Good and Evil Clash in C.S. Lewis's Forgotten Masterpiece

Of the three books in C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra is the one most people haven't read, yet it might be the best of them. Tolkien thought so. He called it his favourite of the trilogy.

Perelandra is Lewis's answer to a simple question: what if you could go back to the Garden of Eden and stop the Fall?

Not literally — the novel is set on the planet Perelandra, a kind of unfallen paradise. But that's the idea driving it: a conceptual reimagining of Genesis, written at a time when the literary establishment was obsessing over Joyce and Beckett. Lewis ignored all of that and wrote something stranger, older, and far more relevant.

In this video, I unpack the novel's central conflict—Ransom versus the Unman, good versus evil for the soul of an entire world—and explores why Lewis's incredibly sophisticated treatment of free will, vanity, and temptation.

Watch the video below.