These pages also feature a lot of Russo’s humor. The small town is bigger, it would seem, than the novel otherwise suggests and it really plays with the concept of being a kid–the only things the narrator knows are his immediate surroundings. And the things the narrator does know about people, clearly he didn’t learn as a child–specifically, in this part, the adulterous nature of the lady who cooks at the church where the narrator spends the summer.

It’s not clear how much time passes during these pages–at least four months in action, but much longer–another year–including all Russo’s summary. Russo captures that idyllic childhood summer, when it never ended, when it went on forever. The narrator spends relaxing days on the church grounds and the whole thing is rather secular. The narrator never says, but it’s clear he’s not religious. The church offers him something to do.

So much happens and doesn’t happen in these opening pages, it’s hard to know what to talk about. Russo’s prose is excellent, fitting this grown-up narrator who’s telling the story from the future (1982 if my math is right), with the narrator’s tangents not slowing things. Russo’s paragraphs are occasionally long and filled with minutiae about the town or its inhabitants, but he gets away with it because of the first person narrator. Just like simile and metaphor for first person narrators (the simile or metaphor only works if the narrator is a person who would make the comparison, i.e. an illiterate beet farmer in the Black Ages shouldn’t be comparing something to Ahab), tangents only work if the narrator is someone who’ll let the story get away from him or her.

And Risk Pool‘s narrator is one of those people.

Russo’s narrator almost treats this novel as essay, an examination of himself, which makes it interesting as memoir as well. It’s clearly not, even three chapters in, going to be an epical story–it’s incredibly mellow, set in a world where suspected spousal abusers successfully run from the cops with their neighbors cheering them on. It’s genial and disarming, so when Russo does make some real observations, they’re passive. It’s a swell way to get the reader to pay attention.

I haven’t read the book in fifteen years probably, so, while I remember how it ends, I don’t remember how it gets there.

These last forty pages of the novella feature some of Burroughs’s worst work on it though. It’s all wheel-spinning, including an inordinately long horse-training section. And this part’s where Burroughs finally turns Billings into the macho man of the first one–he gets a lasso and a horse, he’s a cowboy in a lost world. It’s hideous. Burroughs takes Ajor away from Billings in order to give him something to spin his wheels about and gives her back before the silliest deus ex machina I can think of. Burroughs doesn’t even give the reader a fight scene between Billings and the story’s villain–how very un-Western of him. I’m not actually sure if showdowns were customary to Western novels and stories of this era, but I imagine they were. I mean, I’ve seen The Virginian and it was from 1929 and it’s not remembered as being somehow revolutionary in that development.

Then Burroughs shifts gears again and tells the end of the story in summary. The big reuniting of the narrator from the first book and Billings? Happens at the end of a paragraph. A long paragraph. Burroughs spends more time describing how the crew of Billings’s ship got over the surrounding cliffs than he does talking about the protagonist of the previous novel–the subject of Billings’s search.

It’s like he’d given up thinking about things. Somehow, with a shorter present action, Burroughs made his fictional lost world a lot smaller in this novella. He’s boring of it.

But those parts aren’t the best in this section. In fact, even though Burroughs is trying to add some human drama, it’s all rather contrived. It gives Billings something to do, a world to change, whatever. It makes him an adventure hero rather than just a guy. The first novella had a guy–an annoying guy–but just a guy.

Instead, the best part is discreet and presumably unintentional. Burroughs talks about the regional differences of the tribes in Caspak. The eastern people are different from the western. It’s brief, usually throwaway lines, but it creates this whole world in the imagination. Burroughs drew a map of Caspak and he clearly thought a lot about how things related, geographically. It’s not precise cartography, but it gives the appearance of being a real place. There’s really not much in The People That Time Forgot–the present action seems to be shaping up to be a couple weeks–but there’s a lot of area to it.

I can finally understand why Burroughs had such an active fan base–people argued and debated about his works–it’s because there’s the potential there. Burroughs might not be the best writer, but he’s an inventive, thinking one. And engages the reader on that level.

Anyway, back to the verbosity of this section. It’s boring. Burroughs is filling pages here. Those times the narrator mentions the flora and fauna, well, he’s just agreeing with the first novella. He even says he’s regurgitating it for the readers–if anyone ever reads it–and there’s where The People That Time Forgot breaks. The first novella is passable because it’s supposedly to be a primary document full of purpose. The second is supposed to be a primary document to go in someone’s estate someday. It doesn’t read like something Billings would, essentially, be writing to himself.

Or maybe it does. Because there’s no other reason for him to harp on and on about such useless things. Burroughs’s excitement at his creation is long gone.

There is something resembling a spark of enthusiasm in the way Burroughs writes the romance between Billings and savage girl Ajor. Though Billings is, to put it mildly, hot for her bod, he’d never think of copulating with his evolutionary inferior. Even through these pages, he gets closer and closer to such copulation, but Burroughs isn’t a good enough writer to know he could be mocking his narrator here. It’s actually an engaging romance, but the writing’s weak.

The first chapter, all ten pages of it, seems to be written to get the reader back into the world of fantasy, but Burroughs only spends ten pages on it. He couldn’t have been too worried. Instead, the opening reads like a strange tack-on, something to catch the reader up.

