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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
There was just something about the imagery in this book. i could smell and feel "Venus" when reading it. I still feel like if i imagine hard enough i can feel her floating land beneath my feet.
adventurous
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Confinement, Death, Misogyny, Sexism, Transphobia, Violence, Blood, Colonisation
gender essentialism
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Out of the Space Trilogy, this was the hardest to get through. It’s a lot of pretty imagery and fantastical imaginings but the storyline is pretty sparse.
The new world of Perelandra was not a mere repetition of the old world Tellus. Maleldil never repeated Himself. As the Lady had said, the same wave never came twice. When Eve fell, God was not Man. He had not yet made men members of His body: since then He had, and through them henceforward He would save and suffer. One of the purposes for which He had done all this was to save Perelandra not through Himself but through Himself in Ransom. If Ransom refused, the plan, so far, miscarried. For that point in the story, a story far more complicated than he had conceived, it was he who had been selected.
Perelandra is the second entry in the Space trilogyand it tells the story of Dr. Elwin Ransom who is now tasked to travel to the planet Perelandra by Maleldil Himself. When he arrives, he finds a planet covered in water with moving islands, seemingly abandoned with only strange animals inhabiting them. That is until he meets the Green Lady, the only human-like being present who is in search of the other human-like being, the King.
“And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.”
After a few conversations, Ransom is quick to parallel this Venus as a world where ‘Adam and Eve never sinned.’ The Green Lady knows nothing of death, the existence of millions of people or going against Maleldil’s will. She is simply in search of her husband. But Ransom’s arrival brings a chance of her growing in knowledge.
After days of conversing with the Green Lady and traveling to various islands, Ransom is still not certain the reason as to why he was sent to Perelandra. The place is essentially a paradise. That is until an old acquaintance reappears bringing with him a dark force. Ransom then realises that he has been sent as a representative of Maleldil to fight against the most destructive human weakness—temptation.
For now he realised that the word ‘human’ refers to something more than the bodily form or even to the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth.
I will be getting into spoilers from here on, so beware. This book was incredibly funny. The moment Ransom finds out he has to stop the Green Lady from falling into temptation and his thought process leads him to deciding he can’t beat ‘the devil’ through argument, so he lands on beating him physically. He thinks back to the Bible and can’t help but find it ridiculous that if an elephant had stepped on the snake when he started yapping, Adam and Eve would never have sinned. But Maleldil is like, “No, you’re right.” So Ransom goes ahead and beats Weston black and blue. Do you know what this means? It means C. S Lewis turned his best friend J. R. R Tolkien into Philologist Jesus and sent him to space to fistfight the devil. Iconic behaviour I’m afraid.😌
Let’s not forget this hilarious moment as well:
Here were two human beings, thrown together in an alien world under conditions of inconceivable strangeness; the one separated from his spaceship, the other newly released from the threat of instant death. Was it sane—was it imaginable—that they should find themselves at once engaged in a philosophical argument which might just as well have occurred in a Cambridge combination room? Yet that, apparently, was what Weston insisted upon. He showed no interest in the fate of his spaceship; he even seemed to feel no curiosity about Ransom’s presence on Venus. Could it be that he had traveled more than thirty million miles of space in search of—conversation? But as he went on talking, Ransom felt himself more and more in the presence of a monomaniac. Like an actor who cannot think of anything but his celebrity, or a lover who can think of nothing but his mistress, tense, tedious, and unescapable, the scientist pursued his fixed idea.
“The key of human destiny was placed in my hands. It would be unnecessary—and painful to us both—to remind you how it was wrenched from me in Malacandra by a member of a hostile intelligent species whose existence, I admit, I had not anticipated.”
“Not hostile exactly,” said Ransom, “but go on.”
“The rigors of our return journey from Malacandra led to a serious breakdown in my health—”
“Mine too,” said Ransom.
Weston looked somewhat taken aback at the interruption and went on.
I enjoyed this installment more than the first and am looking forward to reading the third. Sci-fi is never my go to genre as far as reading is concerned, but the themes in this book made it a wonderful read!
adventurous
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
adventurous
challenging
tense
slow-paced
It’s an interesting premise i guess but it’s very slow and long winded. The dialogue seems like it’s going in circles with no significant progression of plot. There’s also a lot of half thought out metaphors that seem to be a blend of religion and magic, but that’s just how i perceived it.