A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
424pp, Savoy, £25
Few English novels have been as eccentric or, ultimately, as influential as David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. First published in 1920, it produced enormous enthusiasm in CS Lewis, who recommended it to Tolkien. In his introduction, Alan Moore compares it to Bunyan and Machen, while Walpole, Corvo, Hodgson, ER Eddison, Barrington Bayley, and even Mervyn Peake also come to mind. But, as Moore insists, Lindsay's engrossing book, a mixture of metaphysics and surreal dream-quest, stands as one of the great originals.
Colin Wilson's two informative afterwords reveal Lindsay as a disappointed eccentric dying of blood poisoning from neglected teeth. The book's photographs present a conventional, pipe-puffing late-Edwardian gent, at ease in a domesticated English landscape. Lindsay's passion for music is revealed in his hand-written letter decorating the fly-leaves of Savoy's exquisite edition, lovingly designed with gold-leaf and Jean Delville paintings on the jacket by John Coulthart.
In common with many others, Lindsay returned from the trenches of the first world war with a profound unease, questioning every assumption of his pre-war upbringing. This was the first and best novel he wrote. A Voyage to Arcturus opens with a drawing-room séance attended by two apparent veterans, Nightspore and Maskull. They witness the manifestation of two ethereal visitors, one of whom is horribly killed by the other, who calls himself Krag. Krag then tells the men to meet him in a deserted Scottish observatory, where they find vials of what are called "Back Rays", by which light returns to its source. In a crystalline ship piloted by Krag, the rays allow the three to travel to Arcturus, the double star, and its single planet Tormance. Blacking out, Maskull wakes to find his companions gone. He now inhabits a vivid world where blazing blue and white suns rise and set, peopled by bizarre characters described with Blakean authority. Some of these Maskull is driven to kill, from anger or in self-defence.
In his novel, Lindsay is clearly questioning the nature of evil, the persuasions that make "good" men like Maskull kill. Maskull's hunt for Krag and Nightspore takes him across ethereal, ghastly dreamscapes where cruel men, loving women and intellectual monsters ponder the duality of God, the meaning of self-sacrifice, and the purpose of existence. His body creates and discards new sensory organs. An atmosphere of alienness is pervasive. A Buddhist paradise is followed by a world of degraded predators. Maskull, meeting what is perhaps God or perhaps the devil, senses a moral purpose to his journey, but that purpose remains mysterious. His inner debates are enhanced by the rapid pace, visual power and logic of the narrative.
Tormented with guilt at the deaths he has already caused, Maskull seems unable to stop killing as he ventures over dazzling deserts and jagged mountains; climbing obsidian cliffs, crossing seemingly sentient bodies of water, negotiating mysterious caverns. Occasionally he glimpses Krag and Nightspore ahead, and learns of a being variously called Surtur, Crystalman or Shaping, who might be God. God, who becomes the object of his quest, forever threatens to appear and sometimes, perhaps, does.
In a memorable scene, Maskull discovers the madman Earthrid "playing" a lake by will alone, manipulating the forces of nature to create passionate, beautiful sights and sounds so magnificently powerful they kill their audience. Earthrid challenges Maskull to better his achievements. Maskull, awed by his own gifts, does just that. The entire lake convulses and explodes. Earthrid is obscenely destroyed.
As though the novel were some Nietzschean Pilgrim's Progress, Maskull seems enjoined to do what he must to save his own soul. Yet if Lindsay celebrates the triumph of the will, he is too troubled to propose the crudeness of fascism. Indeed, the astonishing and dramatic ambiguity of the novel's resolution, in which Krag answers questions only to ask fresh ones, makes Lindsay's literary struggle the antithesis of the visionary brutalism embraced by Adolf Hitler, another traumatised creature of the trenches. Whatever the conventionally Christian CS Lewis learned from A Voyage to Arcturus for his Perelandra novels, he refused Lindsay's commitment to the Absolute and lacked his God-questioning genius, the very qualities which give this strange book its compelling, almost mesmerising influence.
· Michael Moorcock's most recent book is the short-story collection London Bone (Scribner).