R. E. Howard of Venarium

R. E. Howard of Venarium

a.k.a.

BRAVEHEART meets PSYCHO

A critique of Conan of Venarium

By Dale Rippke

This article originally appeared in REHUPA #185

In 2003, author Harry Turtledove delivered the first new Conan pastiche to be published since Roland Green’s Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza in 1996. True to its title, Conan of Venarium was to be a look at Conan on the verge of manhood, and his participation in the Cimmerian sacking of the Aquilonian fort of Venarium. This was fertile ground for a pastiche effort; it’s amazing that no one had attempted the story prior to this.

Conan is a young man of twelve, caring for his ailing mother and working in his father’s blacksmith shop, when word comes that the Aquilonians have invaded the southern region of Cimmeria. Soon the unbelievable has happened; the invaders have smashed the Cimmerian defenders and have set to turning the area into an Aquilonian province. Adding insult to injury, the lecherous Aquilonian’s leader, Count Stercus, has turned his roving eye toward Conan’s sweetheart, Tarla. Eventually, everything comes to a head and Conan rapidly reaches adulthood in the ensuing chaos.

Back in the middle 70’s, this was the Conan tale that I most really wanted someone to write. It would be a rip-roaring account of Conan’s youth set amidst the epic background of invasion and destruction. Unfortunately, Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium is not that story. Not even close…

In a world where this novel is measured against the Conan yarns of Robert E. Howard, this book fails on so many levels that it beggars belief. It’s not badly written; Turtledove has competently scribed numerous books. So what happened to this one?

My biggest complaint is that Conan is completely out of character. Turtledove decided for whatever reasons to make an artistic statement and loosely patterned Conan’s domestic situation after the real-life travails of Robert Howard and his parents. This was a huge mistake! Conan was not an idealized version of Howard; he was patterned after a number of men that Howard was acquainted with, oil-field workers and the like. So in this novel we have Conan/Robert slavishly caring for his ailing mother, Verina/Hester, who is dying of consumption. And we have a Mordec/Isaac Mordecai (see any similarities?) who is emotionally estranged from both his wife and son. All of this would be amazing if it weren’t so downright creepy. Turtledove’s Conan feels like a Cimmerian version of PSYCHO’s Norman Bates; “What do you need, mother? Have a drink of water, mother”. Conan drops anything and everything he’s doing to tend to his mother without a bit of resistance, yet his relationship with his father entails nothing but resistance. I figure that Turtledove felt this homage was pretty clever, however it really didn’t work for me at all.

My second complaint has to do with 19^th-21^st century morality being foisted upon this tale. Count Stercus likes his women quite a bit on the young side, and so this becomes a central plot element of the book. But is this really a valid problem? In most barbarian tribes that I’ve read about, life expectancy was 30-40 years, so a girl was expected to marry and bear children practically as soon as she underwent puberty. Tarla was 14 in this story, just the age when she should have become available as a mate. I can understand the clan being outraged over Stercus making a Cimmerian woman his whore, but her age shouldn’t have been the overriding issue.

My third complaint is that Turtledove seemed to cherry-pick bits of the Conan saga and ignored everything else. For an author that usually does impeccable research, this is amazing. His research seems to have consisted of reading Dark Valley Destiny and Conan the Conqueror. Some of his more egregious lapses in research are as follows:

· Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast states that Conan learned archery in Hyrkania and that it’s not his idea of a manly weapon. Turtledove has the much younger Conan using a bow and arrows throughout the book; in fact it’s his main weapon of choice. It’s even shown on the cover of the book!

· Howard states in one of his letters that Conan lived in northern Cimmeria with his parents and grandfather and took place in fights between the Cimmerians and the Vanir to the north while he was growing up. Turtledove has Conan living in the southern Cimmerian town of Duthil working primarily as a blacksmith’s apprentice. There is no mention of his grandfather.

· Howard’s Cimmerians are barely past the stone-age. They are more evolved than his Picts, in that they are able to work metal, but seem to only scratch out a hand-to-mouth existence in the wilds of Cimmeria. Turtledove has Conan living in Duthil, a Middle-Age town complete with multi-level buildings and a blacksmith shop with a bellows forge. There doesn’t seem to be much hardship at all in Turtledove’s Cimmeria.

· Howard states in the same letter as before that after Venarium, Conan went north to fight among the Æsir against the Vanir and Hyperboreans before heading to Zamora. Turtledove has Conan raiding into Aquilonia until he is the only Cimmerian left alive, then taking a cart and heading to Zamora! Big difference…

· The impression I get from Howard’s Conan stories is that the Cimmerians could never live under someone else’s yoke, so immediately gathered all the clans together and annihilated the Aquilonians so completely that they never came back. Turtledove has the Cimmerians living under Aquilonian occupation for three years before the clans gathered the political will to drive the settlers back to Aquilonia.

If you are getting the impression that Turtledove didn’t research Howard’s tales much, well he missed a few things from the Carter/deCamp stories as well. In Conan and the Spider God, Sprague deCamp presents the name of Conan’s blacksmith father as Nial, not Mordec. In The Star of Khorala, the writing team implies that Conan’s elderly mother is still alive at the time of this short story. Turtledove kills Conan’s mother in his tale. Not that it matters, but both of these stories are listed in the Conan Chronology at the back of Conan of Venarium.

My final observation is that Howard’s Conan stories are quintessentially Sword & Sorcery yarns, with the fantasy elements usually well-integrated within them. Conan of Venarium is essentially a straight up historical story with what few fantasy elements appear completely extraneous to the story. There is a sheep-stealing demonic bird that Conan defeats. There is an otherworldly temple complete with venomous serpent that appears long enough for Conan to acquire the venom, at which point both disappear once more, unexplained. And there is a wandering seer that foretells Conan’s future. No Sword & Sorcery here, Turtledove basically does a riff on the movie BRAVEHEART.

Now I don’t wish to give the impression that this is the most worthless Conan pastiche ever written (that would be Roland Green’s Conan and the Gods of the Mountain). However, given that Harry Turtledove is a well respected and popular author of both Science Fiction and Fantasy, I was expecting something more in line with Karl Edward Wagner’s The Road of Kings or Poul Anderson’s Conan the Rebel.

Most of Harry Turtledove’s popular work is in the field of “alternative history”, like his Civil War novel, The Guns of the South. So in conclusion, I will sum up my critique of Conan of Venarium by stating that in this novel the author has remained absolutely true to his roots.

05/16/04 07:32 PM