Perelandra

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First edition cover
Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis


I am so ridiculously late with this post.  I read this book somewhere in the beginning of October for a Goodreads readalong, but I've been chronically behind with book posts since then and poor Perelandra keeps getting left on the bottom of the pile.

Ransom, who journeyed to Malacandra, is now "called" on a journey to Perelandra--Venus.  He will be transported there, and he'll have a job to do, though what the job will be is a mystery.  Once he gets there, he discovers that Perelandra is a new, young world--an ocean world with floating islands--and that it is an Eden, populated only with the first two people who will live there.  Once again, Weston has traveled to this new world with plans to exploit it somehow, but soon he is taken over by another intelligence whose goal is to turn Perelandra into another silent planet.  Ransom sets himself the task of stopping him.

This is a stranger story than Out of the Silent Planet, to my mind.  Lewis sets up a second Eden and it's Ransom's job to stop a second Fall.  It's got a lot more overt theology in it--that characteristic style, only in novel form.

I like this book, but it's quite difficult to talk about it without either giving everything away or sounding weird, probably both.


This is my copy of Perelandra.

Comments

  1. CleoNovember 18, 2014 at 9:27 AM

    The first time I read it, Ransom wandering about Perelandra reminded me of the Hobbits wandering around the Old Forest in The Fellowship of the Ring. I finally wanted to scream at them, get out of there, before I fall asleep! I perhaps lost a little of that feeling with Perelandra but it didn't completely go away. :-Z

    I'm still not certain how I felt about this book. I'm saving my opinions until I read the third in the trilogy. I have another week and then one of my courses ends and I can finally concentrate on it.

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