Menace from the Moon

BOOKS AROUND MACHEN

Bohun Lynch’s Menace from the Moon
By Dale Nelson

Bohun Lynch attended one or more convivial gatherings at Machen’s Melina Place residence in St. John’s Wood, Westminster, London. Lynch drew what, I suppose, is the best-known caricature of Machen.

Whether Machen ever read anything by Lynch I couldn’t say, but Lynch was author of a little-known novel that should still appeal to some readers. Since it was published in 1925, its composition may date to the period of Lynch’s association with Machen.

Fans of H. G. Wells and John Buchan likely would have enjoyed the novel’s clever premise, its occasional bits of satire, and its atmospheric passages.

The premise: in the 17th century, the secret of travel to the moon was discovered, and three human couples went there. The lunar colony has survived – but not thriven. Now, never-specified “terribly hostile” conditions make it imperative that the human lunarians escape to the earth. Unfortunately, they no longer possess the secret of space travel.

They beam messages to the earth, written in a bizarre code that, at first, no one here can decipher. Eventually it is realized that the messages shining from the moon use the “universal shorthand” devised by Bishop Wilkins.*

The lunarians threaten earth with destruction from heat-ray projections unless papers that their ancestors left behind them are retrieved and their contents beamed back to them by the “super-cinematograph” that they assume earth-dwellers must, like themselves, possess. Unfortunately, these papers appear to have perished. In any event, the people of earth don’t have the technology by which to communicate with the moon people – and so doom seems assured.

Lynch develops the satirical or ghastly possibilities of human behavior under such an appalling death-sentence less intensely than an author today would. Many people, at least in England, either deny that there really is such a danger, or, despite their expectations, go about their activities as if nothing dreadful is imminent. (This behavior may be a satire on English phlegm.)

Lynch’s writing conveys a Buchanesque quality of adventure early in the novel, when the narrator is lost in the fog on a moor. The sudden and frightening appearance of strange lights – he doesn’t realize at first that they are projections of Wilkins’s “hieroglyphics” – and the apparition of a face may remind some readers a little of the frightening experiences “Lewis” has at the beginning of Perelandra. (Menace from the Moon was in C. S. Lewis’s personal library.) The sequence in Menace from the Moon, Chapter 14, in which the narrator becomes lost again, this time in the pines of Italian mountains, and stumbles upon a weird, torchlit rite conducted by old men, is a bit like something out of Buchan’s “The Wind in the Portico.” The passage in which the invisible ray causes the Ligurian coast to become terribly hot suggests the fiction of Wells, except that Wells would probably have made the passage more frightening.

The novel’s resolution depends on the release of energy from the nucleus of the atom in a way that is surprising for a fiction published just a few years after Ernest Rutherford split the atom, and 20 years before the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico.

*Wilkins was an historical person (1614-1672), Bishop of Chester, onetime Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and author of An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) – the shorthand book. The Dictionary of National Biography adds that Wilkins’s first work was an anonymous attempt “to prove that the moon was a habitable world,” and that a subsequent edition added a chapter on the possibility of flight to the moon. Wilkins shouldn’t be dismissed as a crank; the DNB says “he deserves, more than any other man, to be esteemed as the founder of the Royal Society.” His associates included the chemist Robert Boyle and the architect Christopher Wren. Wilkins started the Civil War period as a parliamentarian, indeed husband of Cromwell’s sister, and diarist John Evelyn praises him for taking “great pains to preserve the universities from the ignorant, sacrilegious Commanders and Soldiers, who would fain have demolish’d all persons and places that pretended [claimed] to learning” (cited in the DNB). Wilkins reconciled with the royalists at the Restoration. The DNB mentions that, in the Great Fire of London of 1666, Wilkins’s residence was destroyed with his library and the manuscript of his Real Character.

Note: This Books Around Machen entry includes some material originally published in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society No. 428 (Nov.-Dec. 2008).

This essay: copyright 2023 by Dale Nelson