This is the second book in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy and it's a failure of a novel. The author attempts to tell the story of the Fall of Man in a sci-fi setting--except this Adam and Eve manage to avoid the Fall.
There are aspects of the book that function. There are magical and surreal scene settings right out of Edmund Spencer's epic poem The Faerie Queene--complete with dragons, serpents and an ingenue. There are certain thought-provoking discussions between the characters on original sin, on the nature of knowledge, on the value (and dangers) of curiosity, and on the nature of obedience and rebellion towards God (see here the creepy and well done Chapters 9 and 10). There are scenes of demonic possession, as well as scenes of physical and psychological combat between the protagonist (Ransom) and the antagonist (the demonically-possessed Weston) that are composed well enough that the reader feels great sympathy for the poor possessed Weston--especially during his brief, pitiable moments of freedom from the demon. (These scenes brought Scott Peck's striking book People of the Lie to my mind.)
But Perelandra simply doesn't work well. The pacing is off, the world-building seems largely implausible, there are plot events that feel forced, and the book drags--to a degree you wouldn't think possible for a 190-page novel. The last fifteen pages are nearly insufferable as the unfallen Adam and Eve engage in page after page of pseudobiblical dialog, while the author struggles with the paradox of ineffability: you simply can't write about something that's genuinely ineffable. Perhaps the author set himself a task beyond his abilities. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with an author reaching beyond his grasp, this novel lost my interest to the point where I'm not going to bother to read the third book in the series.
[As for the notes to follow, you can probably read them in ten minutes or so if you'd like a decent CliffsNotes version of the book with all the key plot events. Enjoy!]
Notes:
Chapter 1Our narrator, Lewis, makes a visit to Ransom at his house, psychologically and emotionally maneuvered by (evil) Eldila on the way to his cottage.
Chapter 2
Ransom is to be put in a coffin-like box which somehow makes its way to Venus/Perelandra, and he's supposed to play some unknown role in a great conflict. His assistant and Lewis are supposed to see him off and return when called to receive him as he returns, bringing a doctor with them. The next chapter beings the story-within-the-story where Ransom tells Lewis (and the reader) what happened.
Chapter 3
The description of Ransom's descent and arrival on Perelandra sounds like something out of Christian or Jewish mysticism. He's in this colorful, watery world, floating on huge waves, he grabs onto a sort of raft of vegetation, it turns out these are large floating islands.
Chapter 4
Ransom sleeps, wakes and sees a dragon-like being, about the size of a great Dane and with the same amiable behavior. He explores the floating island, wonders what his purpose is on this planet. On a neighboring floating island, he sees a human form riding on a fish's back to the shore. Ransom yells until he's hoarse at the figure who takes no notice. Later he gets the figure's attention, it turns out to be a woman, an alien; she was expecting someone else, and she shows clear disappointment at mistaking him for that someone else. Soon after she laughs at him. He attempts to swim to the neighboring Island, but it starts to get too dark to see, and he gets lost; finally, he finds land by accident in the dark and falls promptly asleep.
Chapter 5
Ransom finds several islands very close together after he awakes, as if they drifted together somehow; He speaks to the alien woman. They have a completely different conceptual framework for reality, they don't really understand each other even though they literally understand each other's words. The woman is a sort of deity, she has a powerful innocence about her, and Ransom can't look directly at her most of the time. "He knew now what the old painters were trying to represent when they invented the halo."
Good quote here on our need to have exactly what we want, and on our inability to be satisfied with what we get:
"'What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you can make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.'"
Chapter 6
More conversation between Ransom and the Lady, a discussion of fixed land and floating islands. The Lady tells Ransom that on Perelandra no one is allowed to sleep overnight on fixed land.
A shooting star appears, and then a wave passes under their floating island; clearly something fell into the sea. They decide to go to fixed land and get a view from higher up, and they ride a pair of fish there. They see a spherical vessel; the reader gets a restatement of the plot from Out of the Silent Planet, a discussion of how immoral beings seek to spread from Earth and colonize other worlds. "...that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome." Ransom is worried that the vessel contains Weston, the antagonist from the first novel--or worse, Weston with a group of accomplices. It turns out to be Weston, alone.
