Portions of this article appeared in Knights of the Dinner Table #141 (July, 2008).
This past summer I decided to return to C.S. Lewis and examine his writings more closely, especially the fantasy genre books I had not read before or had only read once. C.S. Lewis is best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, but that series of very Christian children’s fantasy novels was only a very small part of his literary output. Lewis is also well known as an Oxford don, the central member of the ‘Inklings’ literary society, and a prolific and popular Christian theologian. Lewis has never been my favorite Inkling, and prior to this summer I had mixed feelings about my then favorite book of his,The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It was an interesting summer as I read several works on the Inklings as well as his own works in order to get a better handle on Lewis, and his place in the fantasy canon.
I started by looking at two book putting Lewis in context with the Inklings, the legendary, loose fellowship of writers at Oxford during the 1930s and 1940s who produced some of the most important fiction and non-fiction of the 20th century. Both of the Inklings books centered C.S. Lewis as the center of gravity for the Inklings, and provided a wealth of biographical detail. First, I read a classic of fantasy literature scholarship, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends by Humphrey Carpenter. Carpenter is bit more reserved and discrete as a biographer then many desire in our current tabloid age, but I believe his biography of J.R.R. Tolkien is still the best there is. This work has been equally free of salacious gossip and nonsense, though unsparing in pointing out the faults of his subjects. He talks a great deal more of Williams and Lewis and the other Inklings then he does Tolkien, which is natural since he has an entire other book on Tolkien.
I then read The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski. It was very interesting to get a different take after Humphrey Carpenter's work, it was more detailed all around, and more balanced covering all of the members of the Inklings. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was sad when it ended. I was especially happy at the Owen Barfield & Warnie Lewis coverage, which explained better then other works I've read why they were Inklings and how they fit into the group. I'd like to read works by both of them, but they can be difficult to find. I'm especially keen on Warnie Lewis, who wrote histories.
(My most glaring gap in my Inklings reading is Charles Williams, who is often seen as the most influential after J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His work is hard to find, I started All Hallow's Eve once in the 1990s but had to return it to the library before I was finished and never got back to it.)
Lewis' best known work, the Chronicles of Narnia certainly had an impact on the fantasy genre, though not so large an impact as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, or sword & sorcery author Robert E. Howard. The Chronicles are not Lewis’ only contribution to the fantasy genre. He also wrote the ‘Space’ or ‘Ransom’ Trilogy, inspired initially by an agreement with Tolkien that there were not enough space-travel or time-travel stories of the sorts that they liked. Tolkien’s time travel story was never completed, but Lewis completed his space travel story. And he produced other fantasy fiction through out his life, always heavily influenced by his Christianity and his love of mythology. Beyond his fantasy fiction, Lewis wrote a great deal of poetry, criticism, theological fiction, and popular theology; he was an extremely prolific writer.
The first two books in the 'Ransom' trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943) resemble H.G. Well’s The First Men in the Moon and Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars in basic outline, but unlike those worthies they were not a political allegory. Instead, Lewis constructed the stories as theological allegory, in a manner similar to the Chronicles, which he wrote later. The final book in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, takes place on modern Earth, and is very different in style and motif. Indeed, though it refers to the earlier books the story is self-contained and That Hideous Strength reads quite well as a stand alone novel. This is an odd trilogy, each of the three novels can nearly stand alone, and all three are very different in tone and style from the others. When I first encountered these books I read the first and the last, but never got around to the middle book.
Out of the Silent Planet (1938) is closest in tone and style to the work of Wells, it is nearly a pastiche, but its firm religious foundation and relatively lack of scientific detail keeps it just on the right side of originality. When I first read it I enjoyed it quite a bit, in large part because I was then quite enjoying Victorian science fiction and it scratched that itch. The alien cultures Ransom discovers are to 'perfect' and extremely alien. I can't quite decide if that is a good or a bad thing -- certainly aliens should be alien! But sometimes it seems they exist only to serve as set pieces for Ransom to view, in jokes, or moral lessons rather then as creatures in and of themselves.
