‘A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him.’ Dr Dimble
That Hideous Strength is the third and final volume in C.S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. As is so often the case in concluding volumes, it is significantly longer than the previous members of the series (Out of The Silent Planet 58,715 words, Perelandra 85,376 words, That Hideous Strength 156,719 words, double its predecessor, nearly three times as long as the first story) and it really feels like it.
It feels like Lewis has stuffed the book as full of his thoughts about Christian belief, angels, prayer, about the nature of obedience, charity and love on the one hand – and on the other, produced a huge gallery of characters, organisations, beliefs and behaviours which he thinks plague modern life and which all stem, at bottom, from a loss of faith in God.
The plot
That Hideous Strength opens like a campus novel, with squabbles among amusingly depicted caricatures of stuffy old male dons, at a place called Bracton College, one of the supposed three colleges which comprise the fictional little university of Edgestow, somewhere in the Midlands.
We are introduced to the usual cast of senile, pompous, ambitious, sly, snide and slimy academics, but the main protagonist is Mark Studdock, a Sociologist who has just been elected to a teaching post. Lewis takes us back into Mark’s childhood and boyhood to show how he has always been an outsider who wanted to be in with the smart set, at school, at university and now, here, at Bracton.
The smart set here calls itself the ‘progressive element’ and is plotting schemes. To be precise we watch as they manoeuvre the board of dons into selling off a plot of land centring on ancient and legendary Bracton wood to a new, go-ahead organisation, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments or the N.I.C.E.
Mark is taken up by the progressive element, but it then turns out the leaders of this as in fact working for the N.I.C.E., and he is offered a place within that secretive organisation. For hundreds of pages we watch how Mark’s frailties, his lack of confidence, his wish to be accepted and part of a clique, leads him deeper and deeper into the heart of the N.I.C.E.
Where he finds horror. At first he discovers that the scientist at its heart, one Dr Filostrato, is experimenting with reviving the heads of dead men, with a view to creating a new race of disembodied intelligences who will transcend mere mortals with their silly perishable bodies.
In the so-called Blood Transfusion Office at Belbury, where the nucleus of the N.I.C.E. had taken up its temporary abode, Mark is taken to see the floating head which Mark is taken to see, the head of a criminal recently guillotined in France, and now suspended from a bracket in a laboratory, with all kinds of tubes and cables running into it, which drools and then – horror of horrors – speaks.
This takes a while to build up to, to show to Mark, and for the full horrific implications to sink in – that the N.I.C.E. is working to abolish mankind as we currently know it.
But that turns out not to be the inner truth. In fact Wither and Frost are using Filostrato, and keeping all the other inner circle of the N.I.C.E. in ignorance of the secret plan, known only to them. This is that they are in touch with dark forces larger and older than man – what they call macrobes – and the N.I.C.E. is preparing the way for them to supercede mankind as rulers of the earth.
Throughout all the long sequences to do with the N.I.C.E. I was continually reminded of the Dr Who episodes from my youth. My Dr Who was Jon Pertwee, whose Tardis had broken leaving him stuck here on earth to help Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the forces of U.N.I.T. (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce). Each week they discovered a fiendish conspiracy to invade and take over earth. More often than not these conspiracies were launched from the shiny offices of gleaming modern corporations which ran a mining operation or massive chemical works or suchlike, which turned out to be an elaborate front for creating some matter poisonous to humans or a front for allowing aliens to invade or for kidnapping humans and turning them into zombies.
Well, that’s what the N.I.C.E. are doing. Lewis builds in an analogy with the totalitarian nations England was fighting as he wrote the book by having the N.I.C.E. run its own police department. Directors of the N.I.C.E. orchestrate incidents and then riots with the local townspeople and then, using their contacts in parliament and among the authorities, get a ‘state of emergency’ declared in Edgestow such that the N.I.C.E. police take over running the town and, as you might expect, turn out to be a very unpleasant paramilitary force. People are beaten up, many carted off to the new prison cells the N.I.C.E. is building, there is mention of at least one rape and beating to death.
All this is supervised by a big domineering leering woman, Miss Hardcastle, who is portrayed as a lascivious, Robert Crumb-like, dominating lesbian, dressed in leather, who surrounds herself with fluffy young women she can bully, and enjoys going down to the N.I.C.E. cells to torture people.
Sleepy little Edgestow turns, before our eyes, into a fascist statelet combined with the shiny new buildings of a modern new town-cum-industrial complex. Filostrato tells Mark they are aiming to abolish all organic life, trees, plants, animals: all the chemicals they produce for the air, all the food they produce can be made much more efficiently in factories. Frost, a man who has talked himself out of any emotions or feelings, tells Mark they are aiming for ‘efficiency’, they aim to become so efficient that they will supersede humanity altogether.
