Customer Reviews

Ship of Ishtar

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"The Ship of Ishtar," a fantasy novel by A. Merritt first published in the mid-1920s, offers a world in which the Gods of ancient Babylon are real and palpable, if not necessarily Divine, and in which marooned voyagers from many times and lands encounter each other in furtherance of an ancient curse. It is probably to be counted as a version of "The Flying Dutchman," although no sailor on earthly seas ever caught a glimpse of the vessel of Ishtar on its unending voyage across a crystalline ocean. The this-worldly counterpart of the Ship is a relic of ancient Mesopotamia, sealed in a block with (long-unreadable) warnings since before the days of Hammurabi.

And the novel itself is a relic of a "modern" world now slipping into the past.

The King James Bible tells us that "There were giants in the earth in those days" (Genesis 6:4) -- the Hebrew can be understood differently, but the Dead Sea Scrolls show that it was once interpreted to explain Mesopotamian heroes like Gilgamesh ("Glgmsh"). And it sometimes seems that before radio dramas and movie serials, before adventure comic strips and science fiction magazines, and well before comic books, let alone television, Giants were roaming the Earth!

Or, at least, Giants were contributing to magazines like "Argosy" (Frank Munsey's pioneer all-fiction pulp) and "All-Story," "Adventure," "Golden Fleece," and the more general-interest "slicks" like "Colliers" and "The Saturday Evening Post." And some of their characters were Giants too -- prototypes of the superheroes of a slightly later day.

A few of these writers had star status, or at least their names had special drawing power (think of Lucas and Spielberg). A few of them are still widely remembered by name or by their creations, like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan. The westerns of "Max Brand" also have a following. (The name was the well-chosen pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust-- which looks even more like invention!)

Others, like Homer Eon Flint, are mostly (and sometimes deservedly) forgotten by all but a few. Their prose styles ranged from the workman-like to the florid and baroque, and sometimes sank to the barely intelligible (which helped some of them paper over plot-holes as large as a mammoth.)

Somewhere between still-famous and forgotten is the present author, Abraham Merritt (1884-1943), once instantly recognizable as A. Merritt, journalist and magazine editor, and, mainly in the period 1917-1934, occasional author of novels and short stories of suspense, the supernatural, and, above all, fantastic adventures in exotic places.

In those years, whenever he chose to write fiction, he was a Giant among Giants, inspiring younger writers, and providing a model for those trying to make a living in the pulp markets by meeting the demand he had created. And he was often reprinted in magazines, a common practice before paperbacks dominated the newsstands. But fiction was a side-line, and Merritt produced little in the following decade, although an unfinished novel and various fragments turned up after his sudden death from a heart attack.

His name still had enough selling power to be used for five issues of "A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine" (1949-1950), just the market for fiction magazines was fading, but before the novels were picked up for mass-market paperback editions by Avon, which for years had a near-monopoly (although Collier Books did an edition of "Face in the Abyss" in 1961, and there were some earlier exceptions, including at least one edition of "Ship").

Merritt has been in and out of favor with readers or publishers in the years since, due in part to whether his lush romanticism and slightly purple prose style seemed exciting or merely unfashionable. (There are those who suggest that the possibilities for enticing cover art were originally more influential with Avon than the books' other qualities, pointing out that Raymond Chandler was the only other author of real merit on their early list, If true, this changed over the years, as the emphasis on exposed skin decreased considerably, although never quite abandoned. Unhappily, more decorous covers did nothing to correct a debatable choice of base texts for some of the books.)

He really didn't throw around adjectives and adverbs nearly as freely as both imitators and parodists would suggest, but he did prefer, for example, "emerald and vermillion" to "green and red" when describing jungle vegetation. He often used simple sentences, among the longer ones. Sometimes just one word. One! (He also liked exclamation marks! A lot!) Not to everyone's taste, but he was actually a skilled writer, and knew that a well-constructed story was more than a sequence of events.

Another factor in the decline of his popularity, if it was more than an accident of publishing policy as corporations consolidated, may have been growing discomfort with the latent (and sometimes explicit) racial overtones of many of the stories. By the standards of the early twentieth century Merritt was far from a bigot, and it is usually possible to distinguish the opinions expressed by the characters from those endorsed by the author, but the casual assumption of white superiority can be jarring -- and prevent readers from continuing to see whether it is borne out by the events. (He sometimes played with readers' assumptions. Watch out for the Frog-People! Or, wait, are they the Good Guys?)

