Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

Tarzan like many of us today needs a little cash his businesses in England are.. .Let's say the cash flow is not in balance with the expenses just a minor temporary difficulty no problem. The apeman knows where to get a ton of gold the lost city of Opar. He has been inside the hidden citadel before and the inhabitants don't seem to realize or care , how valuable the gold is not to mention the precious jewels, also.They are too busy with human sacrifices; the Gods must be satisfied, only blood does that, strange isn't it? So off the jungle man goes with a group of his African followers on a long march to the secret location leaving Jane again alone. Which Lord Greystoke just a few years ago, escaped with his life, doesn't matter now...In the sad haunting ruins, though always beautiful minaret city is salvation (financially speaking) however that's another earlier book...The Return of Tarzan. All is well until an unexpected earthquake and a falling rock smashes the hard head of Tarzan while inside the concealed, dark treasure chamber. Ye of little faith the man still lives!Presto and the mighty giant apeman loses his memory and later returns to the savage he was previously in childhood.Living like an animal with other gorillas and having fun his friends think Tarzan is dead, go back to Jane yet she has been captured by Arab raiders led by the notorious Achmet Zek. In ivory and slave trading he specializes a man who greatly enjoys his work and shows it by an example...the unpleasant scoundrel...dastardly<br /> burning down the unperturbed Lady Greystoke's home , not a gentleman.With this villain the equally fiendish Belgian Lt.Albert Werpe wanted for the unprovoked killing of his superior officer in what was then the Belgian Congo, these people you don't want to mess with or meet. Werper working with Zek had followed the jungle man and his new buddies to steal the gold what else, still some rather unforeseen circumstances cause a change of plans.He too is stuck inside the collapsed building thinks Tarzan is no longer among us, then escapes into the place where a human is to be killed by the city dwellers to appease their thirsty Gods.This is a dead city? Presided by the high priestess, La who has a passion for Tarzan and wants to make him her mate.The clueless Lord saves then this murderous devil , big error, a huge lion just happens to come by and scare the butchers away. All the fearless Tarzan has to do is slaughter the big cat...More adventures succeed this little trifle will the Lord rescue his wife? Get the gold (don't forget the jewels) and live happily ever after ? Of course not that sounds boring! P.S. Who is Jane? Says Tarzan.

La. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. La-La-La.<br>It’s too damn hot to write a proper review of this fifth book in the Tarzan series.<br>The first part certainly was a great read for me – the part in which La, the Queen and High-Priestess of the ancient city of Opar, has her remarkable appearance. A strong-weak-ambivalent character; the deepest in the Tarzan-Universe so far. I hope to see her again in some future novel.<br>The second part was so-so la-la; the usual themes of life and death and long marches through the savage jungle. Themes of which, to be honest, I’m a little fed up by now. The rating's only for the La-Part.<br><br>My edition also has some nice illustrations in it, like this one showing Tarzan and a <del>loin</del> lion in some gravity-defying fight with La (O, La, La) in the background.<br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1533026331i/26054459._SY540_.png" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" rel="nofollow noopener"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380148217i/680962.png" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"></a><br>This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" rel="nofollow noopener">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>.

Perfect summer reading. Tarzan discovers he's broke, goes to Opar to loot it of some gold (they'll never miss it, he figures) but gets amnesia instead after a sudden earthquake. He's followed to Opar followed by murderous cad, Albert Werper, who is in cahoots with Achmet Zek, a roving Arab bandit who has his eyes on Jane. Also in the mix is La, high priestess of Opar, who has the hots for Tarzan when she's not the woman scorned. Tarzan reverts back to his savage self while Jane is in the fiendish hands of Achmet Zet, on her way to be sold into a harem. Albert Werper is just trying to stay alive and get rich. La is going to have Tarzan in her chambers or skewer him with her sacred dagger, she can't decide which. More fun than a bag of barbecue chips and a jug of root beer.

"Tarzan always came back to Nature in the spirit of a lover keeping a long deferred tryst after a period behind prison walls."<br /><br />For the first time, this book starts with very little connection to the ones before except for the city of opar part. Story is entertaining as ever but some of the hardships faced by Jane seemed a little bit of a repetition of book #3. <br /><br />"One of the symptoms of madness is a revulsion of affection - objects of sane love become objects of insane hatred."

I think a case could be made that this is the first of the Tarzan <i>series</i> novels. Obviously it's not the first Tarzan novel -- it has that #5 right there in the title -- but the first 2-3 books were the extended origin story, #4 was a generational shift (and, for the record, at no point whatsoever in this book is the word "Korak" ever uttered by anybody), and this was the book that really set the template for (almost) all of the other 19 books in the series.<br /><br />So we have Albert Werper, the Belgian lieutenant, on the run after killing his superior officer while posted to the Congo, who hooks up with Achmet Zek, the Arab, and they concoct a scheme to get some money out of Tarzan by kidnapping Jane. And meanwhile Tarzan is actually skint -- bad investments or some such, so he decides to return to Opar (the lost Atlantean outpost from which he looted a bunch of gold ingots back in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/51288007.The_Return_of_Tarzan_Edgar_Rice_Burroughs_Authorized_Library" title="The Return of Tarzan Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library by Edgar Rice Burroughs" rel="noopener">The Return of Tarzan</a>) to loot even MORE gold ingots. And we get the first introduction of something that will become a very common happenstance throughout the rest of the series -- Tarzan gets bonked on the head with a rock and suffers a very convenient and entirely fictional form of amnesia so he spends most of the book not actually knowing who he is while he's running around having encounters with La (high priestess of Opar) and her barely-human anthropoid subjects, Werper, Achmet Zek and his problematically-portrayed followers, and on and on, in an almost Keystone Kops level of unlikely coincidences, misunderstandings and people just barely missing each other out in the African jungle.<br /><br />Oh, and Jane of course DOES get kidnapped, but again she shows a surprising amount of agency in getting herself out of various scrapes.

