WILDER SHORES OF LONGING

David Lindsay's most effective novel 'A Voyage to Arcturus' has been critically promoted from a strange and grotesque fantasy yarn to an established classic printed in the new Cannongate Series. Undoubtedly a powerful work, it is a kind of gaunt, elliptic Pilgrim's Progess, packed with mythic encounters and actions that resonate beyond the narrative. In a typical episode, a character goes into convulsions and gives birth to a crystal egg through his mouth; he then throws it away, dismissing it as vanity - a comment on the futility of creative activity? And then there is the chapter set on Swaylone's Island from which harsh, discordant music emanates. People are drawn to it, yet the sound destroys them - rends them from limb to limb. Is there an analogy here with the terrible music of war? Such explanations are reductionist. The point is that generations of readers have lost themselves in the symbolic glades of Arcturus, found new meanings each time they explored, and the re-issue of the book is a tribute to the power and persistence of an enthralling, uncompromising story. In his novels, characters are brought violently in contact with a more powerful reality which stuns and awakens their perceptions. Lindsay's mystical moment are not gentle elevations of the spirit but metaphysical hammer blows.

Pictorially he sketches in the notion that there is a life-source, an eternal powerful spring, a more dreadful yet more brilliant light behind the one that stimulates the temporal eye. He has his faults, not least a tendency to call things 'vulgar' when they are not rugged, overwhelming or grand, but these do not matter, in that they relate directly to his strengths.

Colin Wilson described how, when he was in Virginia, seated on a stuffy coach, a line from Arcturus came into his head and transformed his day. "Maskull is his - but Nightspore is mine." Lindsay answers a longing in us for something beautiful and frightening beyond language, beyond human perception. No one has put this better than C.S. Lewis (another admirer of Arcturus) in his essay, 'The Weight of Glory':

"In speaking of this desire for a far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and tell, though we desire to do both...Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter...But all that is a cheat...The books or music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."