Planet Bookworm

Out of the Silent Planet ======================== Professor Elwin Ransom is on a walking tour in the English Midlands and looking for somewhere to stay the night. Little does he know that before too long he will be on a very different kind of journey, to the planet Malacandra - otherwise known as Mars. ================================================================================ I first read Out of the Silent Planet when I was a student, over twenty years ago, and it made a huge impression on me at the time. I've re-read it since, a couple of times, the most recent occasion being earlier this summer, and one curious thing I've found is that the book appears to have shrunk, over the last two decades. Not in a literal sense, obviously, as the number of words probably hasn't changed, but what I mean is that the events of the story seem to take place over a much shorter time frame than before. What seemed like a tale of numerous adventures, journeys and encounters across the exotic surface of Mars now appears briefer, far more condensed. And my point? It is that so much depends on our perceptions. The book hasn't changed, but I have. And fundamentally this is one of the things the book is all about - a perceptual shift. Out of the Silent Planet is on one level a voyage to another world, and CS Lewis was going in 1938 where authors such as HG Wells and Jules Verne had already ventured. The hard science part is barely there; for instance the space ship, into which Ransom is bundled by his kidnappers Weston and Devine, and which transports the trio to another planet, is powered by processes that are never described. (This, in itself, is not a failing, in my opinion. HG Wells invented a fictitious material - Cavorite - to get his adventurers to the Moon, and Jules Verne simply fired his space travellers out of a giant cannon.) Malacandra is a dying world, like so many other early visions of Mars, a place where life arose before it did on Earth and is now in a state of decline; not a particularly new idea. No, what sets Out of the Silent Planet apart is what happens to middle-aged professor Elwin Ransom - and by extension to the rest of us, because despite his academic background, Ransom is a type of Everyman figure. Abducted by his old school acquaintance Devine and the sinister Weston, Ransom is taken across the gulf of space to Malacandra, where the others have established a base, consisting of a rudimentary hut. Why are they doing this? So that Ransom can be delivered up as a kind of human sacrifice, in return for Malacandrian gold. In the absence of any real information, he is understandably terrified at what might be about to happen to him at the hands of the menacing natives, the sorns or séroni. He breaks away, and starts to flee across the confusing landscape of this alien world. And this is where his transformation starts. I don't want to reveal much more about the story, for fear of ruining it completely for readers who haven't yet had the pleasure. But I have some observations about aspects of the novel where Lewis's writing seems psychologically true to life. Firstly, as Ransom runs for his life across the surface of Malacandra, he experiences the landscape as a confusing blur of strange colours and shapes, as the vegetation is utterly unfamiliar to him and the creatures even more so. The total sense of disorientation is convincing, because we tend to see the world as a collection of familiar constructs. We don't see an expanse of rugged brown stuff crowned by masses of flat greenish tendrils; we see an oak tree, because "oak tree" is a discrete concept we are familiar with. In a similar way, people who are blind from birth and who later become able to see, find the visual world a perplexing mass of colours and shapes until they learn to perceive things. It is also reminiscent of the (probably apocryphal) stories of native Americans unable to see Columbus's sailing ships, as they were completely outside their experience. Perception is something that we learn; it is a human skill, like language. In time, Ransom meets the Malacandrians, and eventually he rejoins his fellow travellers from Thulcandra, the Silent Planet (Earth.) On the outside, he is little different to how he was before. But on the inside... We experience culture shock when we are taken out of our familiar surroundings and placed in a foreign land, with foreign people. Everything seems wrong, strange, even threatening. There are degrees of foreignness - for the average native English person, Paris is foreign but manageably so, Istanbul is somewhat further along the scale and a Mongolian yurt must be at some sort of apex of pure foreignness for those used to suburban streets, corner shops and Victorian terraces. Now place the same English person on Malacandra, with its séroni, hrossa and pfifltriggi! And yet we adapt. Although Ransom never quite loses his instinctive feelings of apprehension when dealing with the spindly, feathered séroni, he arrives at the knowledge that these are neither monstrosities nor bizarre talking animals but hnau, or rational beings. They have undergone a radical transformation in his mind. Weston and Devine also undergo a transformation. For where there is culture shock, there is also reverse culture shock. The familiar becomes strange and by living in foreign parts we become assimilated by foreignness, which gives us the freedom to see our native culture with fresh eyes. That also goes for our fellow natives. At first Ransom is unable to see his erstwhile kidnappers; having become accustomed to Malacandra, he is aware of a couple of approaching bipedal oddities covered in strange growths, and it takes him a while to realise these are humans. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of his book; there's just so much more. I haven't mentioned Lewis's Christianity, his depiction of a world where three kinds of sentient life form live in harmony and his ridiculing of imperialism - this review could easily have been ten times its current length. Suffice it to say that Out of the Silent Planet occupies a special place in my heart; although I tend to resonate more with the writings of HG Wells, there is something about Lewis's vision of a universe inhabited by benevolent spirits (eldil) and rational beings that touches me - would that even a part of it were true. © Alex Cull, 9th July 2008 Top Sergei Lukyanenko Sergei Lukyanenko's homepage: http://www.lukianenko.ru/eng

