Leonard CarpenterCritiques

F/SF

Conan an arena gladiator. An interesting moment when our Sullen Northerner get queasy at the sight of human organs. Not because he is grossed out but because he seemingly develops an insight into the parts of us that make us...us. Interesting take.

The Tor Conan novels are fun. Well the good ones anyway. I would count this one somewhere in the middle. It seems that at times they get somewhat formulaic. Conan down on his luck, Conan finds gold, Conan meets girl, Conan gets in trouble, girl gets kidnapped etc. etc. All ending with Conan right back where he started. Broken sword, no money and one foot in front of the other.

One thing Conan is good at. Getting himself into trouble. Those traits are usually combined with his desire for helping the underdog and chasing the glitter of gold. One thing you can always be sure of. Conan is going to wind up chained to a wall and will get loose because someone is stupid enough to get within arms reach of him. The Carpenter Conan's are not the worst of the series but they easily cross that threshold of being cartoony. This is something Howard, the creator of our hero, was definitely not guilty of.

I know, I know these books are pulp. But if you are going to read pulp it should be like this and bloody good fun!

Of the five or six authors who contributed multiple novels each to the long series of Conan pastiches published by Tor Fantasy in the early 1990s, I am now satisfied that Leonard Carpenter did the best justice to Robert E. Howard's original character and settings. In Conan of the Red Brotherhood, he offers a sequel to the Howard tale "Iron Shadows in the Moon," at the end of which Conan had acquired the captaincy of a pirate vessel on the Vilayet Sea. This Conan is one who has led men in a variety of circumstances, knows his own powers, and fosters growing ambitions.

The book is largely focused on Conan's own struggles to achieve the loyalty of his pirate crew and the cooperation of several women, all while nurturing his aim to build a sort of nautical kingdom. There is also some pivotal monster-fighting. Meanwhile, a parallel plot is centered in the Turanian capital of Aghrapur, where various sages, sorcerers, and inventors are vying for imperial favor in their development of new techniques for dominating naval warfare. In both the primary and secondary plots, the characters are developed in a satisfying way that reminds me more of Howard's own work than most of his latter-day imitators. And at the end, the two plots are brought together neatly enough to answer any hints and promises given earlier.

When using a character created by another author it’s important to be as faithful to that original character’s personality and traits as possible. Other post-Howard writers, like Sprague de Camp, have done a pretty good job of making Conan authentic. Nobody’s ever hit the mark like Howard, of course, but Leonard Carpenter is off target here.

At times Conan sounds like a confused high school boy, or like he’s suffering with teenage angst, which is hardly fitting for a barbarian. In this novel Conan’s aged 19 yet we’ve met him younger than this and he’s never had the emotional issues that he suffers with in “Conan the Hero”.

As for the story, I found it good in parts, but on the whole it didn’t hold my interest.

Style-wise, the author has a habit of overusing adjectives, often using two to describe a noun, resulting in clunky sentences. He also relies on “then” too much, which is a lame way to tell the reader what happens next.

Mr Carpenter is one of several authors to continue the adventures of Conan, filling in gaps of the larger-than-life character's history that the Great Robert E. Howard left unexplored.

I've read this one twice, first as a teenager, second when in my mid-twenties. Fifteen years on, I can't remember this tale in great detail, but know that I enjoyed it, though not as much as the Conan tales penned by Mr Howard.

This is a novel set around the notorious sinking of this passenger liner by a German torpedo in 1915. While the author has clearly done his research well and the book is full of details about naval warfare and the limits of American neutrality and other key issues of the time, I don't think by and large this worked as a novel. I thought the main characters - two US journalists and two nurses travelling to Europe - were rather flat and one-dimensional and the underlying plot about the discovery of the presence of munitions on board the ship not very clearly drawn out. The final few chapters on the actual sinking were dramatically recounted and the fate of the main characters was ambiguous. The author might have been better to have written a non-fiction account of this tragedy.

I'm gradually working my way through all of the Conan novels that were written by people other than Robert E. Howard.

Leonard Carpenter wrote a number of Conan novels for TOR books.

The writing is okay, although his style seemed a little jarring at the start. It feels as though it's somewhat lacking in decent action. The focus is much more on Conans interaction with the 'Hunter Gatherer' tribe that he encounters early in the book. The core Villainy plot is glacial, and then is expended to quickly at the end of the book.½

Carpenter's novel is an adroit pastiche of the Robert E. Howard Conan. It is very explicitly tagged for insertion into the established continuity by the presence of the Star of Khorala gem, which Conan is seeking to reclaim at the outset of the novel, signaling a placement just following Howard's "Shadows in Zamboula."

Raider is set in Abbadrah, a Shemite city on the north bank of the Styx, so the cultural matrix is that of the ancient near east: a fantasy eastern Mediterranean culture strongly influenced by its faux-Egyptian neighbor Stygia to the south. A preliminary adventure with Valusian serpent-men proves to be a mere warmup with no deeper connections to the larger plot other than to introduce some characters and set the central business as that of Conan's membership in a company of tomb-robbers (the "raiders" of the title). The loathsomeness of the Abbadran ruling class is especially well developed. Even the princess Afrit, whom Conan favors both politically and intimately, has a measure of dislikability. The "prophet" Horaspes, a Stygian emigre, is a paragon of malevolent priestcraft.

Conan develops a tense peer relationship with a Vanirman who leads the raiders, not least due to the dancer who seduces them both. This circle of interactions helps to keep a confused, human core in a story full of sorcerous villainy and Conan's usual near-invincibility. On the whole, this tale was well-paced and succeeded in recreating the sense of adventure that Howard gave to his Conan stories.