Books: Little Hm

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET — C. S. Lewis — Macmillan ($2).

” ‘He is not a hnau,’ said the hrossa.

” ‘What is hnau?’ asked Ransom.

” ‘You are hnau. I am hnau. The séroni are hnau. The pfifltriggi are hnau.’

” ‘Pfifltriggi?’ said Ransom.”

But the hnauness of the pfifltriggi turned out to be the least of Elwin Ransom’s worries when he arrived on Mars in a space machine.

In this book Author Lewis, the Oxford don whose Screwtape Letters (TIME, April 19) brilliantly reported the correspondence between a devil in hell and one of his earthly minions, has Philologist Ransom carried off to Mars by a couple of scheming scientists. This well-worn device is intended to provide readers with an astronomically detached view of life on earth. The result is sub-Wellsian fantasy, tinted with irony and as pitted with morality as Pilgrim’s Progress. The findings are not flattering to earthworms, some of whom may feel that Elwin Ransom might have got just as far without going such a distance.

The scientists hoped to hand Ransom over to Martian colleagues for experimental purposes. In return, one scientist wanted Martian gold. The other wanted to study the possibilities of man’s annexing Mars as a breeding ground for a race of new men. But Philologist Ransom escaped his captors.

It was a shock to meet his first hross—a cat-whiskered cross between a snake, a seal and a stoat. It was just as much of a shock for the hross to meet a hmãn. Fortunately, they were both hnau (thinking animals) and after jointly slaying a hnakra, a jabberwockative monster, the hross made Ransom his blood hnakrapunt (pal).

Hyoi, the hross, explained the neat divisions of labor in Martian life. The seallike hrossa did the fishing and wrote the poetry. The séroni, pretty much like men except that they were covered with feathers, took care of philosophy and science. The froglike pfifltriggi handled building and sculp ture. The eldila (unfortunately invisible to the sinful eye of hmãn) represented the spirit world and carried out the orders of Oyarsa, God of Mars.

At first Ransom ignored the summons of the invisible Oyarsa. But when at length they “met,” Ransom found the god far from terrible. Oyarsa explained that eons ago Thulcandra, the earth, had been taken over by a satanic eldil with Hitleresque ambitions and had since lost touch with the rest of the solar system. Consequently hmãn had lost the virtues of the other inhabited planets — the ability of hrossa, séroni and pfifltriggi to live happily together, each contributing his special mite to the common good. Hmãn had also lost his willingness to welcome death as a beautiful redirecting of divine energy, his faculty for recognizing the “shape” of the spirit, and of distinguishing between appearance and reality. The evil spirit, concluded Oyarsa, expressed himself through the two scientists, one of whom loved nothing but gold, while the other loved humanity only in the abstract. Back on earth, “the silent planet,” it must be Ransom’s duty to fight these men wherever he found them.

So Oyarsa put the three visitors back into their space ship. The séroni supplied air for a 90-day trip. Ransom returned to Thulcandra to take up his task of converting humans “from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven,” which, he felt, would prove quite a hmãn-size job.