Doctor Elwin Ransom, a philologist on a walking tour of the English Countryside, stumbles upon a disreputable former schoolmate of his, and a bellicose scientist, who are in the process of kidnapping a retarded man. Ransom stops the crime and is duped, doped and kidnapped in his turn; hauled off to an extra-dimensional version of Mars to be given as a sacrifice to the native aliens. As a protagonist Ransom is both flawed and sympathetic enough to maintain interest in his plight. He is an obvious avatar for the author, who acquits himself in an elegant style that manages to elevate the story above his ponderous lack of narrative flare. Reading fiction by C.S. Lewis is like reading Edgar Rice Burroughs if he had written in a heroin stupor, or perhaps viewing an MMA fight called by a Cato Institute Economist, with color commentary provided by a Fellow of the American Heritage Foundation.
Once landing on ‘Malacandra’ Ransom escapes from the bombastic Weston and libertine Devine and makes his way into a fairytale planet that has a well-thought out ecology. As a language professor he is able to communicate with the native species, which consist of three distinct species sharing a common deist cosmology and living symbiotically. Ransom predictably befriends the aliens that Devine and Weston have come to exploit.
Out of The Silent Planet is written in four distinct portions:
1. The abduction scenario which reads as an absurdly polite situation, but during which the reader gets to know Ransom, who does become a memorable character. Lewis explores the psychological borderlands of terror and joy as Ransom is born off on his adventure in ‘this detestable boat’.
2. The discovery phase, which made for an interesting story of a denatured man discovering himself through discovering a primitive culture. You might call this ‘A Man Called Horse if written by Tolkien’. The possible ecology of a low-gravity planet is well evoked. Lewis explores prejudice, how an alien individual causes less discomfort than an alien group, how biology might drive culture, a human’s irrational urge to represent ‘his species’, and again explores a mental borderland, where ‘thrill’ and ‘repulsion’ are mingled. The cover art by Kinuko Craft is a faithful rendering of the world Lewis painted with his words. The author uses Malacandra as a meditation on the destruction of primitive cultures and the abandonment of ancient wisdom by his contemporaries: with Weston standing in for the fascist warmonger and Devine representing the debased capitalist pleasure-seeker. Ransom discovers that the Malacandran’s know of earth, calling it ‘The Silent Planet’, ruled by the ‘Bent One’. Lewis really got me at this point, when an alien holy figure informs Ransom, who he calls ‘Small One’, that he is a refugee from a godforsaken world.
3. The apex of the story involves Ransom translating for the natives and his former kidnappers. This is the crux of the story, so I will only give away a few alien quotes; ‘love of no completed creature, but the very seed itself,’ and ‘Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood.’ In my mind, Lewis, writing in 1938, was discussing fascism through an alien prism, translated by his avatar Ransom. Lewis’ best moment was when he discussed through an alien intelligence the difference between a bent and broken sentient creature. It is also interesting to note, from this vantage, that Devine [representing decedent liberal capitalism], was only a slight bit better then Weston [representing militant imperialism and fascism]. Indeed, Lewis does a stellar job of exposing the British-style eugenics driven imperialism of the 19th Century, as nothing more than exported fascism. He smites two devils at once, as he therefore damns fascism [Homeland Security, The Patriot Act] as a xenophobic mirror image of colonialism, just a domestic version of Weston and Devine coming to your planet to screw you out of existence.
4. After managing to rise above his tepid narrative to a fulfilling and controversial peak, Lewis permits his withering academic ability to punish a reader for turning the page, to undo his work. Chapters 21, 22 and the postscript, if avoided, will net the reader a 4-star reading experience.
As a conceptual work, Out of The Silent Planet stands, in my opinion, with Orwell’s 1984, and, as narrative fiction, was no more poorly done. C.S. Lewis was an introspective genius that really had the finger in his mind’s eye on something of importance to us all. This fabulous little book was a respectable effort to make his hazy vision of what was unraveling within humanity in his own day accessible to the reader inclined to wonder about his condition. Two years after he completed this book about man's self-destructive godless nature, his world committed suicide.
