This is the second of the Cosmic trilogy
and it has a much more clearly and straight forwardly allegorical tale based
Genesis. This might appear to be a
limitation however the power of the telling is such that this gives a greater
depth of feeling for Eden
and for Eve.
The beauty and innocence of
Perelandra/Venus means the idea that it will be spoilt by the action of a human
(even a human taken over completely by an evil force) becomes genuinely
painful, the loss of The Fall became much more real than it had ever felt
before for me.
The persistence of Weston, the tempter,
gave me new sympathy for Eve. While Genesis appears to say Eve weakly ate the
Apple as soon as it was offered to her the tale of Perelandra makes it easy to
imagine that there was in fact a much longer encounter between Eve and the
Serpent. This chimes with our own
experience of temptation, often after an extended period that we find ourselves
doing that which in the first instance we knew was wrong.
Ransom’s role is perhaps more difficult to
resolve because the evil one is defeated by force, the fight is violent and
vividly told in a way that is hypnotic – hard to watch and yet impossible to
look away. How this fits into the
overall framework of Love that Lewis gives to the story is not clear.
After the fight there is a chase and from this
point on my engagement declined. At conclusion of the narrative the King and
Queen, figures of Adam and Eve, meet with Ransom. The King has been absence up until this point
and suddenly placing the planet into the hands of a “man”, while dynamic figure
of the Queen we have journeyed with seems to play at best second fiddle, jars
just a touch. At the very end there is a long pseudo dialogue which is full of
great sentiments and ideas, but while it is rich stuff I found myself skimming
over this – unlike Ransom I really did feel like they where talking for a year.
Overall I found this a more enriching
narrative than that of the first story, “Out of the Silent Planet”, which was a
good read but did not really push me to any new levels of thought.
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