This is one of the stranger books I've ever read. It came highly recommended by Jim Woodring and it did not disappoint. The protagonist, Maskull, travels to an alien planet and in each land he traverses, the landscape and people are different than the last. He encounters things like green snow and people with third arms growing out of their chests. Indeed, Maskull often wakes up with the same type of new sense organs as the natives he meets. The differences in each place even extend to the morals and philosophies of the people and Maskull often finds himself in agreement, even being driven to murder in lands where pity is rare and the strong prevail. Yet through it all, he is driven to meet the god(?) Surtur and so walks on and on, finding different ways of looking at the universe but none of them quite right to his thinking. It reminded me a bit of Gulliver's Travels but it's not satirical like Swift's tales.

Lindsay really seems to be working on a personal philosophy and the effect, combined with the unhinged reality in the book, is quite disorienting. There are some wonderfully written passages but a lot of the writing and characterization is quite odd and clumsy. Still, the book fascinated me and I'm glad to have read it.