As for the protagonist, Tom Billings, he’s not as annoying as the first novella’s protagonist. Burroughs has him a self-made man, of course, who hasn’t had luck with the ladies (until he reaches the lost world, more on that in a second) and, you know, is a born leader. Or some nonsense.

Burroughs doesn’t have the excellent use of tense here. Even though the first chapter is a different narrator than the majority, presumably, of the novella, it’s not a multilayered narrative. There’s a definite lack of imagination to it. Worse is the explaining. I’m sure Burroughs was listening to criticism and inserted lines about the first novel’s narrator’s paleontological studies to explain some details, but it feels forced.

Strangely, once he gets a few pages into the second chapter and the novella becomes about Billings falling for a little wild woman, it at least gets enthusiastic. Burroughs’s romances are pretty tepid and pretty lame–the guys seem to all have male identity issues and the women–well, at least so far–have terrible taste. Yes, it’s a different era, but Billings isn’t much of a catch. He’s a pompous ass. Sure, less pompous than the first narrator, but still….

The Land That Time Forgot is the first of three novellas; these novellas, Land, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss, supposedly are supposed to be read together . . . but I’m not sure if I believe it.

Or, maybe Burroughs did want them read together, but, even so, he didn’t write them to be read together.

The end of The Land That Time Forgot, the final chapter, finally names the narrator Bowen. Then, Bowen Tyler. Nice strong manly name. The chapter also shows Bowen to be an excellent marksman, which isn’t based on his Southern California upbringing or scientific study of firearms because marksmanship is beyond science.

Would Burroughs have written if he didn’t have issues with his masculinity?

But it doesn’t end with the opening narrator, the guy who found Tyler’s manuscript. The novel ends still a layer deep in the multilayered narrative. It’s a disaster in terms of narrative design.

The climax is a fight scene, not exactly fitting the larger than life scale.

The film version–the first film–took a lot more time with certain things than the novel did and having seen it first, as a child (and having read the novel first as a child), maybe it’s the problem. The film’s better than the novel; worse, it shows the novel how to better pace things.

And then the tense goes bad. The novel ends on a high note, but the beginning of the chapter, presumably occurring just before, as Tyler wrote the last entry, is on a low note.

There’s no way to avoid it–Burroughs is overcompensating here, but it seems like he’s doing it for his audience, not for himself. Sure, you might not know jujitsu or be a blue-blood like the narrator, but you too might some day have the ladies fawning over you. All it requires is finding a small enough pool.

This section is also Burroughs’s most bigoted, whether he intended it or not. While the frequent use of “negroid” might be excusable because of the time period, he correlates pale skin to evolutionary development. It’s too bad, given how good he is with the narration in terms of tense, he didn’t make his narrator believable. The guy’s a know-it-all and it’s hard to believe no one drowned him in the first twenty pages because he wouldn’t ever shut up.

As the narrator meets more and more characters he can interact with, the novel takes a significant hit. It’s not interesting to have the conversations between him and the cavemen. The present action for just this section is something like three weeks and it’s impressive how Burroughs fits so much into just thirty-some pages. When he wastes space on lame conversations–all Burroughs’s conversations in the novel are lame–it slows the novel down.

This section ends with a big downer, which is interesting. It’s Burroughs essaying the human condition. It’s not terrible.

This section features a lot of Burroughs’s prehistoric travelogue, which, again, is where The Land that Time Forgot is so successful. He’s so interested in this world he’s created, so enthused, it’s hard not to get caught up in it. Only when he tries to tell a human story does it fail. His imaginative description is where the novel is strong. When it’s the love story between the narrator and the girl, it’s a disaster. One of the major problems with the book is the lack of characterization. Besides knowing the narrator is supposed to be a real American hero, circa 1917 or 1918 (too lazy to look), Burroughs uses the multilayered narrative to introduce facts about characters only when they’re relevant to the narrative or to some dialogue. It means he gets to tell jokes, but he doesn’t create any characters. They’re devices, just like the tense.

The worst part in this section is the jingoism. There’s a strong anti-German sentiment to it, but it’s a qualified anti-German sentiment–not to the men of Germany, but to their leaders, those aristocratic prigs. It’s a ludicrous insertion, one I’m sure Borroughs will follow up with some contrived set piece, but it does only take up a couple pages. More grating are the narrator’s constant romantic longings, a boob in love with a twit.

The stupid stuff comes at the beginning, as the Allies try to find safe haven in their stolen U-boat. It’s contrived to get them to the lost world and every character–except the woman, who the narrator dismisses because, “she’s just a girl,” or something to that effect–is a moron. This chapter actually deserves some study, as it takes place over weeks and what Burroughs choses for his narrator to concentrate his attentions on is very interesting. It’s a difficult novel in some ways because the narrator is such a tool. But Burroughs doesn’t realize he’s a tool–he’s a manly man with his puppy-dog and his “Anglo-Saxon” pride–and it dates The Land That Time Forgot. A more interesting question, though not a useful one for a writer–put the potentiality is engaging–is whether the narrator is reliable. The idea of the novel and its events being distorted by the narrator’s (and Burroughs’s) machismo is probably worth examination by someone looking for a topic for a term paper. The book’s lack of critical regard aside, it’s probably been in print for seventy consecutive years and Burroughs is well-known. It’s a shame I wasn’t an English major.

The target audience for the novel is readers who’d want to read something with dinosaurs on the cover. Basically every boy until a certain age. It engages adequately on that level.