I would need to read this a second time to understand what I just read, but I don't intend on doing that. This book reads like Homer took mushrooms and rethought The Odyssey. I think I'd recommend it, but I'm not positive I comprehend it. No, I'm sure I don't comprehend it. Still, I enjoyed a lot of the passages. There were some Buddhist themes and interesting thoughts on masculinity vs. femininity. For a book that was published 100 years ago, I was surprised I didn't find anything uncouth or culturally insensitive. The author goes into a ton of detail describing what the protagonist is seeing on the alien world. He really painstakingly paints a picture with words. Some people might enjoy that level of description. I think it's excessive a lot of time.

This was an extremely weird book that I would absolutely have DNFed if I weren’t reading it for a book club. I’ve never taken acid, but this book is what I imagine an acid trip must feel like. Or a fever dream. On the upside, Lindsay is extremely imaginative in his worldbuilding: the flora and fauna are unique from anything I’ve ever read, and I’ve read A LOT of speculative fiction. The decision to name two or three new colours, describe them once by the way they made the protagonist feel, and then just drop them into the book as descriptors is certainly a bold move. On the downside… well, everything else. The book feels like a 0-draft in heavy need of editing. There are long stretches of dialogue with no action or dialogue tags. The protagonist (Maskull) bounces from one motivation to another at the drop of a hat. Things that seem important early on are abandoned and never revisited. The names feel like what would happen if I asked a 6-year-old to name things for me. (As just a few random examples: Joiwind, Spadevil, Sullenbode, Earthrid.) We never really get a sense for any of the characters before we’re whisked away to something else. I was confused for the whole book, and the ending didn’t do anything to resolve my confusion. At least I have a lot of ranting I can do at the book club meeting?

Swept from Victorian England to a distant planet, everyman Maskull begins an epic journey of discovery through that alien environment towards its metamorphic gods. A third of the way into his journey, Maskull encounters a violently sexual woman, murders her husband, demands her obedience, and then has her sing a song while they travel. Its "words were pure nonsense—or else their significance was too deep for him" (113). The same can well be said of this entire book. A Voyage to Arcturus is a fever dream of exploration, metaphor, and metaphysics, but its dry voice is often its undoing, removing the reader too far from its universal aspirations. Lindsay's voice is so distant and dry that not even his vibrant landscape can enliven it—but that landscape is vibrant, alien, and thought-provokingly strange, with a sprinkling of images that linger in the imagination. His protagonist is alternately brutal and blank, with a changing character that reflects all but encapsulates none—he's a figure, not a person, and offers little for the reader to grasp on to. These aspects create an unexpectedly sterile story, one that's too easy to put down and to find distance from, although it's otherwise remarkably easy to read despite its density. It also enables Lindsay to reach an uneasy balance between exploring his concepts and leaving that exploration to the reader: not one that encourages reader involvement and internalization, but one that often remains at a cool distance and leaves the reader unmoved.

Yet Voyage is in its way a success. It reads almost like poetry, and can be approached in the same way: by skating over it, bamboozled but affected and intrigued, or by digging into and dissecting it in the attempt to make sense of its madness. Clute's strong introduction to this imprint is an aid towards the latter goal, but even taken on its own the novel's final pages are sufficiently strong to cap off the story with something solid, if not simple. There's nothing simple to be found here, but there is plenty in the way of rich food for thought—sometimes too rich, sometimes as stale as the book is dated, sometimes made unsatisfying by the book's determination to deny its own conclusions, but an promising cornucopia nonetheless. I found A Voyage to Arcturus to be a long, slow, strange journey, but on the whole it's one I'm glad to have taken: cerebral to the point of dry, but still intriguing and wholly original, this may not be pleasure reading but it is worth picking up. I recommend this particular edition (Bison Frontiers of Imagination from the University of Nebraska Press) with certain caveats, however: the introduction is strong, but I counted 20 typos and even from a small press, that's unacceptable.

I would not have persisted with this one if it wasn't for the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis connection. I got very little out of it, and I didn't think the philosophical insights were worth slogging through the contrived plot and soulless characters. But many people think this is an incredibly important book, so if you've read a chapter or two aren't getting into it, read a spoiler online to see if it will be worth your while.

Probably the best pure allegorical tale I've ever read. Lindsay has an abundance of imagination. Almost too much, in the sense that he fills the story so much to the brim with wonders, it begins to feel chaotic. But perhaps that's the point? As Maskull moves through the various landscapes (read: philosophies) of thought, ideas get muddled, dispersed, and some die away altogether out of nowhere. Reminds me of real-life philosophical discourse in that way.

But while this, like most allegory I've come across, often kills story in preference to idea, Lindsay places himself above both John Bunyan and C.S. Lewis (who was highly influenced by Lindsay) in pure invention of wonders.