Recognition of problems with his way of putting women on pedestals (they tend to be pagan priestesses, and often turn out to be actual goddesses or avatars of some sort anyway) probably came too late to make a difference.

Whatever the case, Merrit's novels were in print, mainly in those Avon paperbacks, in the 1940s and 1950s, when Burroughs seemed to be vanishing, and again from the 1960s through the 1980s, then alongside not only Burroughs but Tolkien and Howard. Most of his titles then disappeared from publishers' lists at some point in the middle or late 1980s.

He has been straggling back into print under such unfamiliar auspices as the University of Nebraska Press (the Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series) and the Wesleyan University Press (Early Classics of Science Fiction), with in one case an introduction by Jack Williamson, a now-venerable science fiction writer who as a teenager regarded Merritt as a literary god. (Merritt was impressed and flattered enough by Williamson's first published story, a transparent pastiche/homage, to ask for the manuscript.)

Still, whenever you see a story about dolls which come to life and commit crimes (remember Chuckie?), or about ill-assorted explorers stumbling on a lost civilization of humans and non-humans menaced by both the outside world and its own ancient powers (say, "Atlantis -- The Lost Empire," or "Dinotopia"), chances are that a Merritt story is lurking in the background. Even if the authors themselves never read "Burn Witch Burn" (1932) (filmed as "Devil Doll"), or "The Moon Pool" (as "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool," 1919; book version 1919), "Face in the Abyss" (1923, 1930, revised for book, 1931; author's ending restored in some later editions), and "Dwellers in the Mirage" (magazine and book versions, 1932). Not that Merritt invented the themes, but his versions of them dominated American imaginative literature for much of the twentieth century.

And, partly by way of Williamson and other writers of his generation, any grotesque-looking alien life-form who wins your sympathy may owe something to Merritt as well. (As will be understood by those who have read "Face in the Abyss," many are the progeny of the Snake Mother!)

Merritt made his greatest reputation among lovers of fantastic adventure with slightly more archaeologically plausible and somewhat science-fictionalized versions of the "Lost Race" novel, made popular in the nineteenth century by Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard. He added some creepy super-beings who may have contributed more than a little to H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones, and, when editors allowed, a rather pessimistic view of human nature (its real gods being Greed and Folly).

In 1924, however, Merritt had moved all the way into what would later be recognized as alternate-world heroic fantasy, with "The Ship of Ishtar," originally published in "Argosy All-Story Weekly." (A combined version of two older titles -- "Argosy" would survive the death of its rivals, only to spend its last years as a "Men's Magazine," finally, mercifully, dying in 1978.)

Instead of an archeologist or explorer stumbling into an underground world, or through a Veil of Illusion, this time the archeologist, John Kenton, examining an inscribed block from ancient Babylon, falls from his mundane twentieth-century New York penthouse right onto the deck of a model ship on a crystal ocean -- and finds himself in a world as material and dangerous as the one he has left. He finds that he is acting out (as mentioned) a sort of implied prototype of every Flying Dutchman yarn ever written, along with other castaways in time, such as Sigurd the Norseman, who recognizes the Irish-American Kenton as a Man of Eirinn.

Kenton is caught up in a struggle between Ishtar, Goddess of Love and Beauty, and Nergal, the God of War and Death, as decreed by Bel-Marduk, King of the Gods. (Yes, Ishtar herself was an often-nasty war-goddess -- but Merritt was mostly dressing up his story with Assyriology, and taking a lot of material from Herodotus rather than cuneiform texts. And the interpretation of the gods wasn't implausible, circa-1920.) Of course, this being a Merritt novel, Good is represented by an incredibly beautiful woman, who takes a liking to the Mysterious Stranger who appears and disappears from the Ship she has sailed on since the days of Sargon of Akkad, believing him to be a messenger of Nabu, God of Wisdom. (Again, Nabu emerged later in history, as did the routine designation of his father Marduk as Bel [The Lord], but never mind.)

Or possibly Kenton really isn't doing any such thing, and Sharane, Priestess of Ishtar, Klaneth, Priest of Nergal, Gigi, Sigurd, and all the others on the Ship, aren't really there -- and neither is the Ship.

In the full text, as published in the magazine version, the reader was carefully informed that wealthy young John Kenton had passed up the excavation in Mesopotamia he had funded in order to join up in 1917, and had returned from the war a victim of "shell shock" -- close enough to post-traumatic stress disorder to make little difference.