Night Watch

Night Watch =========== Anton Gorodetsky is not your average young Muscovite. True, he lives in a run-down apartment, commutes on the metro and has to put up with the machinations of his boss. But he also has to deal with vampires, shape-shifters, demons and other supernatural manifestations. Just part and parcel of his job - in the Night Watch. ================================================================================ Sergei Lukyanenko's novel Night Watch is based on the intriguing premise that the forces of Good and Evil (or Light and Dark), rather than engaging in all-out conflict, are held in an uneasy peace (or cold war), each side bound by protocol and agreeing to limit their operations. The main players in this constantly shifting stalemate are the Night Watch (Light) and their counterparts the Day Watch (Dark), each a sort of supernatural combination of police and military observers; although on opposing sides, their goals coincide precisely - to monitor their adversaries and maintain the delicate balance of power. Of course, this is where things go spectacularly awry. There's much to like in this Russian bestseller, which is basically three stories yoked together to make one rather lengthy novel. The author's handling of the "good" and "evil" characters is nicely complex and avoids stereotyping, mostly. Sometimes the true enemies are not the Day Watch but entities from the "good" side who rampage out of control. Vampires, though nominally "evil" are simply obeying their own nature, which is to be carnivores, and operate under licence. Gesar, the boss of the Night Watch, and thus "good", also manages to be manipulative and devious through and through. I also liked Twilight, the eerie, unworldly dimension from whence all the supernatural Others draw their power. Shadowy, dangerous, and overgrown with unpleasant sentient moss, Twilight is definitely one of the book's better ideas. Plus the setting is great - Moscow in the edgy, turbulent post-Soviet era, uneasy, dystopian, an urban jungle of crumbling socialist edifices littered with shiny toys and trinkets brought in by a brash new wave of capitalism. And there are some memorable quirky moments, for instance agent Anton rushing off to save the day - with a stuffed owl perched on his shoulder. However, the pace is all wrong. What would have worked better as a collection of short stories, becomes rather slow and flabby as a novel. The first section has some tautly-written battles and pursuits; here the story shines. But in the third part, where it should have been gearing up to some truly apocalyptic showdown, it stalls. The characters all go off for a long weekend at someone's house in the countryside. There is much philosophising, and gloomy soul-searching that seems typically Russian. This is accompanied by heroic feats of alcohol consumption, which also seems rather Russian. This goes on for page after page. And when the grand climax to Night Watch does materialise, it seems a bit - anticlimactic. The symbolism doesn't help. In the earliest part of the book, they were up against a vast black vortex, hovering in the sky like some kind of psychic Hurricane Katrina and threatening the end of everything. But towards the end, the magical device that will control the fate of the world is - a small piece of chalk. Yes I know, to make it a ring or a sword or something would have been a cliché. But a small piece of chalk? It's just a bit of a let-down. Was for me, anyway. I'll still be interested in reading the next novels in this series, as a lot of the ideas are promising and I would like to find out where the author will take them. Especially if the translations are still by Andrew Bromfield, whose work is very good, by the way; it was often easy to forget that the original novel was in a foreign language. However, it would also be nice to see the results of some judicious editing, which could have made Night Watch a lot tighter and sharper than it was. © Alex Cull, 19th May 2008 Top