CONAN OF THE ISLES

Do you ever read something that hits you a little extra hard, not really through anything in the actual work, but rather because you're in the right frame of mind to accept it? I've been thinking about aging a lot recently.

I'm a baseball fan, and recently a pretty good baseball player named Juan Soto signed an absolutely massive contract (it's actually the biggest contract in the history of sports) with the New York Mets for fifteen years. I did the math in my head and realize that I'll be almost fifty by the time that contract is up. My apologies to anyone who's fifty or over reading this, but that kind of hit me like a truck. I don't think it's necessarily the number itself; I know fifty isn't really even old. But what freaked me out is the fact that this is one event- Juan Soto's tenure with the Mets- that will end when I'm 48. I think it would have felt entirely different if it hadn't been framed as me being the length of essentially one baseball contract away from my fifties.

So I was already kind of thinking about aging, but then this comes up in all my feeds on Reddit and Bluesky and such: James Mangold was a little hurt by audience reception to his Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny movie from last year. I thought Dial of Destiny was fine at best, but I was a little struck by his reasoning:

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"It hurt in the sense that I really love Harrison [Ford] and I wanted audiences to love him as he was and to accept that that’s part of what the movie has to say—that things come to an end, that’s part of life... You have a wonderful, brilliant actor who’s in his eighties. So I’m making a movie about this guy in his eighties, but his audience on one other level doesn’t want to confront their hero at that age. And I am like, I’m good with it. We made the movie. But the question is, how would anything have made the audience happy with that, other than having to start over again with a new guy?”

This just got me thinking about where my sympathies lie. 

Mangold is absolutely right about accepting a person where they're at, that things end, and that maybe there's something to learn there. I'd certainly have a definitive ending that goes out on its own terms than endlessly recycling the old, which pop culture loves to do these days. That ghoulish CGI Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus. Shitass AI recreations of Chris Reeve and other actors in The Flash. Star Wars endlessly looping back on itself, only allowing things to happen because they happened in older, better movies.

Later printings of the book replaced the original cover art with this righteous painting by our buddy Boris Vallejo.

I guess that brings me to Conan.

Conan of the Isles, the sixth Lancer book written by the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (probably written by Carter and edited by de Camp?) picks up in about the twentieth year of King Conan's reign. Life has gotten immensely stale for the Cimmerian in more ways than one. Hot-blooded adventurers aren't cut out for litigating in a cushy kingship, but also I sense some reticence on the authors' part to make Conan anything but a Gary Stu king. His kingship is broadly popular. He's firm but fair. Nobody dares invade his boring, prosperous kingdom. Eventually, a mystic red shadow begins taking the lives of Aquilonian citizens both high and low. This, as it should, sends him out into the world for another adventure.

For a moment, I thought this might mirror the beginning of Conan's life. The Cimmerian begins his career defending his homeland from a hostile colonizing force (remember how I said we're wondering where our sympathies lie?), I thought this might be an extended metaphor for colonizing forces defeating indigenous tribes through smallpox and the like. I was mostly wrong- it's not quite that interesting, but Conan of the Isles is still pretty decent and does indeed have something worthwhile to say.

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We follow Conan across the western ocean to what appears to be the islands that will one day dot the Gulf of Mexico (we were so close to being able to make "Conan retires to Florida" jokes!) judging by the Aztec- and Mayan-sounding names. I'm trying to not think too hard about the fact that the cultures in "Red Nails," over on the Hyborian continent, were also influenced by these same real-life cultures. As it ends, Conan still yearns for one last adventure or two and the book implies that he gets folded into the Quetzlcoatl myth in the New World. 

Much of the prose of this novel was really good. Especially in the beginning, it pounds away at this idea that Conan doesn't want to simply waste away in the tapestried halls of Tarantia. It does a great job setting up those themes. For a while, I was a freshman English major back in college reading "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" for the first time again.

Conan pants, he aches, notes to himself that he used to be a little quicker. I'd imagine that it's really tough to see that you're not able to do things that used to come easy to you. Obviously, nobody is as physically capable as the superhero aptitude of Conan, but I suppose it's doubly hard for people who were once razor-sharp athletes. And whereas the two latter Indiana Jones movies are constantly winking at the audience and asking, "Isn't it hilarious that he's doing this now that he's old? Wasn't this a lot easier when Indy was in his prime?," Conan of the Isles is playing those questions straight. It is instead saying, "Wow, it sure seems like it must be hard to be past your prime." 

We get a more introspective Conan here that makes this all possible, a little bit more like the one in "Queen of the Black Coast" or in Jim Zub's current Conan the Barbarian run for Titan. Conan is raging against the dying of the light, as are some of his comrades. One of the best scenes involves Sigurd Redbeard being marched toward an altar of human sacrifice. He's afraid at first, but then realizes that much like Conan, he and death are old shipmates, and Sigurd ends up laughing out loud. 

At the end of the book, Conan sails off to a new continent that no Hyborian has explored. There's a whole section on this book's Wikipedia page about what happens after the events in of the Isles, but dude, listen to James Mangold up there at the top of this blog post. Let it go. Things come to an end, and that's part of life. 

For a definitive end to Conan's life, read "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian." I'm going to be over here working on being okay with aging.

★★★☆☆

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