This is it. This is where the Tarzan series really gets going, for me. I guess for some Graystoke purists, this is probably the demise of Tarzan as a "serious work" because it basically becomes nonsense dime novel fiction from this point on, but to me, that's ERB at his best.<br /><br />This book has everything; Tarzan returns to the lost city of Opar, meets a beautiful, alluring, and - of course - dangerous queen who falls in love with him, he gets amnesia, and Jane is in danger all the while. Fantastic adventure story.

A great Tarzan story featuring another visit to Opar, a weasely Belgian, a "mad" Arab (not Abdul Alhazred, but the angry Achmet Zek LOL), and La, the beautiful High Priestess to the Flaming God. <br /><br />After an earthquake strikes Opar, causing a cave-in within the unknown chamber of gold that Tarzan discovered years before, he emerges with amnesia, with only the memories of his childhood available with which to face the adventures soon to overtake him. While Jane is in peril, Tarzan wanders the jungle unknowing--for all the world a mangani once more as he resumes relations with his former tribe of the great apes. Encountering La, she brings to bear all her feminine whiles to woo the handsome ape-man, but he continues to repulse her, although he has forgotten the very existence of his wife. How Tarzan is able to repulse this most beautiful denizen of the jungle is anybody's guess: <br /><br /><i>"She ran her hands in mute caress over his naked flesh; she covered his forehead, his eyes, his lips with hot kisses; she covered him with her body as though to protect him from the hideous fate she had ordained for him, and in trembling, piteous tones she begged him for his love. For hours the frenzy of her passion possessed the burning hand-maiden of the Flaming God, until at last sleep overpowered her and she lapsed into unconsciousness beside the man she had sworn to torture and to slay"</i><br /><br />It's a good story, and I believe the first time ERB uses the amnesia plot device in the Tarzan stories (it is repeated later in the series when he is hit by a falling tree limb during a storm where Usha, the wind, runs rampant thru the forest IIRC.) One thing I noticed where ERB repeats himself in this story was the plot device of utilizing the falling of a horse which then arises with a new rider. In one instance, Werper, that bounder of a Belgian, takes advantage of a riderless horse falling at his feet in the brush, and another time Tarzan does so. I'm guilty of doing the same, so far be it from me to criticize. It happens. I'm super enjoying the Tarzan yarns once more after a decades' hiatus from them.

There is so much wrong with these books, but I am addicted to them. Tarzan, returning to Opar for more gold, suffers a nasty bump on the head during an earthquake, gets amnesia and reverts to his jungle past. This is not good for Jane who, in the meantime has been abducted once again and is waiting to be rescued by her forest-god. Mix in more man-eating lions, rites of human sacrifice, apes running around disguised as arab traders, shadowy figures slipping into tents with daggers in the night, etc, and you have an enjoyable if somewhat repetitive story. The author seems to have entered into a time-warp by this book - Jane is described as a 'young girl' despite the fact that the previous book ended with the marriage of her adult son; and La, the beautiful priestess of Opar, who fell for Tarzan back in The Return of Tarzan, has remained resolutely single all this time, waiting and hoping for his return.

Lord Greystoke is back and do to financial set-backs must head with a group of Waziri to Opar to gather up some of that sweet sweet hidden gold. Unfortunately an earthquake caused falling rock gives Greystoke one of his many bouts of amnesia. This causes him to revert fully to Tarzan and while he escapes Opar a group of Arab bandits attack the Greystoke home and kidnap Jane (shocking). There are all sorts of adventures involving La and the Oparians, a Belgian soldier who deserted after killing his superior, a company of Abyssinian soldiers, the aforementioned Arab bandits, a number of mangani and a partridge in a pear tree. <br /><br />This is actually a fairly fun entry if you completely turn your brain off. But you can't think...don't dare. Tarzan's hyper-senses come and go with the dictates of the plot. Burroughs' Africa is clearly not very big because everything in the continent is less than a week's march from anywhere else. And you're almost certainly going to run across everyone you know within a few days time. The Burroughs coincidence meter is turned up close to 11. But it's still fun, though this is getting perilously close to the point where the Tarzan novels begin to hit tedium. <br /><br />I had never noticed before in the paperback Ballantine edition with the cover by Neal Adams that Tarzan's lower right leg and foot are a MESS. Love Adams though I do that extremity is screwed up.

When I was a kid, I read almost all the Tarzan novels and I figured I’d try them again. While the adventure and main character of Lord Greystoke are still enjoyable enough, I am surprised at how easily I glossed over the blatant racism of the books. I remember them as “occasionally” being cringey, but there was a lot more than I realized. I might read a few more, but I know the casual, pseudo-science explanations of white supremacy will be in full effect, and this takes away from the escapism. Important to not ignore this aspect.