Over Christmas I've been reading C S Lewis. I haven't had one of his books off the shelves for a while, and his space trilogy I read long ago. I've just finished Out of the Silent Planet, and found it a strange and attractive story, old fashioned in its narrative structure, political incorrectness at times off the scale, characters nearer caricature than convincing weight bearers of the story. But the imagination to write what is effectively a moral fable, and to draw the reader into an alternative reality where Lewis persuades us to believe the frankly unbelieveable is why his books remain in print. We are persuaded to conceive the possibility of disembodied personality, counter intuitive affective responses to creatures normally repulsive to our tastes and aesthetics, and to do all this with a background mythology resonating with Christian theological themes of sin and evil, judgement and redemption, creation and uncreation and new creation.
Sometimes questions which haunted Lewis himself are evident in the telling of the story and the conversation of the characters. In a discussion of time and memory, pleasure and sorrow, one of the creatures is puzzled by the human propensity to possess, repeat, hold on to whatever briongs pleasure, thereby reducing the significance and joy by diluting it with repetition. The creature asks, "How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?" As a way of welcoming each day gratefully as gift and being content to live in the joy or pain of the moment and thr reality that is now, there are few more telling and moving questions. Wisdom sometimes exudes almost unconsciously from lewis when he is at his best.
The book was written in 1938. Reading it reminded me of the dated and contrived production of the 1960 film the Time Machine. Our contemporary familiarity with advanced technologies such as AI, nuclear science, genetic science, IT and the now ubiquitous electronic devices which reconfigure the very nature of communication, are so far ahead of Lewis's science fiction range that there is an inevitable naivete about his portrayals of human technology, scientific theory and cosmology. However the core of the story as fable and construal of human ethical failures and dilemmas remains as a moral narrative which still delivers. In any case I'm glad to have read it again.
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