August, 1977 Pinnacle Books
I hadn’t planned to read any more Richard Blade novels after the debacle that was #9: Kingdom Of Royth, which happened to be “new” author Roland Green’s first installment of the series. Given that Green went on to write the ensuing 27 volumes of the series (a one-off author named Ray Nelson contributed the 30th volume), I figured reading more books by him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. But the other month I came across this volume and the next on the clearance rack of a local Half Price Books (which is where I do all my book shopping these days; you never know what you’re going to find!), so I figured what the hell.
But man, reading this book wasn’t worth the trouble. At 182 pages of small, dense print, The Torian Pearls was a chore to read. And a pulp novel about a sub-Conan getting in swordfights and bedding busty babes should never be a chore to read. It was Kingdom Of Royth all over again, and it baffles me that series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel kept Green on the series. My assumption is Green was just turning in his manuscripts on time. Or maybe the series was selling and Engel decided not to rock the boat, but I’m gonna assume that if Richard Blade did sell, it was mostly due to the era in which it was printed (sword and sorcery being pretty popular in the late ‘70s), and/or the covers were drawing people in (this one being by Kelly Freas).
Everything that original series creator Manning Lee Stokes imbued the series with is long gone. Richard Blade, while still a brawny fighter and leader of men, has lost all of the macho qualities Stokes gave him. Indeed, Green is once again at pains to point out that Blade “doesn’t kill needlessly,” and there are parts where Blade congratulates himself that he didn’t kill some foe. He also spends an inordinate amount of time worrying that the women he beds in Dimension X won’t get killed or go nuts – both things which have often happened in the past, as Green recounts in the opening pages.
But let’s face it, by this point Roland Green had written 16 volumes, twice more than Stokes did, so Richard Blade was Roland Green’s series at this point. As evidence of this Green adds a lot of continuity to the series, with the curious tidbit that all the continuity is related to prior Green novels. The first 8 Stokes volumes are ignored, and that Richard Blade is long gone – the Richard Blade who was prone to doubt and brooding in Home Dimension, but who turned into a vicious, almost unstoppable force of masculinity in Dimension X. Roland Green’s Richard Blade is a pale reflection of that earlier character, though it must be admitted he is more of a standard hero. Whereas Stokes’s Blade would kill with impunity, in some cases just to make a point, Green’s Blade is more concerned with keeping peace and helping people.
Interesting, sure, but the delivery leaves a lot to desire. The Torian Pearls is a sluggish, trying read, everything relayed in bland and unthrilling tones. Even the battle scenes are rendered limp by the mundane narrative style. Midway through the novel I realized what the issue was: literally everything is relayed through Richard Blade’s perspective. The novel could just as well be written in first-person. Each page is comprised of nigh-endless paragraphs of description or the thoughts of Richard Blade; there is seldom any dialog, and absolutely no other characters rise to the surface. In a Stokes novel, there would be interraction with various characters. In Green’s books, the entirety is focused on Blade and his thoughts, and the other characters he meets in Dimension X serve as his sounding boards, having at the most a handful of lines of dialog. Even the women Blade beds – with one falling in love with Blade (and vice versa) and becoming pregnant with his child – are ciphers, briefly emerging from the dense narrative murk to say a line or two before disappearing back into it.
Seriously though, it’s 182 pages of stuff like this:
Very seldom does another character talk to Blade and give his or her opinion on things; almost everything is relayed via the narrative, as if we were reading a history book. To add to this, the adventure lasts over several months – one holdover from the Stokes novels – so there’s a lot of “three months passed” and the sort, further making the reader feel as if he’s reading a history book about some guy named Blade, who goes to a new Dimension and starts to align the various peoples into one nation. And really that’s all that happens in The Torian Pearls. The plot is so uninvolving: Blade finds himself in a swampy world, befriends a traveling group of warriors, wins their respect, then leads them in various battles with other warlike peoples in this swampy world, with the goal of unifying the various nations. That’s it, folks. There’s no real impetus to the story nor any goal for Blade; why he’s still being sent to Dimension X in the first place is not even dwelt upon.
