Conan the Barbarian Omnibus – Robert E Howard
Allen & Unwin Crows Nest, 2009
653 pages
RRP: AU$29.99
ISBN: 978-1-74175-851-1

Reviewed by Kate Smith

Conan the Barbarian was excellent.  It was an easy enough read to be enjoyable, with enough in what would appear to be a fairly basic premise to be interesting.  Many people are acquainted with Conan at least in passing but this will be knowledge from the movies that have been made at various times.  Less people, perhaps, will be familiar with the novels that have been written by others.  I have enjoyed the movies but not so much the novels, and I approached this volume of short stories curious but without any great expectations.  Very quickly I was engaged.

The stories of Conan already published as books and movies were based on these original tales by Robert E. Howard.  A prospective reader does not need to be a fan of either but they do need to be able to enjoy the style.  Conan is a barbarian from the North and acts on ‘barbarian’ principals.  There is a lot of violence, bloodshed and semi-naked women.  The stories are short enough to be enjoyed but then put  down.  Read together they give a sense of the passage of time and the growth of the lead character.  Read in conjunction with the introduction, they also give a sense of time passing, of empires rising and falling, and of the place of one man within this.

Personal beliefs of Conan as well as those stated by other characters are food for thought, something I did not expect to find in the short stories.  His desires, his background and his attitude to fate will simply be a tale for some readers but will encourage further consideration in others.  They are what you want them to be; never a grand philosophical treatise, but something more than simply gore and bloodshed.

However, the prospective reader should be aware that the collection of stories is a product of the times in which it was written.  Racial and gender stereotypes are bases for most, if not all, of the material and it may be easy for the reader to take offence at many of the characters portrayed.  Howard was writing in the United States over seventy years ago and attitudes that are reflected in his work were relatively common at the time.  The reader needs to be aware of this, and if they are able to accept and overlook this in order to read the stories then they are in for a thoroughly enjoyable read.  If, however, such beliefs as the ‘black as barbarian’ and the ‘woman as weak’ are offensive and cannot be overcome, then this is not the book
to read.

Conan the Barbarian was an enjoyable read both in terms of the construction of the stories, the ideas that Howard was trying to communicate, and as an exercise in understanding texts written at different times and from different cultural backgrounds.