In this context, Kenton's initial reaction to his unexpected experiences, shifting from passive acceptance to violent action, and back, made perfectly good sense, and allowed the skeptical reader to wonder if Kenton really was finally cracking up completely, as he himself suspects, until persuaded otherwise.

In the 1926 book version from Putnam, the text used by Avon in numerous reprintings, and by far the most widely-read version, the opening paragraphs were truncated, and Kenton's behavior can become rather a puzzle, as does the attitude of his servants back in New York to "the Master's" odd behavior. There are several discussions of the book, some available on-line, which stumble over just this incomprehension. (The reverse situation befell "Face in the Abyss," in which the magazine tampered with the ending.)

The full text of "Ishtar" (and the difference in wordage is not large) was restored after Merritt's death, in the undated "Memorial Edition" from Borden (1948, 1949, and 1951 are all given). It was beautifully illustrated by Virgil Finlay, one of the best of the many artists inspired by Merritt. This was reprinted in hardcover in 1990, and reproduced in the Collier Nucleus Fantasy & Science Fiction series paperback edition in 1991, apparently after the Avon option had finally lapsed.

However, the Avon edition is perfectly satisfactory on most counts; and, with a couple of decades of reprintings, usually the easiest to find. It had various covers over the years; the 1960s-era Douglas Rosa portrayal of Kenton and Sharane, with a glimpse of one of the supernatural battles fought in and around the Ship, is particularly lovely.

(Note: although presently unavailable new in English, "The Ship of Ishtar" has been translated into, among other languages, French and German, and these versions seem to be in print. -- see Amazon.fr and Amazon.de. The French editions appear as "La nef d'Ishtar," a literal translation. The German translation for some reason is called "Insel der Zauberer." Although Chapter Twenty-One is indeed entitled "The Isle of Sorcerers" [plural], this is a curious choice for the book title, and changes the focus away from the Goddess, and the Ship and its destiny, for no clear reason. To add to the confusion, the very attractive cover art of "Insel" suggests that someone either doesn't know the difference between Babylonia and Egypt, or Isis and Ishtar, or just doesn't care.)

The Ship of Ishtar is one of the better 1930's Indiana Jones style pulp adventure novels. An archeologist unearths a miniature ship artifact that transports him to another dimension, where he becomes a macho hero, who, with the help of an interesting assortment of new friends, assists a lovely priestess in a battle against some evil warlocks. His adventures lead him through some wonderfully imaginative fantasy locales, and the book has a spectacular ending.

"The Ship of Ishtar," one of Abraham Merritt's finest fantasies, first appeared in the pages of "Argosy" magazine in 1924. An altered version appeared in book form in 1926, and the world finally received the original work in book form in 1949, six years after Merritt's death. In this wonderful novel we meet John Kenton, an American archaeologist who has just come into possession of a miniature crystal ship recently excavated "from the sand shrouds of ages-dead Babylon." Before too long, Kenton is whisked onto the actual ship, of which his relic is just a symbol. It turns out that the ship is sailing the seas of an otherdimensional limboland, and manned by the evil followers of the Babylonian god of the dead, Nergal, and by the priestesses of the Babylonian fertility goddess, Ishtar. A force barrier of sorts prevents the two parties from coming into contact with each other, and they have been sailing thus for...nobody knows how long. It seems that, centuries ago, a priest of Nergal and a priestess of Ishtar had been guilty of the sin of falling in love; this eternal cruise is the punishment that has been meted out by the gods. Kenton becomes embroiled in this ages-old strife; falls in love himself with Sharane, a Babylonian princess; eventually takes over the ship; and then goes in pursuit of the Black Priest of Nergal, after Sharane is kidnapped. He is aided in his quest by a sword-swinging Viking, a hugely strong and mace-wielding man of Nineveh, and by a scimitar expert from Persia. The quartet makes for one formidable team, lemme tell you! This is high fantasy done to a turn, and Merritt is at the peak of his game here. While "Ship" does not boast as much of the purple prose and hyperadjectival descriptions as his first two books, "The Moon Pool" and "The Metal Monster," there is still quite a bit, and in places the descriptions of various isles and temples almost reads like prose poetry. The story moves along briskly and builds to a pair of splendid set pieces: Sharane's rescue from the Temple of Seven Zones, in which each floor is dedicated to another Babylonian god and is decked out with its own color scheme, shrines and so on; and a very tense sea battle between the Ship of Ishtar and the Black Priest's bireme. The novel really is a stunning feat of imagination. I wonder if Merritt was perhaps influenced or inspired by the excavations at Uruk (now in southern Iraq, and one of the original cities of Ishtar worship) that had commenced in 1912. He may have also been inspired here by H. Rider Haggard's seminal fantasy work "She" (1887), in which Ayesha, head priestess of Isis, is given an eternal punishment for her own love dalliances. Whatever the inspirations, though, Merritt makes it all work, with great detail, color, action and character.
The book is a fantasy classic, but still, Merritt makes some small booboos. Thus, the gold bracelet on Kenton's left arm is on his right arm several pages later. Kenton is said to have disappeared from his NYC apartment at 8 PM, while later Merritt tells us that is was 9 PM. Sargon of Akkad (an ancient Mesopotamian ruler) is said to have ruled 6,000 years ago, whereas in actuality, it was more like 4,300. Merritt, in the course of the book, is also guilty of some fuzzy writing. But these little glitches should in no way interfere with anyone's enjoyment of this rousing tale. I should perhaps mention here that "The Ship of Ishtar" has been included in Cawthorn & Moorcock's overview volume "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books," and that I personally have no problem with that inclusion. It really is a fantasy for the ages.

