has put in a thermos and tossed into the sea.

This is the first third of a serial originally published in 1918, and this is one Burroughs series I will be completing.