Review: The Ship of Ishtar

The Ship of Ishtar is a fantasy novel by A. Merritt ("Abraham", though rarely credited as such), first published in 1924.

It hasn't aged well.

The premise of the story, like its initial publication date, lies somewhere between Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars series and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall: John Kenton, an antiquarian, scholar, and veteran of the recent World War, is sent by an artifact of Babylon into a demiplane populated by various peoples of the past, Babylonians featuring foremost, and goes about winning himself a princess.

Which is all well and good — there is a bit of disconnect where Merritt refers to “etheric vibrations,” even though ether was largely discredited even in 1924, but this is perhaps forgivable. No, the problem is rather that Mr. Kenton falls out of what little character he has been established with within the first few chapters, and begins to go on about “conquering” the world he finds himself in, or at least the ship he finds himself on, and “taking” the princess/priestess of Ishtar (whom, one would think, would recoil in terror rather than respond with attraction). Honestly it's kind of creepy to see a perfectly good Lovecraftian hero turned into a Howardian one.

The prose is the slightly purple sort of thing that you tend to encounter in 1920s adventure-pulp, the sort that ERB almost employed but largely rose above (at least in my memories thereof). One chapter is composed almost entirely of a description of several Babylonian deities in the course of a ritual-cum-parade.

Wikipedia says it's “universally hailed as a classic.” If someone could point out why to me, I'd be grateful, but as things stand, I can't rate it higher than a 1 on my usual scale.