One of the books that turned me on to heroic fantasy fiction back in the early Seventies.

I've been a fan of Merritt's for a long time. He's little known outside a narrow field these days, but he knew how to drive a plot.

Our protagonist is "sucked" into a sculpure of a boat, finding himself part of the crew and forced to man the oars in a fantasy "Arabian Nights" setting.

That's just the start of a swashbuckling adventure worthy of a Douglas Fairbanks movie. There are sultry maidens, heroic rescues, and black magic, all you'd expect in a fantasy novel of the period.

The writing style seems pulpy and dated these days, but it's a great fast read, and should be on every fantasy reader's bookshelf, just so they can understand the history of the genre.

This review is of the Paizo "Planet Stories" reprint of The Ship of Ishtar, first published in the 1920's. The format is of a classic pulp magazine, with a two-column layout and 10 full-page pieces of Virgil Finlay artwork.

The Finlay work is beautiful and atmospheric, and a fitting complement to the text.

The story itself is well enough described in earlier reviews: a modern (1924) man, with more than a touch of Indiana Jones about him, is cast into an alternate world where gods do battle, only to be locked in stalemate. Our Hero, John Kenton, breaks the age-old impasse with the help of doughty companions, finds love (and sex!), only to have it all snatched away and require a quest to recover.

The characters are well-rounded and developed, and the tale for the most part moves at a cracking pace. The language however may be a little difficult to overcome. For the modern reader, there seems to be an incredible surfeit of both dashes and exclamation marks. There is no doubt but that this is deliberate, and part of building a rhythm in the narrative, but it was jarring after several pages and did not cease to jar hundreds of pages later. Unfornately, I can't divorce the gripping tale from the telling, and while I enjoyed the book - and hope in a future re-reading it to enjoy it more - it was good but not great. It would make a wonderful movie, I think, without having to struggle under punctuation on the written page.

I entirely agree with Mr. Slater's comments.

There are literary authors and there are story tellers. On all-too rare occasions one writer combines both aspects in his or her work. If A. Merritt was not among that rarified class, he certainly ranked as a master story teller.

"The Ship of Ishtar" is a charmingly old-fashioned, rip-roaring good read.

I have and treasure the Borden Memorial edition with the excellent Virgil Finlay illustrations. The book is everything that Mr. Slater says it is, and more. By all means snatch it up if you ever stumble on a copy. You won't regret it.

Five adventurous stars.

Sam Moskowitz (1963) and James Blish (1970) agreed about very little, but they both held that _The Ship of Ishtar_ (_Argosy_, 1924; 1926) was A. Merritt's weakest novel. Algis Budrys (1985) later stated that "to my mind Merritt's _Ship of Ishtar_ has virtues as a story that are lost on Blish the classicist" (303). Certainly, _Ishtar_ was popular enough in the past. Fourteen years after its first puplication, the readers of _Argosy_ voted it the most popular novel serialized in that magazine (Moskowitz, 1963). I am with Budrys: _Ishtar_ does indeed have its virtues, and (who knows?) it just may lead to a mild resurgence in Merritt's popularity.

Let us start with the entrance to Merritt's fantasy world. The hero strikes an ancient bar of metal (clothed with centuries) with a hammer. The bar turns into the model of a ship. Then doll-like figures appear on the ship. And finally, the model pulls the hero onto the real ship in a parallel world of gods, monsters, and magic.

