C S Lewis continues his obsession with Christianity. Basically it’s the Garden of Eden, Eve, the serpent and temptation and knowledge all wrapped up as Venus, the sole female inhabitant of Venus, a bad man – Weston – from C S Lewis’ previous “sci-fi” work Out of the Silent Planet, and his education of that female, respectively.

The main character Randsom is the goodie-goodie guy who is chosen by “God” and transported to Venus – Perelandra – to be Eve’s saviour from devil possessed Weston. Initally Randsom is too weak intellectually to intervene in Eve’s “bad” education and rather extraordinarily encouraged by God to go and physically murder Weston! Apparently that’s ok since its in “God’s” name!

Once Weston is eradicated, “Adam” comes on the scene and meets “Eve” everything is hunky-dory and just before Randsom is transported back to Earth, he is told that Earth will have its population and I guess all life eradicated (cleansed) eventually by the Perelandrians.

And that’s also apparently ok too!

The book is filled with circular, verbose dialogue possibly normal for the Forties when Perelandra was written. I find Randsom annoyingly unintellectual and weak, his actions are weak, and the outcome of the whole book is so gloomy.