With the February selection
of the Notting Hill Napoleons (our book club of 24 years and counting) being
C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, I
decided it was an appropriate time to re-read all three novels in the author’s
celebrated space travel series. I not only
enjoyed them very much but, as is almost always the case with re-reading good
books, I understood more, appreciated more, and was freshly inspired.
It is hard to classify these
three novels. They are called, by
various commentators, science fiction, fantasy stories, space travel, spiritual
adventure, and allegorical Christian fiction.
But Lewis himself stresses that they are not allegory. Rather, they are “fairy tales for grownups”
(Lewis’ description) and, like the best of the ancient fairy tales, they have
clear and relevant morals for the reader to glean. Indeed, these books teach the same important
things that Lewis does in his other works.
For instance, Lewis says of That
Hideous Strength, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has
behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” And the careful reader gets it -- among the
adventurous journeys, discoveries, and battles described in the novels, there
are serious spiritual truths to be considered.
The first in the trilogy is Out of the Silent Planet (1938) which
tells the story of an English philologist named Ransom who is kidnapped and
taken by two evil scientists to Malacandra (Mars). The plot of this short novel (only 160 pages)
involves Ransom’s escape from his captors, his meeting with the planet’s
natural inhabitants and the angelic beings that serve them, and his eventual return
to Earth. It’s a fun, exciting read but
it is also replete with Lewis’ insightful observations about education, heaven,
death, Eden, memory, poetry, the sanctity of life, progressivism, poetry, fear,
duty, and much more. Also, there are
many very fascinating, revealing, and memorable lines and passages. It is, in
all of these ways, classic C.S. Lewis.
Perelandra (1943) is the second novel in the series, tells of Ranson’s second
space adventure. This time he goes to
Venus where he witnesses (and helps defeat) the temptation of the Green Woman
by one of the wicked scientists first seen in Out of the Silent Planet.
That temptation process, striking in both its similarities sand its
differences to Eve’s temptation by the serpent in Eden, is quite
instructive. I must confess that Perelandra is a bit too long in description
for me. Many pages, for example, are
devoted to the watery nature of the planet, the fish-like creatures that live
there, and Ransom’s laborious climb out of the depths to dry land. Perhaps it was all too strange from what I
know…or perhaps it’s merely because long descriptive passages are usually my
least favorite thing in novels. So, chalk it up to my limitations. However, the
climatic scenes in which Ransom must physically challenge the demon which has
possessed Devine’s body are truly riveting and unforgettable. And again, all along the way, the reader
receives Lewis’ ideas on conversion, ego, academia, materialism, spiritual
warfare, feminism, righteous hatred, mythology, and so on. This book is also
short, 150 pages in my paperback copy.
That Hideous Strength (1945) concludes the trilogy but, in several
ways, it is quite different than the other two novels. This third book is a
terrestrial adventure played out entirely on Earth – no space ships, no alien
creatures, no planets to describe. Also,
it is considerably longer than either of the other books -- 384 pages. The fairy tale reaches not into the heavens
for its other-worldly mystery this time round, but back into the past to Britain’s
most famous mythology. Most striking of
the differences to me, however, are the all-too-realistic villains of the story:
the materialist manipulators of the National Institute of Co-Ordinated
Experiments (N.I.C.E.). As cold-hearted as any wicked force imagined by Wells,
Orwell, or Huxley, N.I.C.E. is an organization dedicated to marrying the powers
of science and state, propaganda and violence, and ultimately even the dynamism
of demons in their effort to re-make not only the world, but Man himself.
It is this novel that I have
always found most interesting, most relevant, and the best written of the
series. After this last reading, I think
so still. The story is a thriller; the
insights into modern culture are remarkably spot-on; and the spiritual
development of the various characters present plenty for the reader to
ponder. The tension builds throughout
the novel, erupting into an unforgettable spiritual battle that involves no
less than Ransom, the ancient wizard Merlin, the arch-villains of N.I.C.E, a
severed head taken over by a demon, ordinary Christians who are no less heroes
for that, a couple undergoing a most unusual sanctification, and a menagerie of
animals escaped from the experimental labs, including perhaps the most
remarkable bear in modern fiction, Mr. Bultitude. That
Hideous Strength is an astounding read and one which deserves a much higher
place than those written by the authors mentioned earlier.
To help encourage you to
consider reading this impressive series by C.S. Lewis, I’ll post below just a
few of my favorite lines and passages.
And I should also mention, the Notting Hill Napoleon discussion of That Hideous Strength was a particularly
good one.
From Out of the Silent Planet:
“The last thing Ransom wanted
was an adventure.”
“This is the second life, the
other beginning. Open, oh coloured
world, without weight, without shore.
You are second and better; this was first and feeble.”
“The siege of Thulcandra may
be near its end. Great things are
afoot.”
“The weakest of my people
does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes
lives and befouls them from flying from what you know will overtake you in the
end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.”
“God can make good use of all
that happens. But the loss is real.”
“There are no coffins in
Malacandra, no sextons, churchyards, or undertakers. The valley is solemn at their departure, but
I see no signs of passionate grief. They
do not doubt their immorality, and friends of the same generation are not torn
apart.”
From Perelandra:
“I suppose everyone knows
this fear of getting ‘drawn in’ -- the moment at which a man realises that what
had seemed mere speculations are on the point of landing him in the Communist Party
or the Christian Church -- the sense that a door has just slammed and left him
on the inside”
“When the Bible used that
very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved
hypersomatic beings at great heights…it meant that quite ordinary people were
to do the fighting.”
“Don’t imagine I’ve been
selected to go to Perelandra because I’m anyone in particular. One never can see, or not
till long afterwards why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, t is usually some reason
that leaves no room for vanity.”
“Don’t you worship Him
because He is true spirit?”
“Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and
good. There’s nothing specially fine
about simply being a spirit. The Devil
is a spirit.”
“He had full opportunity to
learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.
Again and again subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather
in his cap, or even a somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been
a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not
like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much like being set to guard
an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child.”
“Inner silence is for our
race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which
continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest of places.”
“And as Maleldil Himself
draws near, evil things in our world shall show themselves stripped of disguise
so that plagues and horrors shall cover your lands and seas. But in the end all shall be cleansed, and
even the memory of Black Oyarsa blotted out, and your world shall be fair and
sweet and reunited to the field of Arbol and its true name shall be heard
again. But can it be, Friend, that no rumor of all this is heard in
Thulcandra? Do your people think their
Dark Lord will hold his prey forever?”
From That Hideous Strength:
“The real thing is that this
time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the
whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the
state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain
is that it can do more.”
“Man has got to take charge
of Man. That means, remember, that some
men have got to take charge of the rest…Quite simple and obvious things, at
first -- sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t
want any dead weights), selective breeding.
Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no
‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real
education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his
parents try to do about it. Of course,
it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first.
But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct
manipulation of the brain.”
“I happen to believe that you
can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different
thing.”
“I suppose there are two views about
everything,” said Mark.
“Eh?
Two views? There are a dozen
views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”
“His education had had the
curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than
things he saw. Statistics about
agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or
farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he
had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to
use such words as ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ He
preferred to write about ‘vocational groups,’ ‘elements,’ ‘classes’ and ‘populations:
for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior
reality of the things that are not seen.”
“It must be remembered that
in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had
a secure lodging. His education had been
neither scientific nor classical -- merely ‘Modern.’ The severities both of abstraction and of
high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness
nor aristocratic honour to help him. He
was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact
knowledge…and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him
sprawling.”
“The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians; that, indeed, is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science.”
“He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void….He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnations are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue-bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction.”
