A Writers View

Just finished, on 1/7/2022, book #2 for the “read 1 book a week” new years challenge.

The book was Perelandra by CS Lewis.

Wow.

All I can say is wow!

It has been a long time since a book, movie, or show has scared me so much to the point of not being able to fall asleep, but this one did it.

It follows the further adventures of our leading man Ransom, a middle-aged British scholar, who this time around rather then being kidnapped by morally depraved humans and taken to Mars, is spirited away by celestial eldila (what we would most probably call angels) and sent to Venus. The newborn planet of floating islands and innocent new creations has been invaded by another creature, a creature that Ransom has been sent to stop – the devil himself.

Once again, I don’t know if that’s a good enough summary of the book – but I can promise you, that that is the starting off point of it.

What was most frightening was how familiar the words of the devil sounded. From modern tv shows, books, education, social media, the news, academic circles, etc, etc… it was all too familiar.

What I liked was how Ransom has never been put out there as a saintly character or like some kind of superhero, he has always just been a middle aged, academic, Christian Englishman. He is very much a real person. The thoughts and feelings he has throughout the book (throughout both of the books in fact) are ones that I think would be familiar to almost everyone today.

And he had to fight the devil.

He was the one that had been sent, it could’ve just as easily been someone, anyone else, but it was him. So, he had to stand up and fight.

I have heard it said, and I believe it, that Ransom was based off of CS Lewis’s dear friend JRR Tolkien. What I love about that is that it is very clear in reading both Tolkien and Lewis, one a Catholic and the other a born again Christian respectively, that they are in the constant habit of having very intense deep discussions. I love how you can see a similarity of themes, ideas, characters and topics in both of their writings. (btw if my writing style is a little different, that is the direct response of having just spent the last few hours immersed in Lewis’s own writing style, hahaha!🤣)

I don’t really know how to put my thoughts into words… maybe I should wait a day or two to write a proper review, but I wanted to get something down now while the experience was fresh in my mind.

I have also heard it said that one of CS Lewis’s early academic essays that deals with the topic of space travel deals with the question that, and I’m paraphrasing here, “what if the alien life we discover, is a race that has never sinned? What then? We would have to be very careful to make sure that our race did not cause another to Fall.” Again, that’s all paraphrase, I haven’t read that essay myself, (not yet anyways!), but that is the question that is most definitely raised in Perelandra.

Ransom, is essentially dropped into a new Garden of Eden, on the planet Venus, where he meets a new Eve, and then our old devil, in the body of one the men that had kidnapped him in the previous novel, arrives to try to make her Fall.

…

1/10/2021 – I took a few days to try to collect my thoughts a bit more coherently, and still all I can say is YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK! It is so good!!

10 out of 10, 5 out of 5, this book is everything!

Now… what should I read next?

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