A Voyage to Arcturus (David Lindsay, 1920)
I first heard about this book when reading a collection of essays on science fiction by C.S. Lewis. He consistently praised it as a work of imagination and depth, despite certain flaws as a novel and a work of prose. He's spot on in identifying the flaws. The first few chapters are very earthbound, and I was almost discouraged from continuing.
After we leave Earth behind, though, we enter the realm of pure allegory: not literal allegory like "Mercy and Hope traveled to the Sinless City," but imagistic, gut emotion allegory. I'm not even sure if Lindsey knew exactly what he was going for with every character and every scene, but the novel is a vast, poetic landscape where imagination runs amok. Life is short, grand, beautiful, brutish, unnatural, supernatural, and ever-changing.
Maskull, the main character, is a jaded, pessimistic man who is tired of the falsity and spiritual compromise that is life. He meets two other men, Krag and Nightspore, at a bizarre seance, where Krag tells Maskull he has found a way to travel to a planet where Maskull can have fresh experiences and meet new creatures. Maskull takes the bait, and on the planet Tormance he begins a journey that takes him through love, lust, fear, guilt, compassion, rage, learning, asceticism, and an awful lot of senseless death. His journey soon takes shape and purpose: he keeps hearing about a person called Surtur, who is supposedly the creator of this world. Surtur has many other names: Shaping, Crystalman, Muspel. Some people praise him as a benevolent deity, others fear him as a devil. Some ignore him and live their lives, while others spend their whole life in pursuit of him. Curiousity about this person drives Maskull across the planet. Every time he thinks he's closer to an answer, though, he realizes he has just found another unreality, another lie, another deception. No system, society, idea, or experience seems to tell the whole truth.
Ultimately his blind quest asks more questions than it answers, mostly about the nature of God, reality, and the soul. It's definitely a sweeping journey, though. There are regions of tranquil peace, where water is pure and substantial, taking the place of all food. There are regions of freakish danger, where mountains and abysses appear out of nowhere, destroying any creature that happens to be in their path. An island contains a natural musical instrument, but the music is violent and deadly to the people who are drawn to hear it. People grow and discard limbs, eyes, even senses, with each addition or subtraction changing their perception of the world. At times the imaginative reach of the novel defies the reader's ability to conceptualize: he tries to describe new primary colors, sounds, even a third gender. It's definitely a wild read, and it covers a lot of imaginative and philosophic ground.
Arbitrary Rating: 4.5 out of 5 alien suns
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