Imaro & Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush (review)

The sight of Ngatun in a cage angered him; the Ilyassai believed that the souls of their dead occupied the bodies of lions before returning to animate a human of a succeeding generation. Thus was Ngatun the most honored of foes; only by slaying a lion and freeing an Ilyassai soul to become human again could an Ilyassai youth gain full status as a man and a warrior.

• Title: Imaro, Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush
• Author: Charles Saunders
• Genre: Sword & Sorcery/Heroic Fantasy
• Year:2006, 2007 (1981, 1984)

As someone who reads a great deal, I can’t help but be a bit jaded. It’s inevitable really, and books that may have held my rapt attention as a teenager just get a passing nod as light entertainment now. When I picked up Imaro I expected little more than a decent, entertaining read. Instead I was blown away. Saunders’ name belongs without qualification alongside those of Leiber, Moorcock, Burroughs, Vance, and Howard — and that he isn’t better known, and that this groundbreaking epic has twice now been curtailed by publishers, is a great loss to fans of heroic fantasy fiction.

The premise of Imaro, in a nutshell, is a Sword & Sorcery tale in the Howardian tradition drawing upon African sources rather than the typical ancient and medieval Near Eastern and European ones. As Saunders states in his introductory piece to the first volume ‘Revisiting Imaro:’ “Imaro’s Africa, which I named Nyumbani, would serve as an antidote to the negative stereotypes about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ that crept — advertently and inadvertently — into the fantasy world of far too many other writers.”

But I get the impression that the unfortunate tendency to try to package Imaro as the ‘Black Conan’ has undermined its perception as anything other than a gimmick, as if Saunders was merely telling the same old stories with a different color palette. For the book’s initial release in 1981, DAW’s planned slogan was ‘The Epic Novel of a Black Tarzan.’ So moronic a slogan is, I think, somewhat indicative of the mindset that may have contributed to the series’ failure to find its audience.

Anyone who reads these books, however, soon discovers that such flippant, sound-bite style labeling does an extreme disservice to what is a major piece of storytelling. Having learned the best lessons of Howard, Saunders takes them to the next level. His prose rolls with a smooth efficacy that embodies the punchy pacing of pulp without any of its awkwardness or excess — a style equally at home in the midst of a clash of arms as it is in the careful evocation of a landscape. Like his protagonist, Saunders is at once lithe and powerful; he is a writer sure of his own voice and passionate about his story.

Nyumbani, Imaro’s alternate-African setting, is a triumph of secondary world creation. Like Howard’s Hyborian Age, Nyumbani blends the real with the invented to create a world that is at once teasingly familiar and wholly exotic. But Saunders exceeds Howard as a world-builder, for Nyumbani breathes with life — it is no mere backdrop to the action. Instead, the world of Imaro feels authentic from the very first page, and this setting is fundamentally a part of every character’s persona and the action of the story; shaping events, attitudes, and even Saunders’ use of metaphor. But unlike a modern ‘fat fantasy’ epic, Imaro pulls off this feat of world-building without resorting to vast slabs of description, managing to condense the epic feel of larger fantasy in a faster-paced Sword & Sorcery package that never once loses its momentum.

Imaro himself is a character that will naturally be compared with his Cimmerian cousin, for they do have much in common. Powerful, wild, and unlike other men, Imaro is a warrior in the truest sense of the word, fearing neither man, beast, or demon. But while Conan is an outcast and adventurer by choice, Imaro is a man without tribe or kin, literally a ’son-of-no-father’ as his mother’s people, the Ilyassai (based on the Masai), contemptuously refer to him. Though raised by the fierce Ilyassai to become a peerless hunter and warrior, Imaro parts ways with his tribe at an early age and is thrust into events of epic proportions.

Alone, Imaro is a man of the wilds, distrustful of others and bitter over his own treatment at the hands of his people — for, though Imaro clearly does not resemble the Ilyassai, having inherited the features of his unknown father, he had desired above all to be a part of them. But he is a man with powerful enemies — sorcerers, the users of mchawi; evil magic. With each episode the reader learns a bit more of the scale of the threat to Nyumbani such beings pose, and the otherworldly descriptions of Imaro’s numerous sorcerous opponents is some of Saunders’ best writing.

But Imaro is not a static character, and his growth toward a greater maturity and self-acceptance sets him apart from the typical Sword & Sorcery hero who exists more as an archetype around which the story revolves. Imaro’s encounters with love, community, responsibility, and friendship forge his character into something more noble — it is this process of his ‘taming,’ as he himself perceives it, that gives him a kind of humanity often denied the heroes of this kind of story.

It is with the second book in the series, Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush, that Imaro truly begins to come into the role he is destined to play. The world of Nyumbani opens up as well, and the numerous peoples and cultures and their links — sometimes apparent, sometimes not — to real world or mythological civilizations, infuse the setting with a richness and exoticism every bit as compelling as the plot. By the book’s end Imaro is on the verge of further changes and responsibilities, further humanizing ties, and himself makes a choice that reflects his new maturity.

Though much in the Imaro books is told episodically, having first appeared in short fiction magazines, the stories are not collections of aimless or unrelated tales. Not only are the books cohesive as novels, but the whole story feels epic from the start — and I can think of no other Sword & Sorcery saga that feels as much like a High Fantasy epic as Imaro.

But the epic is unfinished, and looks to remain so. Twice now it has come into print and been canceled mid-stride, before it was allowed to find its audience. Despite Saunders having completed four books and parts of a fifth , and despite the inarguable quality of the work, Night Shade Books has canceled the series after only two releases. While book store shelves are positively groaning beneath the weight of substandard and derivative fantasy, it is a real tragedy that something as fresh, entertaining, and rewarding as Imaro was not given the fair shake it deserved.

I don’t intend my reviews as advertisements, but I will advise anyone who is a fan of Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy to buy these books before they go out of print again. I hope that somehow this is not the last chapter in the Imaro story, and that it will one day get the recognition and success it warrants, and Charles Saunders’ name is spoken in the same breath as Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber.

It is still possible to track down the older Imaro printings, and Imaro 3: The Trail of Bohu is sometimes available from second-hand sources.

UPDATE: For those that have not yet heard the good news, please see Charles Saunder’s comments below and be sure to check his website for up-to-date information on the release of the full Imaro series, from Sword & Soul Media.

• Imaro on Amazon
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush on Amazon
• Charles Saunder’s website
• Charles Saunders interviewed and Sword & Sorcerey.org