How to
describe the ineffable? Is it possible to iron the crinkles from the crumple? Can the pieces of a Faberge egg be put back
together? Do the glass beads
form some pattern? These are the
daunting questions I face setting out to review David Lindsay’s 1920 A Voyage to Arcturus. Thus I’m going to do something I’ve never
done before: review a book through the lenses of its descendants. In this way I might be able to
approximate—and approximate, only—the ideas possibly going through Lindsay’s
mind as he penned the story of Maskull, his strange visit to the planet
Tormance, and the myriad fantastyka there encountered.
Jack
Vance’s The Green Pearl, the middle
work of his Lyonesse trilogy, is a
book set in a rustic land reminiscent of Medieval England. But not all of it. One sequence of events taking characters on a
trip through a dimensional portal to an alternate world, all manner of the
bizarre is encountered in the aptly named Tanjecterly. From animals shaped like houses to strangely
colored flora and fauna, the land bears little in common with Earth. Tormance, the planet Maskull finds himself
traversing in A Voyage to Arcturus,
is much the same. Green skies, multiple
suns, blue plants and trees, and creatures that can only be pictured in the
mind’s eye, Maskull’s journey is as psychedelic as a Jimi Hendrix song. The fact that chaos rules the geological
formations—where a mountain exists one moment a lake may the next—only
heightens the alien feel, and leads one to wonder: why has Lindsay taken Maskull,
and by default, the reader to such a strange land?
Gene
Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is the
story of Severin, an executioner in training.
Severin’s coming of age taking him from the lonely halls of the
executioner’s guild to the wilds of the lands beyond, his quest for purpose in
life leads him to all variety of encounters with the fantastic and
mundane. People appearing he may or may
not have already met under different guises, and yet still, who may or may not
be corporeal, his conversations cover all fashion of the indirectly profound. Deeper meaning always seems to hover just
below the surface—often maddeningly close.
A Voyage to Arcturus plot arc is
no different. Likewise the story of a
man seeking the meaning of life and existence, Maskull meets with a wide
variety of people and strange customs traversing Tormance. Dialogue obviously written with purpose but
appearing party only to the participants upon first blush, the reader must peer
into the depths beyond and make ideological connections between the words
spoken and events which befall Maskull. And there are innumerable dichotomies
bouncing back and forth between: god/devil, male/female, stability/instability,
heaven/hell, beautiful/ugly, right/wrong, guilt/innocence, and so on. What is readily accessible only half of the
story, the allusions and metaphors, and how they are interlaced with plot, are
the ideological heart of the story and where one must search to piece together
the sub-text.
And the
third and final lens I will use is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Though best known for its high fantasy heroism, few are aware of a
deeper sub-text to the story. Partially
an act of catharsis for Tokien, he poured a lot of the melancholy and
disappointment he felt at having seen England go from being a quaint, innocent
country to one involved in two world-enveloping wars into Middle Earth. Though taking its conception of the fantastic
in a different direction, A Voyage to
Arcturus nevertheless also has the same feel of a person feeling
out and coming to terms with a crisis of cultural conscience of what world war meant to him
and his country. In a few of the scenes
Maskull is forced to kill based on the situation, while in others there is talk
of duty to one’s country to kill.
Moreover, many of the characters Maskull meets end up dead in some
fashion, whether by his own hand or by others around him. In this, he and Tolkien both echo their
returns to England as survivors of war on a scale like the world had never
seen. If there is a difference I would
note, however, it’s that Lindsay adds a strong dimension of spiritual
questing. Where Tolkien was a Catholic
and only indirectly included the doctrine in his stories, Lindsay imbues
Maskull’s quest with a wide variety of beliefs and philosophies, the emphasis
on ideology as much as story in trying to define what place the war (in the
larger terms of existence) held for him, and seems far less certain than
Tolkien.
And still
there are other books which popped into my head. Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (for the esoteric conversation and bizarre
moralizing), M. John Harrison’s Viriconium
and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris (both
for the Weird inherent to the atmosphere and mode of storytelling), Stephen
Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series
(for the noun-noun formula often used in forming names and places, e.g. Poolingdread,
Nightspore, Joiwind, Polecrab, and Maskull himself), and of course the
oft-mentioned comparison to John Bunyun’s Pilgrim’s
Progress (for the spiritually episodic nature of Maskull’s quest). To be fair, however, I think Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun forms the better
analog.
But in the
end, the offshoots and elements of A
Voyage to Arcturus are so diverse that I don’t know if it’s possible to
reclaim the smorgasbord of ideas and visuals from the diners’ bellies to see
how they looked on the plate. One can
gather from the three lenses I have chosen that A Voyage to Arcturus is a work of fantasy that entails a journey of
philosophical proportions. But that’s
about the limits of the overview. Any
deeper perspective or understanding requires a reading of the text.
(For an
amateur but nevertheless interesting attempt at capturing the novel on film, see here.)
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