Book Review: Out of the Silent Planet

I'm generally a big fan of C.S. Lewis and his writing. I should be. I spent four years of my life helping to transcribe his personal letters at the Marion E. Wade Center on Wheaton College's campus. I have always felt he gets the heart of matters so well and eloquently turns a phrase to bring insight into difficult subjects of religious belief and philosophical understanding. Nonetheless, I'm not a big fan of space travel literature. Despite his skilled pen, I didn't fully appreciate this short novel, Out of the Silent Planet, the first in a trilogy. I know Lewis meant it to be an allegorical tale, but it didn't stir me in the same way his other works moved me.

Dr. Elwin Ransom is on a walking tour when he stumbles onto the house of a former schoolmate and a famous physicist. The two men abduct Ransom and take him on a spaceship to the planet Malacandra. Upon their arrival, Ransom is about to be sacrificed to an alien life form called the "sorns" when he flees and encounters other species of life on the planet. He is eventually drawn to the highest life form on the planet and must plead his cause hoping to escape back to earth.

The inside cover of the Scribner Classics edition I read touted, "In the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language's most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time." It also says, "the Space Trilogy is rivaled in this century only by Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings." Hmm. Wishing I loved it as much as that.

The book held my attention and was accessible but didn't seem to get anywhere, apart from drawing conclusions about the opposition of good versus evil and the problem of sin (or "bent" individuals). Perhaps I was simply not in a good frame of mind to dig deeper, but the story left me as cold as the space Dr. Ransom encountered. I read the book to take part in The Deliberate Reader's on-line book club, so I will be interested to read the reactions of fellow readers in that group. Hopefully, they extracted much more from it than I did and will lead me to see the value of the book. Several Amazon reviewers indicated that the third book is the best by far, but do I have it in me to continue with the series long enough to get to book three? We shall see.