This harks back to the old "threshhold of adventure" in mythology that is frequently watched by a "threshhold guardian" (Campbell, 1949, 77-89): cerberus at the gates of Hades, the sirens on the rocks, the Great God Pan at the entrance to the dark forest. In Christian lore, St. Peter guards the Gates of Heaven. Sometimes the gate is in the form of a magic portal or door that the hero must leap through "in the twinkling of an eye" before it slams shut (Watts, 1963, 220). All heroes crossing these threshholds enter a world that is different from our bright, secure, everyday world. It is frequently dark, amorphous, magical, and dangerous: Hades, Heaven, a foreign country, the labyrinth, the Land of Faerie.

In more recent times, Alice has her rabbit hole and her looking glass leading to her Wonderland and her chess world. C.S. Lewis's children have their wardrobe leading into Narnia. And Hannes Bok has a golden stairway guarded by a blue flamingo leading into his sky-world.

In _The Metal Monster_ (_Argosy_, 1920; 1948), Merritt didn't give much attention to a magic threshhold or gate into his lost valley. The novel suffered a bit. _The Moon Pool_ (1919) and _Dwellers in the Mirage_ (1932) had great threshholds of adventure, and they still have a mythical resonance with readers. The same may be said of _The Ship of Ishtar_.

But what about the novel after its grand opening? On the balance, Merritt does fairly well. It is true that the characters are fairly stock-- the rugged hero, the sensuous warrier priestess, the sneering villains-- but they aren't handled any worse than those of other American scientific romances. And I think that it is fair to say that Merritt doesn't use the usual plot formula. There are a number of unusual twists and turns that make it a bit different from many of his other novels. Not a perfect novel. But for my money, still good entertainment-- even after all these years.

REFERENCES:
Blish, James. "The Monstrosities of Merritt". In _More Issues at Hand_. Chicago, Ill.: Advent, 1970, 79-85.

Budrys, Algis. _Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf_. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Adventist UP, 1985.

Campbell, Joseph. _The Hero With a Thousand Faces_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1949.

Moskowitz, Sam. "The Marvelous A. Merritt". In _Explorers of the Infinite_. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion P, 1963, 189-207.

Watts, Alan W. _The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity_. Toronto, Ont.: Collier, 1963.

After The Moon Pool, this is probably Merritt's most famous work. Fortunately for us, Paizo has seen to reprint Merritt's definitive edition here for us. All of Merritt's trademarks are here--the achingly beautiful woman, the lush prose, the dreamlike atmosphere, the diabolical villain, the darkness somewhat uncharacteristic of a pulp writer--and all are used to great effect. Strikingly for a pulp novel, Kenton and Sharane come across as somewhat more than just types. Although adhering somewhat to pulp archetypes, their romance is fairly fresh and well developed (predating as it does any number of imitations). In addition, Merritt provides us with a wealth of wonders in the alternate, sea-bound world the Ship exists in. In short, this is a fine book to spend an afternoon reading and savoring and an even better introduction to Merritt's work as a whole.

This book reminded me much of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It borrows heavily from the tradition set forth by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and follows the tradition of Verne and especially Burroughs in conceiving a plot that moves inexorably forward. The primary characters feature some depth, some motive for their actions, and even the secondary characters are more than just flat extras. The dialogue is realistic, and the details paint a vivid picture of the characters and the action. It's a real page turner.

The Ship of Ishtar certainly has an original premise: an unearthed artifact (a toy ship) transports a modern-day archaeologist onto an ancient, very real vessel that is cursed by the gods to sail until a wager between the god of love (Ishtar) and the god of death (Nergal) is resolved. The archaeologist, John Kenton, falls madly in love with a priestess of Ishtar named Sharane aboard ship, but prompts the bitter wrath of a priest of Nergal. Kenton has many adventures while on the ship, but keeps being pulled back to Earth at unpredictable moments. After one such trip, Kenton returns to the ship only to find that Sharane has been kidnapped; so with the aid of some friends, he sets off to rescue her.

A bare description of the plot may not do the book justice, as the story is densely constructed with mythological layers and a very florid style of writing that is very evocative (though it is overdone at points and slows the story to a crawl). Characters are very one-dimensional, dialogue is decent, and there's some zesty description in the action scenes. Although perhaps overlong, The Ship of Ishtar has enough interesting features to recommend it. It's one of those books that fits into the fantasy genre, but is so different than most fantasy that it creates a memorable contrast.