The Space Trilogy

Kenneth Tynan, the British drama critic, theater historian and playwright, used to play a rather odd game with his old Oxford tutor, C. S. Lewis. Lewis asked Tynan to pick a number from one to forty to identify a bookshelf in Lewis's sitting room at Magdalen College. Another number from one to twenty would select a book on that shelf. In similar fashion, Tynan was required to pick a random page and then a line on the page, which he read aloud. Lewis then immediately named the book and discussed the material on that particular page.*

This little anecdote is remarkable - accordingly I shall make some remarks about it. It is easy to forget the vigorous intellects behind the stories we take for granted. The common metaphor of a steel trap is grossly inadequate for describing the depth, discipline, and multi-dimensional capacities of Lewis's mind, which could perhaps be compared more fairly to a honeycomb, full of delicate chambers and intertwined passageways, tidy, sweet, and very much alive.

For someone who could digest books as surely and easily as he could digest broiled fish, inventing planets, histories, and civilizations was simply a favorite pastime. Here was a man who was so in touch with the way things are that he could go beyond them into the way things are not, and further still into the way things ought to be.

Out of the Silent Planet
In this the first volume of the Trilogy, Dr. Ransom finds himself shanghaied to a distant planet called Malacandra, quite beyond the reach of the Royal Navy. Once there, he is confronted with several new species (old species, really, but new to him), and must learn how to interact and survive. This strange situation gives Lewis ample opportunity to comment on what it means to be - and act - human.

This book is the shortest of the three, while simultaneously managing to lay the groundwork for the rest of the series.

Perelandra
Similar to Narnia in The Magician's Nephew, Perelandra is a virgin world of innocent pleasure and unspoiled beauty. As you might guess, the enemy is not about to let the truth reign free and unchallenged, and before long the battle lines for the soul of Perelandra are drawn. The nail-biting temptation narratives that constitute the core of the book are by turns exquisitely painful and breathtakingly profound, leaving you with a new sense of how convincing the Devil's sleight-of-hand can be.

It is in the latter part of Perelandra where we find Lewis's famed "sexless" male and female archetypes - keeping alive the ancient mythical significance of Mars and Venus. This book seems to be the most oft-quoted of the Trilogy.

That Hideous Strength
Somewhat disappointingly, no character in That Hideous Strength is abducted for a hair-raising interplanetary expedition. However, while the story remains rooted in familiar earthen soil, things are far from safe. Lies are falling like acid rain, history is being plundered, and the peaceful English countryside is being overrun by obscene machinery. All this creates a vivid backdrop for Lewis to demolish some of his favorite targets - nihilism and pragmatism - in broad, unanswerable strokes.

This story reminded me of the work of Frank Peretti, mostly because of it's deeply conspiratorial plot. It is quite different from the first two books, but arresting in its own way.

"He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void." -C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 353

*C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, Signature Edition (HarperCollins, 2005), 780

Images courtesy of lethalpublishing.com and elidourado.files.wordpress.com