I finally read Perelandra, the middle book in his Space trilogy, over the summer. I had avoided it because it didn't catch my interest, essentially, Ransom visits Venus where he meets Venus' Adam and Eve and witness' an alien 'Garden of Eden' tale with a different ending. Frankly, I found Perelandra boring, even a bit dull. There just is very little happening, just endless conversation and what little conflict and action there is stretched out until it becomes repetitive and boring as well. If you don't accept Lewis' basic assumptions on theology, gender, and the nature of man, it can seem rather nonsensical at times as well. Much of the tale is Lewis setting up an obvious straw-man for Ransom to demolish, the theology and philosophy is pretty elementary. But in the end he abandons even that one-sided argument. Lewis resolves the conflict between good and evil which lies at the root of the novel, through pure physical force rather then rationality or spirituality and he fails to make any sort of argument for why this is a satisfactory conclusion. Some people consider this one of his better novels, I believe, but for me it was a big miss.
(As a side note, in his blog James Cambias compared C.S. Lewis' works, especially the 'Ransom' trilogy, to the works of H.P Lovecraft. I thought it was very well written and observed. It has a different spin on Perelandra's ending then my own take and is worth reading.)
Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra have been called ‘Science Fiction’ but they are more properly described as fantasy fiction, since neither novel deals with realistic scientific or technological advancement and human reactions to it. By that standard, That Hideous Strength is quite firmly fantasy as well. It details a climactic battle between the forces of Good and Evil as they play out in an English university town. The forces of Evil are represented by the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments or N.I.C.E., an organization ostensibly devoted to removing the impediments of ‘red tape’ and ‘wrong ideas’ from the path of scientific progress. In reality, the N.I.C.E. is controlled by fallen ‘eldila’ or angels, and devoted to the destruction of humanity (as distinct from the destruction of humans).
The forces of good are lead by Elwin Ransom, the protagonist of the first two novels but here the somewhat distant leader of the community at St. Annes, a small group formed to counter the agenda of the N.I.C.E. As the members of N.I.C.E. represent the sort of academic and scientific personalities which Lewis believed most reprehensible and susceptible to corruption, those of St. Annes are the sorts he felt represented the very best of Britain and academia.
Interposed between these groups are the protagonists, Mark and Jane Studdock; a young married couple just beginning their academic careers and married life. Their marriage is troubled in a very English, very quiet way, and the book’s epic struggle mirrors their marriage difficulties.
The book moves smoothly from academic politics to modern social behavioral modification and onto to modern Arthurian mythology in a manner common in many ‘modern’ or ‘urban’ fantasies today, such as The Dresden Files or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. This was extremely uncommon when Lewis wrote the book, in 1943, but demonstrates the influence of the ‘spiritual thrillers’ and epic Arthurian poetry of Charles Williams, another of the Inklings. In fact in Merlin: The Prophet and his History Geoffrey Ashe identifies Charles Williams' Arthurian poetry and Lewis' That Hideous Strength as the beginnings of the 'New Matter of Britain' aka the 'historical Arthur' movement which is so common in modern Arthurian tales. (pages 204-207)
Lewis somewhat daringly set That Hideous Strength in the vague ‘near-future’ after World War II (it was written before the war had ended and published in 1945). Indeed, one character remarks, “it’s almost as if we’d lost the war.” as the machinations of N.I.C.E. take on a tangible form and people are turned from their homes in the name of ‘progress’ (a scene similar in effect, if different in style, from Tolkien’s longer ‘The Scouring of the Shire.’) The story is a harbinger of the immediate post-war literature centered on the theme of a dystopian future, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Lewis’ prose is clear, poetic, and filled with learned allusions, as it is in all his works. He alludes to questions of violence, sexuality, and perversion with a polite sense of decorum that modern American readers, accustomed to vulgarity and profanity, might find quaint or simply over-look. The book is, in essence, a well written, fictional example of the argument he makes in his theological/philosophical work of the same period, The Abolition of Man. Readers who enjoy his Narnia work will find a distinct lack of humor and fun in this book, but those who found the first two ‘Ransom’ novels too exotic will find the more familiar post-war English setting far simpler to comprehend.
As I continued my exploration of Lewis' writings last summer, I turned to the Chronicles of Narnia works that could not remember, either because I had never read them, or only read them once and then forgotten them. As with many popular authors who revisit a popular setting and characters rather beginning with a firm plan, there is some debate over which order to read the Narnia books in. (J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is an exception). For Narnia, the question is, order of publication or chronological order. I tend to prefer chronological order for most such questions, but it certainly is question open to debate, you can find an excellent discussion of the question here.