Chapter 7
Weston appears to be a changed man: "I was seriously mistaken in my conception of the whole interplanetary problem when I went to Malacandra." Western articulates a sort of biological philosophy of spirituality; it rubs Ransom the wrong way and seems anti-Christian to him. Weston claims that a spiritual force is guiding him. It comes off to the reader as megalomaniacal. And then Weston has a fit, as if he's taken over by a demon.
Chapter 8
Ransom rides a fish from the fixed land to an island and then he falls asleep, waking up later to hear two voices; it turns out to be Weston and the Lady, Weston is persuading her of various things, he sounds unctuous and slippery; Ransom gets the feeling that he was there just to listen not to intervene.
Chapter 9
Ransom wakes and sees a frog-like creatures (this is from an earlier chapter when the author described the various life forms on the planet). The creature has his back slashed open with a horrible wound; Ransom is horrified to see the first instance of death or injury on the planet. It turns out that Weston did this to the creature, in fact Ransom finds that Weston killed and tortured many of these frog-like creatures, although it's not really Weston, it's like a demon has taken him over. Ransom sees Weston, but actually faints after perceiving the evil in his face and body. At this point Ransom realizes he had been called to Perelandra to somehow stop the being ("the bent one") which has invaded Weston.
Ransom recovers and seeks out the Weston being, and he finds Weston and the Lady in conversation. Weston is trying to convince her to live on the fixed land, basically attempting to persuade her to disobey fundamental laws of the planet. Ransom tries to convince the Lady that Weston is evil. Weston here is a Satan-like character convincing Eve to do something forbidden.
Interesting discussion here of the "fortunate sin" of Adam, felix peccatum Adae, the idea that original sin and the Fall was a "happy transgression" because it led to much greater good in the long run; The point here is that it led to man's great civilizations, his great creations and also that it ultimately led to Christ as well to free man from sin; thus the idea here was that the original sin was a good thing, not a bad thing; this is a full-fledged debate between Weston's possessed body, Ransom, and the Lady.
This chapter is both creepy and thought-provoking. Quite well done.
Chapter 10
The possessed Weston being (Ransom now calls him "the un-man") continues pozzing the lady with compelling "so strong, so brave, so fierce"-type stories of women throughout earth's history who triumphed magnificently despite the disapprobation of their societies. It's interesting here to see a sort of third-wave feminism rendered here in mid-20th century literature.
The author here evokes quite an image of a disgusting homunculus-like creature with his description of the taken-over Weston character. [I feel terrible for saying this, but I can't help but see the homunculus-economist Paul Krugman in my mind here: stammering, muttering, gesticulating, spitting--all in an effort to justify the cruelly extractive modern financial system!]
More on the debate between the tempter and the Lady; it's interesting how he taps into her narcissism and vanity; how he cultivates in her a desire for attention and induces her towards rebellion; also it's fascinating how he furthermore leads Ransom into losing his temper at these transparent tricks of rhetoric; the demon is savvy in both enraging Ransom and then by making still more rhetorical capital out of the fact that Ransom got enraged ( as in: "look how this other guy lost his shit, clearly his arguments are also shit, you should believe me all the more!"). This multi-chapter scene (across Chapters 9 and 10) is a sort of intellectual violation of an innocent ingenue.
Chapter 11
Ransom feels a presence; and there's sort of an internal discussion in him (one could read this as a discussion about faith and trust in God), where Ransom feels like he's being cheated or misled by being brought in to help a situation of spiritual warfare when he actually has no power to help; he feels outmatched and he wonders if the God-figure in this drama even wants to achieve victory at all. Ransom goes back and forth in his mind, should he just trust in "the plan" or instead feel hurt and misled, what?
There's an underlying theme here of how you must have the ability to understand evil in order to defeat it; that innocence, or a genuinely innocent person, is never prepared to do the job.
At the end of the chapter Ransom realizes that regardless of how impossible or fear-inducing the situation is he'll answer the call and do what he has to do.
