Although John Collier has titled his new book Milton's Paradise Lost and announces that he intends to reproduce “Milton's concept” in a screenplay, in almost every respect this work is unlike Milton's; and only in appearance is it a screenplay. It is all John Collier and entirely romance.

For a starter Collier replaces Milton's Ptolemaic System with a physically correct galactic universe through which Satan plummets like a stricken astronaut. Then he substitutes for the sword of God “an electronic barrier” which sweeps the gateway of Eden. But these are incidental to his real intention, which is not to revise but to reverse Milton's poem. Collier rejects the two beliefs central to Milton's work: that the divine design was perfect, and that a poem in praise of that design should strive for perfection. Collier, to the contrary, is interested in the blighted and blasted, the defective and changeable.

He is not the first of Milton's readers, of course, to show dissatisfaction with the notion that a perfect God was the poem's hero. Many 19th- and 20th-century readers have had difficulty in discerning anything but boredom in perfection. How could an omnipotent, omniscient Being be interesting when by definition he could have no conflicts, feel no tensions, suffer no existential pathos? William Blake began the search for alternate heroes by suggesting that quite in opposition to Milton's intentions Satan, who at least is interesting in his ruin, was the central figure of the poem.

Collier goes much further, but at first it does appear as if Satan is the hero. The opening scenes show him to be magnificent in his defiance of God, especially so in his ability to restore himself after his total defeat. The fall of the angels, their torment in the burning lake whence Satan leads them, their creation of Pandemonium, Satan's struggle with Death and Sin—in all these scenes Collier emphasizes alteration, transformation and renewal. Not endurance but change is the central power of the universe. Late in the book Satan exults to Gabriel: “All our glory is change. Poor imperfection must change. … And poor Perfection cannot. A stagnant glory!” Satan, too, is given heroic qualities as a guerrilla leader and speculative philosopher. God is stagnant the archangels are plain soldiers, stereotyped in goodness; while the archfiends are malicious imps (though 40 feet tall), stereotyped in evil. As for the humans in the action, God made “two imperfect things. Of these—one snores.” So much for Adam. As for the other, when Raphael arrives in the garden he utterly ignores Eve except to remark that she is “a creature incomplete, and most imperfect.” So much, it appears, for her.

But it is just in Raphael's characterization that we have the first hint of who the real hero is. While Adam hungers to imitate God's crystalline perfection, Eve never even begins to delude herself. She discovers and eventually learns to celebrate human incompleteness and imperfection, and, above all, the labyrinthine dynamism of her changing mind. What she discovers in Satan is really her own being, while Adam had never arrived at the threshold of his humanity while bent on becoming a god. It is Eve, then, who becomes the moving center of the universe. Satan is her discovery, the cinema of her mind: his fall has been merely a stage in the progress of humanity toward the Fall of Man.

Satan even acknowledges Eve's superior vision of change when he comes to see the world through her eyes:

SIN AND DEATH SEEN BY EVE

It is the hitherto unseen side of each that is visible to Eve. With her, we see two figures of great beauty. Sin cradles something in her arms, the nature of which becomes clear only when Eve speaks of it.

Eve
But she is beautiful.
What's that she has at her breast?
I know their names.
Those are Love and Birth.

Shaken to the roots of his being, Satan looks at Eve in rapture, like one awakened to a new and thrilling view of things.

Early in the book, Satan had made much of the invincibility of mind and of the notion that the whole drama was being enacted in the infinite space of his brain. But at last it is clear that the drama is instead Eve's human comedy, with God, the angels, Satan, heaven and hell as the figures of her creative dreaming. When Adam wakes up from his snoring, he joins in her dream. He is her last creation—the most imperfect and therefore the best of Eve's creatures.

In form Collier's “cinema of the mind” is the reverse of Milton's epic. His work is designed to be incomplete, open-ended, and thus to push the reader away from it into his own creations rather than enclosing him in the totality of the perfect work. What Collier wants is not Milton's divine words, but the “weaker words” of defective humanity—incomplete images, half thoughts, partial pictures. In his “Apology” Collier writes: “Many of Milton's jewels are rough at the edges in this version, having been rudely ripped from their rich setting. I like them rough at the edge.”

Milton originally intended to write his great work on King Arthur, and to take up the theme of the Fall of Man later. Collier began by wishing to rewrite Milton's epic and ended by writing the romance which Milton abandoned. His interest in magic and in human imperfection, and his idealization of woman all have strong affinities with the romances of Chrètien de Troyes or Marie de France, and with Arthurian themes. Furthermore his Satan is chivalrous. Though unwilling to be ruled by his Liege-Lord, he proposes to make Eve the “Empress of Hell” and to be ruled by this lady. Milton could never have entertained that proposal, and even the lesser devils are shocked by it. But we modern humans have seen much; Collier's audience is likely to find his romantic conclusion to Satan's Complaint quite predictable and only mildly amusing.