What interests me, is that the four Narnia books which I needed to reread were the four in the middle for both reading orders, though I chose to read them in chronologically: The Horse and His Boy (1954), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), and The Silver Chair (1953). I recall very clearly why those two were left behind. I was starting to find the series tedious, and I wanted to skip to the parts that most interested me. So, I had read the beginning, The Magician's Nephew (1955), which I still recall as a pretty good book that I rather enjoyed, as good in different ways as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). And I had read the end, The Last Battle (1956), which I did not enjoy very much, finding it more then a little blunt and clumsy. Of course, what those three books shared was a focus on the 'deep magic', I found it handled well in the former two, an poorly in the latter.
So, I turned to the four books I had skipped before, starting with The Horse and his Boy. The work is clearly a bildungsroman, and very enjoyable if a bit short. It's weakness is the obvious deus ex machina which are not only apparent throughout the tale but then hammered into the protagonist as well, leaving no room for doubt (and without doubt there is no faith, in my opinion).
I moved on to Prince Caspian, which got off to a good start, but quickly began to feel rushed and formulaic. This work highlighted, for me, why Tolkien disliked the Narnia books. Lewis spends no time thinking about his world building, nor does he spend time developing his characters or plot lines. Prince Caspian himself is just getting interesting when we essentially abandon him and start all over. And Lewis missed a real opportunity to deal with the disparate view points of the resistance groups, dismissing the hags and ogres in a handful of pages.
I was even more disappointed in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I love sea voyage tales so i was most look forward to this of the four. But though the novel contains a few interesting set pieces, too often the issue or difficulty is simply resolved by Aslan intervening in some manner. Even Reepicheep, the most fully devloped and interesting character, was grating by the end. When I compare this to The Odyssey, the sort of voyage tale Lewis was clearly trying to emulate, I'm dumbfounded, and the writing felt very rushed. A lost opportunity, really.
At last I read The Silver Chair. It was much better then the previous two, being more firmly an adventure story and less of a lesson plan. It benefited from better developed villains with comprehensible goals who were not simply defeated by Aslan fixing everything. Though the ending was lame sadly, but the Narnia portions of the work were quite good. I had to check my Appendix N listing from the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide, to confirm Lewis wasn't in there, because the scenes with the giants of Harfang, the Green Witch's underground kingdom, and the Marsh-wiggle all very reminiscent of various early AD&D adventures.
Having now fully examined Narnia, I'm afraid my opinion of it didn't improve much, Lewis' allegories are simply too blunt and obvious throughout, his theology too dogmatic, to allow the series to really impress. His world building is especially clumsy, which is sad, because there are many aspects (the beavers, the marsh-wiggles, & Reepicheep, for just three examples) that hint at the deeper, more complete work it could have been. It's telling, to my mind, that it is so popular with the fundamentalist Christian set. Despite Lewis' own history as an atheist and debater, these works do not encourage thought but obedience -- it is hard to imagine C.S. Lewis growing up to be the man he became if he had been reading the Narnia books as a child.
I capped of my summer of studying Lewis by reading Till We Have Faces (1956), Lewis' last novel, which retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche. From its excellent start it felt different from his other works, reminding me more then a little in its opening pages of Mary Renault's books (I especially love her Theseus books). That is high praise indeed, and since Lewis was notoriously susceptible to literary influences (That Hideous Strength was heavily influenced by the 'spiritual thrillers' of Charles Williams), I wondered if the resemblance was coincidence.
Of course, a little research revealed that though Lewis knew of Renault (one of Tolkien's Oxford students) and recommended The King Must Die (1958) to Roger Lancelyn Green in a 1958 letter (the year that novel was published) Till We Have Faces was published in 1956, the same year that Renault published the first of her historical novels. So the similar tones must be due to similar source material... and it makes sense that two former Oxford students retelling a Greek myth would produce work similar in tone!
I particularly loved this novel, it is work filled with doubt, but firmly looking at the 'deep magic.' What is remarkable is that Lewis, who is not known for feminist thinking and is often accused of misogynistic tendencies, produces a thoroughly feminist protagonist from the sisters, who are the antagonists of the original myth. His protagonist and narrator, Orual, is the most developed and complex character I have found in his works. Intelligent, dutiful, powerful, yet blinkered, and convinced of her own ugliness. Many say it is Lewis' best work, and I certainly agree. This work is a masterpiece.
Unfortunately, Lewis’ reputation as a Christian apologist and The Chronicles of Narnia’s status as children’s literature sometimes wards off adult readers. If you enjoy complex, well-written contemporary fantasy, and especially if you are interested in different take on the genre compared to today’s oft-used tropes, give his books, especially That Hideous Strength and Til We Have Faces a read.
All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.
