I loved Perelandra by C.S. Lewis when I first read it almost forty years ago. I re-read it in the 90s, but have not re-read it in this century till now. It certainly confirmed for me that one of the delights of re-reading in late life is finding so much of the book new and surprising. From the moment the hero confronts the villain, all the action was new to me.
The occasion for re-reading the book was the publication of a new book by my friend Jim Como about Perelandra titled:
Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis and His Favorite Book.
As the subtitle asserts, Perelandra was Lewis' favorite book among the 39 published during his lifetime--several more were published posthumously.
My friend Cliff and I are driving from Darmstadt, Germany, to Copenhagen next month and plan to read Jim's book on the trip. We also agreed to re-read Perelandra before the trip.
In the book, Lewis imagines Venus as a beautiful world of floating islands. The hero of the novel is Elwin Ransom, a philologist. He is sent to the world by angels to save the world, but not exactly knowing what to do. For much of the beginning of the novel, Ransom swims the towering seas of Perelandra, then eats the beautiful and wildly varied fruit on the floating islands.
It is a world that is just beginning with its own green-skinned Adam and Eve. At the opening of the novel there is no sin in the world. Sin appears in the form of the physicist Edwin Rolles Weston. He invents a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel and flies to the unspoiled world with his soul already taken over by Satan. By the middle of the novel the soul Weston is mostly gone from his body. Ransom starts referring to Weston as the Un-man.
The end of the novel is a fist fight on land and in the sea that ends in an underground cavern with a bottomless pit of fire! It is a fun story that finally ends with the crowning of the King and Queen of the new world. After fifty pages of fast-paced fights and action, the final scene is stillness and formality.
Although Perelandra is a re-telling of the temptation story from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the book is definitely not a Jewish story. All of its theology is deeply and explicitly Christian.
If you Google search Perelandra, the first and third links have nothing to do with the book. The first is Perelandra Natural Food Center in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Ltd. The unspoiled world of floating islands makes a much more vivid picture of natural perfection than the vague description in Genesis. I emailed the store in Brooklyn to ask about the name and got the following reply:
First sixteen books of 2022:
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
First Principles by Thomas Ricks
Political Tribes by Amy Chua
Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson
1776 by David McCullough
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen
