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This is our discussion of the Classic SF/F novel...

Lord Tyger by Philip José Farmer
(1970)

I wonder if I'll enjoy this as much as I liked it years ago. I don't think I've read it in 30 years or so. It was a wild ride then.

Jim wrote: "I wonder if I'll enjoy this as much as I liked it years ago. I don't think I've read it in 30 years or so. It was a wild ride then."

Chapters 1-4 read. So far we have a teen-age boy super-stud who is fine with rape, kidnapping & murder to sate his lusts, though he seems popular enough with the girls to skip the rape after a bit.

Like all teenagers, he's tired of "It is written" and "It's the custom" as the answer to almost every "why?"

I'm a bit confused about Mariyam & Yusufu, Ras's "parents", who are, by explicit words and description apparently actual apes; but, apes who have taught the boy English, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic (a language used in the Horn of Africa), & Latin. (And he's learned tribal languages Wantso & Sharrikt for himself.) Quite the little scholar.

Just hold that thought on the parents. All will become clear. IIRC, Ras is quite the little savage.

I started reading this again yesterday. I love how Farmer introduces Ras. He has quite a long backstory to fill in, but he does it really well in a couple of chapters. He manages to avoid data dumps by filling in the blanks as the story moves along & the air of mystery is heightened by only using Ras' knowledge of the world.

It's obvious that Ras is being raised in a strange environment. The odd education, his parents, & the Bird of God make that abundantly clear. Anyone who has read Tarzan of the Apes will quickly pick up the clues. Farmer does a great job of bringing out many of the realities of that life that ERB left out or glossed over, especially with the sex. He hits that a little harder than I like, but it is a driving force, especially in healthy teenage boys.

It's also pretty clear that the reader needs to quiet their own moral judgements & see the world from Ras' point of view. He's taught such a mishmash of religion, language, & skills which interact in weird ways with the world he knows & revels in. The brutal customs of the tribesmen & his parents' "It is written" all make little sense rationally. Unlike most kids, he doesn't have any peers to help him make sense of it all, either.

G33z3r, you need to reread the descriptions of his parents a little closer. His parents say they are apes. They say a lot of things & his mother gets instructions from God, but can't keep a story straight. Her head is proportionate to her body like his, but she's tiny. His father, who is short with a big head & teaches him to juggle, walk a tight rope, & other neat things, doesn't want to discuss certain matters in certain places.

Jim wrote: "G33z3r, you need to reread the descriptions of his parents a little closer...."

Like I said, they called apes & described as apes, except for the whole talking and teaching four languages thing. And nice knives. And cooking. And building treehouse.

Later, Eva suggests they are midgets pretending to be apes, Jane Goodall in an uplift experiment, so I'll go with that.

The cooking thing was interesting: at first he was taught to eat his kills raw, but after he got sick once from a raw-meat disease, the rules were changed and he was told to cook. A mid-experiment correction, I presume.

I thought it interesting that the English Eva speaks is noticably different from Ras's dialect, seemingly more than simple accent. (She also knows a lot of words he doesn't.)

Well, a couple of things after finishing... SPOILERS

This is a jungle adventure novel, although Farmer has certainly written plenty of SF/F.

Lor Tyger, aka Ras Tyger, aka Ras, is Farmer's notion of an alternate Tarzan, but intentionally created by a madman. That notion is a bully and a rapist; worse, every girl & woman he rapes falls in love with his because of his awesome sexual prowess; which is a sick fantasy on Farmer's part.

Perhaps this is Farmer destruction of the romantic notion of the "noble savage." Ras was intended to be that Savage, that "tarzan", but he came out wrong. (I guess he became the strongest human in the valley because the tribes were selected by Mad Scientist for their smaller stature; we later meet some Ethiopians who are at least physically as tall as Ras,

I didn't find Ras's on-and-off sense of "honor" very convincing. I guess he must have picked up some version of the concept from his foster-parents. Bit while he doesn't mind ambushing / killing unaware Wantso from hiding with his bow, he balks as killing an openly murderous Gilluk with a rifle.

At the conclusion, now in "civilization," Ras has already decided he can do well in this world by taking what he wished, "if you knew how to get them." And Ras plainly thinks he does. Look out world.

As for the ERB-worshiping madman, he apparently has a high tolerance for boredom, having lived in his valley tower doing nothing but watching Ras group up from babyhood. If farmer wanted an alternate idea, he could have written it from the PoV of Boygur, drumming his fingers in boredom waiting for the occasional interesting day to come around.... I guess he passed the time playing god for the two native tribes.

Also, disappointed never we did find out where the name "Igziyabher" came from. :)

I finished it yesterday & really enjoyed it. I think your ideals of morals were exactly the point Farmer was making & you took him seriously. You shouldn't. Farmer loved sticking pins into inflated ideas to bring them back to reality. He did exactly that here.

Spoilers below

Ras obviously isn't all that noble. He's not awful, either. His morals are the product of his upbringing. He's not going to risk getting killed or wounded for no good reason. He has no real concept of honor, just of expediency. That was Farmer's point.

He learned to talk because he was raised by 'apes' that talked. Remember how you thought they were described as apes? Obviously, they weren't, so he fared better than his brother Jib. He didn't die of pneumonia like his other brother, either. Pretty obvious points for someone to miss. Obviously the guy didn't listen to anyone else & was shrewd rather than intelligent & most definitely obsessed.

Jim wrote: "He's not going to risk getting killed or wounded for no good reason...."

And yet he does. He prevents Eva from killing Gilluk with a rifle, even knowing Gilluk be an implacable foe who would pursue Ras until he killed him (or was killed), but later Ras paddles off in a canoe to confront him spear-vs-spear on the river. Some code of honor says he has to face his enemies in person.

What he wants varies around expediency. He wanted to face Gilluk & thought he could take him at that point. Do you expect everyone, especially teenagers under pressure, to always act consistently? Ras read like a very real young man.