The good guys
Lewis makes no bones that the book is a kind of fairy story, maybe a morality tale as well. So it’s no surprise to discover that all these bad guys are mirrored by a gang of good guys. Specifically, the book opens with Mark’s wife, Jane. She is bored and lonely at home, trying to concentrate on her academic PhD i.e. when the book opens her and Mark’s marriage is failing due to mutual incomprehension, lack of trust, lack of candour, lack of love. Mark is far too busy trying to brown-nose his way into the ‘progressive element’ in his college, and then trying to wangle a job at the N.I.C.E., to listen to Jane.
As the N.I.C.E. take over Edgestow she discovers that her kindly tutor, Dr Dimple and his wife, are being kicked out of the college house they live in, as is her cleaner, the working class Ivy Maggs. She takes pity on them and discovers they are going to stay in the big old house up on St Anne’s Hill.
But the important thing about Jane is her dreams. She has terrifying dreams which turn out to be true, to be visions of things which have really taken place. She dreams of a middle aged man in prison, another comes into the cell and twists off his head. This refers to the guillotining of a criminal in France which is in the next day’s news. Her friends, the Dennistons, suggest she goes to see an ‘analyst’ about the dreams, one Grace Ironwood who also lives up on St Anne’s Hill.
What emerges or develops, over several chapters, is that Janes slowly accepts that her dreams are in fact visions of real events; and she too is forced to take refuge up in the big house on the hill. Here she discovers quite a menage, Doctor Dimble (who had been Jane’s supervisor) and his wife, a bustling older woman who everyone called ‘Mother’ Dimble, Mr and Camilla Denniston, Ivy Maggs the cleaning lady, and a sceptical Scot named MacPhee – along with a menagerie of animals which includes Baron Corvo the crow and – preposterously but fittingly for a fairy tale – a tame bear named Mr Bultitude.
But overseeing the house at St Anne’s is a figure she is at first told is named Mr Fisher-King. The second I read this I thought it was too direct a reference to the role of the Fisher King in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste Land, itself borrowed (according to Eliot’s notorious notes) from The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, the compendious study of mythology and religion by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer.
He is called this until Jane is actually presented to him at which point we realise that Mr Fisher-King is none other than Elwin Ransom, protagonist of the first two novels in the series. Wonderfully well-preserved and youthful looking, due to his stay on Venus (described in the second book) Ransom is nonetheless in pain due to the bite he received there from the evil Weston, possessed by a demon.
Each of these revelations – Mark’s step-by-step induction into the college’s progressive element, then into the conspiracy to sell the old college wood to the N.I.C.E., then into the ‘true’ purpose of the N.I.C.E. in Dr Filostrato’s version (to create a new race of superhuman heads or intelligences), then into the level above that – into Wither and Frost’s true knowledge that even the head experiment is a front for raising much darker forces, is prefaced by much suspense – is accompanied by shock on the part of the initiate – and then a world of doubts and fears and uncertainties.
Same goes for Jane. We follow her journey from unhappy ‘modern’ woman, sceptic and feminist, frustrated by her marriage and stalled career. We follow her anxious response to her dreams, and her seeking help from Grace Ironwood. Then her realisation that dark forces are taking over Edgestow – which includes her being arrested by N.I.C.E police during a riot, and tortured by the sadistic pervert Miss Hardcastle (by having a lighted cheroot stubbed out on her skin). Her flight to the house at St Anne’s. Her introduction to the household and the way she has to overcome her middle class snobbery about consorting with her ‘cleaning lady’, Mrs Maggs. Her introduction to Mr Fisher-King where her modern sceptical mind reels at everything he tells her about dark forces.
And so on. Step by step Mark goes deeper into the darkness, and Lewis paints the doubts, anxieties and inferiority complex which drives him, making him a very human figure, explaining how easy it would be for us, the reader, to do likewise.
And step by step Jane climbs out of Edgestow, ascends out of the real and actual fog the N.I.C.E have projected over the town, up into the sunlit hilltop of St Anne’s, where she is inducted into a successive circle of secrets concerning Ransom.
Merlin
Slowly the narrative focuses onto the reason the N.I.C.E bought the college wood in the first place. There was a hoary old legend that Merlin lived and died there. Now Jane is afflicted by dreams of an underground cavern and an ancient figure lying on a raised altar. Surely, Ransom and his advisers think, this must be Merlin. And the Dark Side is seeking the exact location of the burial chamber in order to waken him, and recruit him and his ancient magic to their plan.
