by C.S. Lewis, 1943
(2nd in the Space Trilogy)
Ransom is taken to Perelandra (Venus). It is a land of floating islands, friendly beasts, bubble trees, and yellow gourds delicious beyond belief. The Bubble trees refresh you better than a cool shower on a hot day. The Yellow gourds, which grow on trees, taste so good–they are filled with a delicious liquid. The land is spongy and soft. The nights are dark but warm and the days are beautiful and filled with yellow light. If it rains, it is warm and you can go to a special place where the trees shelter you. It’s Paradise.
Ransom meets the Green Goddess and they ride over to the fixed island–the one place the Green Goddess is not allowed to stay on overnight. While they are approaching (they rode giant fish) something falls into the ocean from the sky. It’s Weston in the spaceship. Turns out he’s been inhabited by Satan and is going to try to ruin Perelandra by tempting the Green Lady to move to the fixed island. She has gone back to the floating islands while Ransom stays the night with Weston on the fixed island. They make their way back to the floating islands and Ransom starts noticing horrible things – beautiful frogs cut open and left to die. It’s the evil in Weston. Then Weston starts his temptation, trying to convince the Green Lady that God wants her to disobey his commandment to live on the fixed island because it is her way to become wiser, older. The temptation goes on and on for days and days. Ransom is afraid to sleep but must – one time he wakes up and can’t find them. When he finally does, they are covered head to foot with clothing (Ransom and the Green Lady have been naked until now. She calls Ransom, Piebald, because he’s 1/2 white, 1/2 red due to trip through space).
The clothing is made of bird feathers, most likely killed by Weston.
Finally Ransom says for the 3rd time, this can’t go on. Has conversation in his mind about what to do and decides to physically fight and try to kill Weston’s body because then the Devil will leave.
The fight happens while all on the island are sleeping. It moves out to sea where they chase one another riding fishes, then it moves to an underground cavern where Ransom straddles Weston and strangles him to death he thought. Ransom is in pitch black and climbs forever until he finds light (from fire) and Weston unbelievably follows him. Ransom throws a boulder and smashes his face. Throws Weston into an abyss of fire. Ransom makes his way out finally to a beautiful beyond belief place. He nurses himself by a waterfall, eating grapes and drinking water. Once he’s well, he walks, climbs miles and miles through valleys up and down mountains until he climbs the highest mountain and meets the Oyarsas of Malacandra and Perelandra at the very top. He never got tired from all that walking and climbing.
There he is part of a beautiful ceremony where the man and the lady become King and Queen of Perelandra.
Hoorah! Ransom helps avoid another Fall – and evil is conquered and paradise forever for the man and the woman and their offspring!!!
Here are various quotes from Perelandra:
When Ransom has discovered the magical pleasure brought on by the bubble trees, Lewis writes: “Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him overnight from tasting a second gourd…This itch to have things over again…was it possibly the root of all evil?”
Ch. 6, after he finds the Green Lady and they have a conversation: “As soon as the Lady was out of sight Ransom’s first impulse was to run his hands through his hair, to expel the breath from his lungs in a long whistle, to light a cigarette, to put his hands in his pockets, and in general, to go through all that ritual of relaxation which a man performs on finding himself alone after a rather trying interview. But he had no cigarettes and no pockets: nor indeed did he feel himself alone. That sense of being in Someone’s Presence which had descended on him with such unbearable pressure during the very first moments of his conversation with the Lady did not disappear when he had left her. It was, if anything, increased…At first it was almost intolerable; as he put it to us, in telling the story, “There seemed no room.” But later on, he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments – at just those moments in fact (symbolized by his impulse to smoke and to put his hands in his pockets when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s on his own…But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne…Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. A first, of course, the wrong moments occurred pretty often. But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually learns to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make that inner gesture.“
Ch. 9: Ransom finds the first frog torn open and suffering. He decides he has to kill it to end its suffering. “The job seemed to take nearly an hour. And when at last the mangled result was quite still and he went down to the water’s edge to wash, he was sick and shaken. It seems odd to say this of a man who had been on the Somme, but the architects tell us that nothing is great or small save by position.”
He walks on and to his horror finds 21 more torn frogs and then sees Weston, “inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature’s head and ripping it open.” … “Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted.” … “The children, the poets, and the philosophers were right. As there is Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. And though there seemed to be, and indeed were, a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision.”
Then when Weston is trying to convince the Lady to sin, Ransom: “I will tell you what I say,” answered Ransom, jumping to his feet. “Of course good came of it. Is Maleldil a beast that we can stop in His path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost forever. The first King and the first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there were some to whom no good came nor ever will come.”
When the devil (Weston) was bugging Ransom while the Lady slept: “…then, like a minute gun, “Ransom…Ransom…Ransom,” perhaps a hundred times.
“What the Hell do you want?” he roared at last.
“Nothing,” said the voice. Next time he determined not to answer, but when it had called on him a thousand times he found himself answering whether he would or no, and “Nothing,” came the reply…Then all at once it was night, “Ransom…Ransom…Ransom” went on the voice. And suddenly it crossed his mind that though he would some time require sleep, the Un-man might not.”
Ch. 11 “He could not understand why Maleldil should remain absent when the Enemy was there in person. But while he was thinking this, as suddenly and sharply as if the solid darkness about him had spoken with articulate voice, he knew that Maleldil was not absent…Moreover, he became aware in some indefinable fashion that it had never been absent, that only some unconscious activity of his own had succeeded in ignoring it for the past few days.”
Then, when Ransom decides he must physically kill Weston’s body to rid Perelandra of Satan he hears the Voice (of God), “My name also is Ransom.”
I haven’t quoted any of his descriptions of Perelandra – beautiful planet full of floating islands – perfect temperature, friendly beasts, beauty beyond belief, and wonderful smells – everywhere and everything.
GREAT BOOK! A lot of philosophy too deep for me, though.