A Voyage to Arcturus
Reviewed date: 2022 Dec 7
Rating: 0
248 pages
Worst Book Ever
This one is bad. I'm told it's an important book, that it's a fantastic allegory about human spirituality and the nature of existence or some such. That may be. It's bad.
It reminded me a little bit of sword-and-planet stories like Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars. It reminded me quite a lot of C.S. Lewis's books Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which is likely because it inspired Lewis. But Lewis could write. He could write a decent plot and decent dialog, and he could craft intelligible and understandable allegory and symbols. Lindsay does none of those things in A Voyage to Arcturus.
The only enjoyment I had from A Voyage to Arcturus was reading Brenton Dickieson's takedown of it: Despite what C.S. Lewis Says, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus is the Worst Book Ever.
Another review from Blackgate calls it "a gnostic Pilgrim's Progress."
A good reference website for A Voyage to Arcturus and all of David Lindsay's work is the Violet Apple by Murray Ewing.