Chapter 12
Ransom and the possessed Weston fight; Ransom is surprised that Weston has normal human strength, not superhuman strength like he expected him to have as a demonically possessed being. The fight goes Ransom's way, and the Weston character runs away; then we have a chase scene both on land and out into the open sea of the planet.
Chapter 13
Ransom continues chasing after Weston, both of them riding the "taxi fish" that characters can ride on this planet; Ransom sleeps even while in pursuit; he sees some of the beings who live under the water, they are humanoid in nature; he tries to eat some seaweed, contemplates space, God and reality. He catches up to Weston, who appears to be his normal self. Weston is scared, his body is broken up and badly injured from the fighting. They have a conversation, ultimately Weston turns out to be pretending that he's himself and attacks Ransom again dragging him under the water.
Chapter 14
Ransom survives and manages to strangle the Weston un-Man. Then we have some odd Macguffin situations here: Ransom realizes he's in a cave; somehow they emerged from under the water during their fight; it's perfectly dark and he can't see anything; he begins climbing upward to try to see if there's an exit. The rest of this chapter tells the story of his escape from this underground cavern, kind of an escape from hell or purgatory. Then he sees Weston from below with a large insect-like being crawling alongside him, they both approach Ransom. The scene that follows lacks believability, but suffice it to say Ransom goes from a place of fear and loathing of the insect-like creature to losing his fear; Ransom defeats Weston once and for all.
Chapter 15
Ransom finds himself at the peak of a mountain made of a glass-like or ice-like material; he carves a memorial to Weston in it, spends time there recuperating, and then descends down through various unearthly landscapes, seeing various unearthly animals as well, including an elephant-like animal that sings. After a tremendously long journey through strange landscapes, Ransom walks without being tired, recovers from his wounds, and is left with only one remaining injury: a bleeding wound in his heel that won't heal up. He discovers the coffin-shaped spaceship that will take him back to Earth.
Chapter 16
Ransom is now in the presence of two Eldila; he learns that the King and Queen of Perelandra remained innocent, they didn't fall as Adam and Eve did. These eldila manifest in different forms for Ransom, he helps them choose a proper form for the King and Queen. After a kind of metaphysical conversation on the nature of the Eldila, many other beings from the planet gather around, and seeing all these beings, Ransom thinks to himself, "A regular Noah's ark!... But there will be no ark needed in this world." [Unfortunately this quote is the author needlessly beating the reader about the head with the book's central theme.] The King and Queen arrive and everyone kneels in front of them.
Chapter 17
The King character basically has the appearance of Jesus. The author is really getting wrapped around the axle here trying to describe something while wanting to give the impression that it can't be described, this is the central paradox of trying to write about something ineffable, and lot of the book consists of this kind of writing. There's sort of a ceremony here and a lot of insufferable speechmaking between the Eldila (angels here, allegorically) and the Adam and Eve/King and Queen characters.
"It is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young; there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep." In a sea of tiresome dialog, there's an interesting comment here on levels of understanding evil.
The last 10 to 15 pages of this book are nearly insufferable, basically pseudobiblical speechmaking about the origins of the universe and the blessedness of Maleldil (the godlike being in charge of this book's universe). There's a weird multi-dimensional dance of all the beings; Ransom "sees" it but yet the word "seeing" is inadequate (again, the paradox of ineffability). And then everyone is gone, just the Adam and Eve/King and Queen characters remain. And then Ransom climbs back into his white coffin-like ship and is transported back to earth.
Vocab:
Anthroposophy: a spiritual new religious movement founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience
Bole: the main stem of a tree; usually covered with bark
Congé: an unceremonious dismissal or rejection of someone
Inter-sidereal: between two or more stars
Orotund: (of the voice or phrasing) full, round, and imposing; (of writing, style, or expression) pompous or pretentious
Fissiparate: to divide into separate parts or groups
Surd: (in mathematics) the irrational root of an integer "a surd number"; (in phonetics) a speech sound uttered with the breath and not the voice (e.g. f, k, p, s, t ) "a surd consonant"
Mythopoeic: of or relating to the making of myths; causing, producing, or giving rise to myths
To Read:
The Battle of Maldon (10th century English/Anglo-Saxon poem)