by Stanley Anderson » July 14th, 2004, 2:35 pm
One of my first thoughts on this chapter is "why did Oyarsa make it so hard on the journey home. They said they'd need 90 days, so that's what Oyarsa gave them in terms of air and food. Why not give them air and food for, say 100 days, or unlimited? Perhaps the bare necessities made them work harder? In any case, the deus ex machina ending made it seem sort of pointless, unless Oyarsa's comment to Ransom, "You are guilty of no evil,...except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure".
I was also a little confused about the last bits before they left. They were to take off in the ship "tomorrow". Does that mean the Malacandrians brought the ship to the Meldilorn handramit? Or did they do a quick march (that took Augray and Ransom at least a couple days going the other way through a short cut) to the original handramit where they landed? Before they leave, it says that Ransom took a last look around at the "familiar handramit". Does this suggest he is back at the old handramit?
After they lift off and Ransom sees all the lands below him on the planet that he didn't see, he contemplates about how his "knowledge of Malacandra was minute, local, parochial". This echoes the end of the "Fog" chapter excerprt from THS that I've quoted often here as one of my favourite Lewis passages, along with the passage from The Discarded Image about the difference between the Medieval classical view of the universe and the Modern Scientific romantic view.
In fact, this whole section is another wonderful display of that contrast and the progression of Ransom's thoughts into the Medieval cosmological view of the universe. The transformation is nearly complete as he thinks "...for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures." I wish I had the time to go sentence by sentence through these three or four pages to show the delightful "fictional exposition" of the Medieval world view presented in this section as described in The Discarded Image.
But the modern scientific mind still makes one last stab at recapturing Ransom's mind. The effort is illustrated, I think, symbolically by Ransom's impression of the dark arms of the black crescent that begins surrounding the Malacandran landscape where he suddenly realizes that the dark arms are th beginning of the surrounding black sky that they are rising into. This attack becomes more pervasive as they make their perilous journey across the interplanetary space. As they become more concerned about reaching Earth, Ransom finds that "his celestial mood was shattered".
Oh, there's so much here I could go on and on about. But I'll finish this post for now with the observation that the story essentially ends the way it started. Ransom finds himself drenched in a rain storm walking along to find shelter and perhaps a pub. But here the "nightmare" vanishes in a vivid light and a momentary wind and he finally finds his shelter in the cozy pub. Perhaps not unlike the Dark Island episode in Dawn Treader.
The end, getting back to where the story started with a nice finish reminds me a lot of Watership Down where the first and last sentences are very similar (the first sentence is "The primroses were over" and the last is "...where the first primroses were beginning to bloom".
--Stanley