Adventure classics -- Lost in unfallen space

Perelandra

by C. S. Lewis

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I’m a C.S. Lewis fan, and there’s lots I love about his science fiction trilogy, the source of this week’s Adventure classic, Perelandra. But even I have to admit, as science fiction, it’s got to be one of the oddest ever written.

For anyone who thinks Lewis begins and ends with the Narnia books, here’s a brief synopsis. Mild-mannered English professor Elwin Ransom is kidnapped by fellow professor Weston and taken to Mars in the first of the series, Out of the Silent Planet. The inhabitants of Mars are nothing like either Weston or Ransom (not to mention readers) expected. Not just that the Martians aren’t human, but that they exist in a sinless state, never having experienced the kind of fall from grace that occurred when Earth’s Adam and Even succumbed to temptation.

In the second book of the series, Perelandra (later published with the more descriptive title, Voyage to Venus), Ransom takes flight to the second planet of our solar system. This time he travels with the aid of angelic spirits, with a mission to save Venus’s inhabitants from sinning as well.

Problems? Partly because Perelandrians don’t know sin (and partly because their planet is pleasantly warm), they don’t wear clothes. So neither can Ransom, their “first contact” with humans. Nothing wrong with that, except making it hard to find an illustration that doesn’t trigger Blogger’s adult content alert. And, not exactly a spoiler alert -- the book takes way too long to wrap up after the climax.

Despite Lewis’s long list of nonfiction writings, he was still young in the craft of writing fiction. But he learned fast.

In Perelandra, he foreshadowed the relationships between human beings and animals that would become the great charm of the Narnia stories. He demonstrated his talent for what science fiction writers call “world building” -- the ability to construct a fully-rounded fictional world -- and the descriptive powers he would lavish on Narnia as well.

Perhaps most important for a writer, he made his first attempt at developing a strong female character in Tinidril, the Venusian Eve. He would use that ability again and again, creating characters such as Lucy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the sister of Psyche in his last novel (and my favorite) -- Till We Have Faces.

For more about C.S. Lewis and his writings, see Adventure classics post of September 9, 2011, “A faun in a snowy wood. . . .”

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics begins a month of true-life adventures with record of a medieval Spaniard whose pilgrimage to Mecca may have saved his life -- The Travels of Ibn Jubayr.)

Adventure classics -- Light in every way

The Light Princess

by George MacDonald

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I’ll admit not catching most of George MacDonald’s sly satirical touches when I first read his mid-nineteenth century fairy tale, “The Light Princess,” in my family’s 1956 edition of The Junior Classics. But I knew that this story about a princess with a mind of her own -- light as it was -- was like nothing else I’d ever seen.

This wasn’t a princess who stayed obediently cloistered in a tower. Or whose idea of a rowdy night out was going to sleep for a hundred years. Not on your life. This was a princess who, when confined to her room, climbed out for a midnight swim.

And if a handsome prince happened to come along -- she wasn’t about to put herself out looking for one -- she didn’t worry about whether their friendship conformed to conventional Victorian standards of deportment. As long, of course, as he was a good swimmer. Swimming was her passion and water, indeed, was the only medium in which she could enjoy the freedom of not floating off into the atmosphere.

Because much as some of us may wish to register more lightly on our scales, this princess really was light -- a defect wished on her by a spiteful aunt, whose witchcraft had deprived the princess of her gravity in both the scientific and psychological senses.

Of course, she was able to regain her gravity by falling (one of MacDonald’s many puns -- and they are hilarious, not horrible) in love. And when her boyfriend the prince (he’s the obedient one in the story) offered to die by drowning to save her life, threatened by the actions of the same wicked aunt, the princess saved his life instead.

Given that the story is from the hand of the Scottish preacher turned professor turned author who C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged as an influence, both the
obedient and disobedient have their proper place in the scheme of things.

Lewis Carroll, who would complete Alice in Wonderland with MacDonald’s encouragement, wrote in his diary in July 1862 about a walk with MacDonald. They took MacDonald’s publisher the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” which included, in Carroll’s words, “some exquisite drawings by Hughes.”

I was unable to find any of the drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator Arthur Hughes, but I’ve snitched one of his more famous paintings, “Ophelia,” to go with this post. If that sounds too serious, consider the description of the fairy tale’s light-minded princess: “. . .she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. . .I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow -- morbidezza, perhaps.”

“The Light Princess” is included in numerous other editions of MacDonald’s works, with illustrations by artists as famous as Maurice Sendak and actor Humphrey Bogart’s mother Maude Humphrey. But it’s also available online at
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/George_MacDonald/The_Light_Princess/
Want to know more about George MacDonald? See
http://www.george-macdonald.com/
(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventures continues with Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey.)

Adventure classics -- An ape and a gentleman

Is there a more perfect modern myth than Tarzan of the Apes?  Modern, at least, as in ninety-nine years old this year – Edgar Rice Burroughs’s masterwork was first published in magazine format in 1912.  The writer was born in 1875 and after enduring health problems and a series of low-paying jobs, tried his hand at fiction without having any illusions about his skill as an author.  He recalled later that “although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read. . . .”

My sister and I devoured Tarzan books during what would now be termed our years as middle grade readers.  All I remembered was the adventure, so that when I started to read one to my then middle grade daughter, I was shocked by how awful the writing was.  Not only were the books filled with the overwhelming bigotry and racism of their era, but Burroughs also seemed to have fallen under the spell of the deliberately archaic language that “good bad writer” Rudyard Kipling used in writing about children, indigenous people and animals.  Fortunately, excellence in writing isn’t needed for the art of myth making.

“The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art – the art of myth-making, is a species of the literary art,” C.S. Lewis wrote as editor of nineteenth-century fantasy writer George MacDonald’s works.  “. . . myth does not essentially exist in words at all (and) can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words.”

Perhaps it was because he only aimed to tell an entertaining tale, without worrying about literary excellence or burdening himself with excessive knowledge of his equatorial African setting that Burroughs attained such purity as a transmitter of myth.  The myth of the lost child who grew up to be Lord Greystoke but, still more wonderfully, king of the apes.  In that mythic realm, Burroughs has few rivals.

(The copyright of Tarzan of the Apes has expired in the United States, so I hope not to go to jail for reproducing its dust-jacket illustration here.  Does anybody dare share memories of books they once loved that they have to bowlderize now for family reading?)