That said, Green it appears has tried to work a sort of continuing storyline into Richard Blade. There’s now some stuff about the “Menel,” a race of aliens who have plagued Blade in past installments – apparently #10: Ice Dragon was the first, but I could be wrong; I’m only guessing this from the narrative. In The Torian Pearls Blade again comes across the Menel, who have spaceships and may also be able to bridge dimensions. But hey, don’t listen to me; here are two pages of typically-dense text as Blade ponders the Menel:
Note that all of that is material Richard Blade could have discussed with someone else. Hell, even if he was just talking to a rock! But the above is another indication of what I’m talking about. The entire damn book is just Blade and his thoughts, which go on for pages and pages with no dialog breaks. I mean, Manning Lee Stokes certainly turned in some padded and boring volumes, but at least the guy gave Blade someone to talk to! The characters Blade encounters in The Torian Pearls are so cipher-like that I once again return to my original theory that Richard Blade isn’t really going to any “Dimension X” at all; the entire series is just the hallucinations of Richard Blade. In other words, it’s all about him because it all is him, like a dream or something.
Well anyway, the plot itself is lame, mostly because there really is no plot. Blade’s been spending some time walking through the woods of Scotland or something when we meet him, reflecting on past Dimension X exploits (only the Green ones), and he heads on back to the Tower of London for his next trip to Dimension X. He comes to in a swampy world and gradually finds himself encountering one after another group of people who are fighting for the ever-diminishing land. The oceans are expanding and land is becoming precious, and it’s a wonder this book hasn’t been discovered and cherished by the climate cultists. But then it’s much too masculine for them…even in neutered form, Blade still gets in lots of fights, eventually becoming a leader of men.
But it’s all so nauseatingly repetitive and bland; Blade meets one group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies; he meets another group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies. There’s also a proto-Dances With Wolves/Avatar bit where Blade is not believed to be a true warrior and must prove himself in various native rituals, culminating in a fight against the top warrior. But again it’s all so tepidly described, because the entirety is locked in Bland’s thoughts and reactions (it’s the first jpeg excerpt, above).
The sexual material is just as bland; Blade hooks up with three women in the book, per the template, but everything is off-page. And the female characters are even more cipher-like than the men, literally only showing up for Blade to bang off-page and then disappearing back into the text. Hey, they’re the perfect women! Seriously though, what’s humorous is that Blade apparently falls in love with one of them, and indeed sires a child with her, but Blade’s gone before he finds out whether it’s a boy or a girl. If I’m not mistaken, in a future volume Blade returns to this Dimension and meets his child, and if I’m further unmistaken it’s a boy and also a grown man when Blade returns, given the loosy-goosy nature of time in Dimension X. It would be interesting to read, but given what I know of Roland Green’s novels, I’m sure it won’t amount to much, as it all will be locked in Blade’s thoughts with the other characters not having the space to breathe.
The alien Menel only factor in randomly; Blade survives a lot of wild animal attacks, from flying reptiles to water creatures, and he hacks one open and finds a crystal in the brain – apparently the same thing the Menel did in a previous volume. There’s also a Menel UFO that crashes, but Green is maddeningly vague when it comes to describing the aliens. Indeed, Green’s descriptions throughout are maddeningly vague; even female characters are not given the exploitation that is customary of the genre. Instead the novel is like an endless sprawl of Blade thinking this and Blade pondering that as he voyages across the swampy world and unites various groups into one, eventually launching a war against the titular Torians, an empire that is headed up by a hotstuff, wanton babe in her 40s.
But Green has squandered so much text that he rushes through all this – the queen takes Blade as her plaything and we only learn about it in hindsight, with none of the naughty stuff Stokes would’ve given us. That said, Green does deliver a memorable sendoff for Blade, having him zapped back to Home Dimension while the queen is giving him a blowjob! Speaking of rushing through things, only here in the very last pages are we informed that Blade’s bosses have taken care of a publicity matter, apparently from an earlier volume, in which Blade saved some people from a crashing train, and Scotland Yard were trying to figure out who the “mystery hero” was who’d saved them, Blade having vanished into the shadows to preserve his secret identity. This is literally brought up and dispensed with in a few lines of text on the last pages, so either Green forgot about his own dangling subplot or editor Lyle Kenyon Engel grafted it in to Green’s manuscript.
Overall, The Torian Pearls was terrible. I went into this one wanting to think that Roland Green had improved after so many volumes, but it seems more apparent that Richard Blade should’ve ended when Manning Lee Stokes left the series.
1 comment:
Perhaps Ray Nelson's book is more stimulating.
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