A Novel Ian Likes: The Hour Of The Dragon by Robert E. Howard

I normally open each column with a summary of the story or premise of whatever it is I like that month, but this time I’m jumping straight in with an extract, because it’s the only way to do The Hour Of The Dragon justice. Conan (of “The Barbarian” fame) is making his way home to his adopted kingdom of Aquilonia to oust the sorcerer who has taken his throne. He writes a letter to be delivered to the dread magician, and it goes like this:

“To Xaltotun, grand fakir of Nemedia: Dog of Acheron, I am returning to my kingdom, and I mean to hang your hide on a bramble.

“Conan”

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the story and its lead character, frankly. And if you don’t enjoy prose like this, it’s probably best that you stop reading here.

…

OK, for those of us that remain, Conan needs little introduction: he first appeared in the early 1930s in a series of about twenty stories by Robert E. Howard in the pages of Weird Tales. The stories follow a rough inner chronology but were published as Howard wrote them. The series came to an abrupt end when Howard took his own life following the death of his mother in 1936. Conan then took on a life of his own as other writers, notably L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter published their own, or heavily edited unfinished tales, of Conan and his exploits. The stories achieved their apex of popularity from the late 1960s until the mid-80s, following a lengthy series of novels by other writers, three films, a couple of cartoon series, a fabulous comic book series, and those wonderful covers by Frank Frazetta.

The Hour Of The Dragon, though, is the only novel that Howard wrote about his hero.

And it’s a doozy.

The plot runs a little more complex than what I laid out above: it begins with Conan becoming comfortable as the king of Aquilonia, a kingdom he took in battle. He is proving a fairly competent and popular king; a monarch who takes the time to listen to his subjects and his critics and who welcomes trade with former enemies because it’s good for his people. He’s even fair with taxes. This naturally angers certain members of the aristocracy who are plotting his downfall (some of them had tried this in an earlier short story “The Phoenix On The Sword,” but were thoroughly vanquished). At any rate Conan is usurped through mystical means and he soon discovers that his enemies have resurrected an ancient sorcerer, Xaltotun, who has unleashed his magic to take his revenge upon Aquilonia in a plot familiar to anyone who watched it being… er, homaged in the 1982 film, The Sword And The sorcerer.

He is, of course, eventually thwarted by Conan, but not before the former king has been on a whirlwind tour of the lands surrounding his kingdom and assembling a fantastic team of allies to help him.

Like I said, it’s a doozy of a tale. It starts with a bang and doesn’t let up for the remainder of the book.

It was serialised in Weird Tales across five issues (December 1935 – April 1936) then not published again until 1950, when Gnome Press (who also published Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy in its first book form) republished it as Conan The Conqueror. But it’s more commonly known by its original title these days. It was given some favourable reviews both in magazine and book form but, because it was pulp fiction (and genre pulp fiction at that!) it wasn’t taken seriously until people realised that it was staying in print which meant that it might be better than first suspected. It has since taken position as one of the tent poles of the heroic fantasy genre, along with the rest of the Conan stories and pretty much Howard’s entire body of work.

I came to Howard quite late: it wasn’t until I was in my thirties (I’d lived longer than him before I’d read any of his stories) that I started to read his work. I realised that although I had read a lot of work by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (two of his contemporaries and friends), I hadn’t touched a single story by Howard. He was always there, in the long-running Conan paperback series when I was a kid, but there were an awful lot of them, and they weren’t very long, and they were written by a huge bunch of different authors… and I prefered my pocket money to get me more pages for my buck, so I overlooked him for a long time. I have tried to make up for lost time by starting with Conan, then moving on to Kull, then his horror, his westerns… look, I still haven’t read his entire corpus but I have made a dent in it.

His style is brisk and highly visual, with vivid characters and settings and situations. Honestly, Howard is basically fun to read: Conan appears to lack some depth as a character, but he is loyal and honest, and almost single-minded when it comes to achieving his goals. There is a lot to admire in him in this novel.

And there’s a lot to admire in the novel itself: it sets up characters and places quickly but artfully; then, once Conan sets out to regain his kingdom, he embarks on a Cook’s Tour of the world that Howard has built up over the last few stories.

And it is glorious: Conan’s world is a mishmash of imagined ancient cultures – appropriately enough since it is our world prior to the fall of Atlantis. There are countries and cultures easily recognisable through their mythologies… and Conan cuts a massive swath through most of them in his journey to get back to Aquilonia: he journeys with pirates, takes an unexpected tour of what we recognise as an Egyptian tomb, fights vampires and soulless men… he swashes his buckle all over the prehistoric world.

Which is most of the fun of it: the previous Conan stories had taken places in analogues of India, Tibet, Greece, the American Frontier (“Beyond The Black River,” which is superb), the Spanish Main… all thinly disguised under some vague fantasy trappings. The stories are wonderful fun and, pleasantly, they also vary differently in tone and construction: some are straightforward adventures; others are carefully planned capers where Conan gets into or out of some sort of mess; there’s a couple of “lost race” stories – he even takes part in a “locked room” mystery in one!

But The Hour Of The Dragon is the jewel in Conan’s crown. It’s fast-paced, clever, and says a lot about Conan’s own philosophy towards civilisation (which runs pretty close to Howard’s) which is that Man is at his most honourable and pure when he is free of the trappings of cities and wealth. Despite having become king, Conan still believes that the simple life led by most people has more to offer than luxury and wealth. It’s shown here in his choice of allies and supporters: Conan is aided by pagan priests who were persecuted under his predecessor’s reign; he is freed from imprisonment by Zenobia, a slave girl in his enemy’s harem; another enemy is slain by the men he made homeless through his quest for wealth and power. All of this fits with Howard’s idea that Man becomes soft and selfish when exposed to “civilisation.”

It’s a great idea, but it unfortunately falls down with Howard’s own racism. No great surprise for someone who was a correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft’s but a lot of it can also be lain at the feet of the pulps themselves – they were the home of populist ideas for the main part, so expecting them to be a frontrunner in the battle for civil rights is possibly unrealistic. However, Howard does create characters from many walks of life and different cultures, but his racism is, sadly, fairly characteristic of the day. Although he does save his most deadly contempt for anyone above a certain level of “nobility,” it does frequently come across as merely a plot device rather than genuine class warfare. What does come across, though, is the admiration for characters who rise above the challenges that life and tyranny throw at them in the service of bettering the world for themselves and their own ideals.

Like I said at the outset, this is not a novel that everyone will enjoy. Literarily, it passes muster (although Howard’s use of adverbs and “said-bookisms” does grate a little), but in terms of readability and action and adventure, it fits more into one thin volume than a lot of authors manage in a fat trilogy.

You can find out more about Robert E. Howard and Conan at https://conan.com/