Anyone else read the science fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay?

By GlimmerBrocaded

I just got back into reading after basically two years of not picking anything up. I kicked things off with *1984* (still really good), then I went to *A Voyage to Arcturus*. I didn’t really know much going in, aside from the fact that it’s one of those pre-Tolkien fantasy books that was apparently really respected—Tolkien himself apparently liked it, and I also heard Lewis and some other big names were into it too, even Harold Bloom, who even wrote some kind of sequel/follow-up and later complained it wasn’t as good. Anyway, I read it and I loved it. I do think it’s one of those books that hits harder if you don’t know a ton going in. It feels like each place and the people in it stand for different ideas or viewpoints, and the core of it is following Maskull and how he reads/figures out what’s going on with the land as he goes. One thing I can’t ignore is how religious it gets, and it’s pretty intense for when it was written. I’m usually pretty relaxed about “what the author meant” (like I don’t obsess over that), but still, I can’t help feeling Lindsay’s Calvinist background really shows through in how God and Satan are portrayed, and how the whole relationship between them and the world is handled. It’s not flawless though. It starts out kind of slow, and at points I honestly couldn’t fully follow why some people were doing what they were doing. Also, the way women are depicted is pretty sexist by the standards of the time, not in some ragey way, just… yeah, it’s dated. Still, I ended up liking it a lot. Has anyone else read *A Voyage to Arcturus*? It feels kind of obscure—what’d you think?