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?
