C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy(Spoilers)

I heard about this series for a while and since I liked the Narnia books well enough, I picked them up and gave them a whirl.

Out of the Silent Planet was good, with an interesting blend of religion and sci-fi. Maybe not much in the way of plot, but with two more books to go, I figured I’d see what developed.

Prelandra was a change of pace, and definatly not what I expected. The idea of a whole planet that floated on the waves was interesting, though the venus as eden motif got a little heavy handed. That and apparently the moral is that if you can’t out argue a demon about original sin, just bash the possessed guy’s head in.

Still, the talk of the siege of earth lifting soon was enough to make me want to see where he was going to go. So I proceed onto “That Hideous Strength”(which may be one of the coolest titles ever).

Sadly, the book not so much. I had a rant for this, but I’ll keep it down to the bullet points.

[ul]
[li]Mark may be the dumbest protagonist in a “classic” ever. Even when his new employers kill a guy who tries to leave the company and threaten him if he tries to leave by implicating him in the murder of the last guy who tried to leave. Mark still seems more interesting in a “Concrete position” and “Fixed Salary” then the fact his employers are evil.[/li][li]I can’t decide what annoys me more: That NICE is an evil corporation that makes UMBRELLA look both competent and realitivly altruistic by comparison(They control the entire press and presumably parts of the government, but have to resort to threatening people who might not want to work there after the initial interview via blackmail and murder. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let people go, because it’s not like anyone’s going to believe them anyway if they talk about the company being run by a zombie head. [/li]
Or the fact that, well frankly, NICE seems to be a strawman for everything Lewis distrusts, namely Atheism and Science. And he goes out of his way to make NICE extra evil just in case you wanted to sympathize with them. Like having one of the bad guys talk about improving the human race by slaughtering all the brown peoples of the world. Or talking about how the moon is such a great place because they no longer have organic life there. Or that war is really just a way to get rid of the lower classes who are too populus. You know, beliefs that only a few kooks in the world actually hold(Even racist imperialists merely want to use the brown people of the world as slave labor, not exterminate them and people who believe war is a tool to get rid of poor people use that as a reason war is bad, not why there should be more of it).
[li]The biggest flaw: The book runs out of book long before it runs out of story. So you have bad guys taking over a town so they can get access to Merlin so presumably they can rule the world(though their own opposition seems to be a small and perhaps useless band of good guys led by the protagonist from the previous books(and they have a bear). Fine, not the most original idea in the world but it’s been used well before. So the battle between good and evil is set up…and then it ends. Merlin pulls some magic out to confuse some tongues before he kills the bad guys with animals the bad guys were experimenting on. And the world is saved through perhaps the largest anti-climax ever. It’s almost like Lewis couldn’t be arsed to write a final book to actually depict a satisfying battle between good and evil, so he just had “a wizard do it”. Oh, and a deus ex machina.[/li][/ul]

Maybe I’m reading the book the wrong way, but it felt like the last book seemed to abandon the pretense of a satisfying story for a political/religious tract in the guise of a novel. Am I the only one who thinks so?

You didn’t even mention Fairy Hardcastle, the total-cliche bull dyke.

The impression I get from the trilogy is that Lewis had a lot of unmentioned backstory that could have been made into another book or two, and that the whole thing could have been done better IF Lewis had conceived of the whole thing as a unified series. But I gather that each novel was written as a standalone.

True, but if I listed everything, the post might be as long as the book was.

And I apologize for the punctuation(or lack thereof). Perhaps posting after a long day wasn’t such a good idea.

I agree with your analysis. Out of the Silent Planet was an impressive book (and still one of the few which takes into the issues of alien languages – on a planet where there actually are more than one).

Perelandra was OK. It was all setting, of course (Lewis has indicated that he was most interested in the setting and that the plot was only a side issue). I didn’t much care for the Garden of Eden metaphor, but otherwise I found it unobjectionable, if uninspiring.

But I found That Hideous Strength unreadable. I only got about halfway and stopped reading. I didn’t really care about the characters, and he’d moved a long way away from the wonder that made Silent Planet great.

One issue was that Lewis really never had the patience or interest ot make an entire living world, repleat with ample background, and build on that (like Tolkein did). This does get to be a little bit of a weakness in his fictional works at times. There’s a bit of the slapdash off-the-cuff on it. It does arguably help it appeal to younger readers, though. Of cours,e the three Space Trilogy books are utterly unlike each other, so…

I think That Hideous Strength was also influenced heavily by his horror over WW2 and the Nazis, who were basically the anti-Lewis.

One issue I didn’t entirely like was his characterization of Devine and Weston. Actually, Weston is in some ways a symnpatheic character, more broken than bad. He’s insane (by the standards of the universe), but humanity could never really understand what exactly was wrong with him; he simply know something is wrong and is, in his own weird way, trying to protect mankind. It’s more a pity he screwed everything up (and he was apparently hammered quite hard by demons).

Devine, I thought, ought not to have been treated as a villain in the classic sense. I would argue a stronger characterization would a rather depressive man, who can no longer even believe in goodness itself. Yes, he does things for his own self-interest, but why? I didn’t feel this was adequately explored, and he comes across as a rather pointless villain in it.