Meanwhile, in the Mark chapters, the men who have emerged as leaders of the Dark Side – Wither and Frost – know about Jane’s dreams but not exactly what they mean. Thus they put Mark under pressure to get his wife to join him – and he realises it’s because they want to use her – and for the first time he begins to see how wicked these dried-up old husks of men are. And it dawns on him that, in a way, he has always used her, for sex, for comfort, because having a wife is respectable – but he has never really listened to her or respected her.
Anyway, the waking of Merlin is the turning point of the novel and, I couldn’t help feeling, in a way it is all downhill from here.
there is a genuinely scary (in the way a children’s story can be genuinely scary) chapter where Jane guides Denniston and Dimble to the grotto where she thinks she saw in a dream a figure who might have been Merlin, and as they circle towards a a fire burning in a glen in the pouring rain there is a real sense of suspense and terror. But nobody is there.
Instead Merlin turns up at the house on the hill, banging the door open, riding a wild horse, rearing in the weird light of the rainy evening. This image promised all kinds of mayhem and Lewis surrounds it with multiple examples of his scholarly knowledge of ancient myths, fairies, elves, woodwos and so on.
But, alas, when Merlin is dressed and shown up to the Director (i.e. Ransom’s) room, he is quickly tamed. Merlin wants to unleash the earth, the trees and other organic forces against the bad guys, but Ransom refuses, tells him no. And now Ransom reveals that he is the legitimate king or Pendragon of the nation of Logres, the heir of King Arthur, having been handed the crown by a dying man in remote Cumberland (chapter 17, section 4).
There is a great deal of background information explaining how two forces have always vied on these islands – Logres, the small league of mystical powers, against ‘Britain’, the humdrum and prosaic.
The triumph of the N.I.C.E. is the triumph of the prosaic; the scientific, technocratic, managerial worldview which is so concerned for ‘efficiency’ that it would sweep away all traditions and customs, all chivalry and courtesy, all kindness and charity, in fact all organic life itself, reducing life on earth to chemical processes supervised by a handful of super-brains.
Logres stands for the opposite, and Ransom – Fisher-King – Pendragon – is its head.
What happens then is that Ransom calls down the tutelary spirits of the planets of the solar system – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – and each in turn a) infects the whole household with their qualities (when Mercury appears everyone becomes talkative and gay, when Mars appears everyone starts quarreling), and infuse their powers into Merlin.
The climax
The ending is disappointing for a number of reasons. I haven’t mentioned that, at the same time that Merlin burst into St Anne’s house, the N.I.C.E. police force were out looking for him and did, indeed find someone, a rough looking big man who couldn’t talk. He is brought to Wither and frost who put him in the same prison cells as Mark – who is refusing to go and get Jane for them. In a broadly comic scene Mark tumbles to the fact that the scruffy old geezer is just a common or garden tramp but he’s not going to let the two heads of N.I.C.E. know that.
What happens then is that the cell door is unlocked and a big unwieldy curate is ushered in by Wither and Frost. Unbeknown to Mark it is the real Merlin in disguise. He hypnotises the tramp and makes him speak gibberish which he then ‘interprets’ back to Wither and Frost. The ‘curate’ claims that ‘Merlin’ is demanding a tour of the facilities, so off they go, rather reluctantly.
This demand coincides, very inconveniently, with a visit from the man who Wither and Frost had long ago persuaded to be the official figurehead of the N.I.C.E., a superannuated novelist and popular science writer ‘Horace Jules’. I think this a fairly broad caricature of H.G. Wells (who died in the same year this novel was published, 1945). He is rather cruelly depicted as a short, stocky, vulgar Cockney, who got his ideas from Thomas Huxley 50 years ago, and had never learned anything new since.
The climax of the entire novel – with its themes of God versus the devil, faith versus scientific modernism, of ancient Logres versus technocratic Britain, of charity versus ruthlessness, of the superlunary powers of the planets versus the dark forces of earth – all this comes to a grand climax in…. a college dining hall.
For it is here that the fellows of Bracton College (by the time you get to the end of the novel it’s difficult to remember that it all began on the campus of a fictional college) assemble and Jules rises to give his speech to discover… that he is talking gibberish. The audience starts tittering. Wither rises to interrupt him and take control, but he talks gibberish. the audience start laughing then talking among themselves and discover that everyone is talking gibberish.
At that point a tiger appears in the dining hall and starts attacking people. Then a snake. Then an elephant breaks down the doors into the dining hall and proceeds to stomp all over the assembled dons as a peasant woman stamps down the grapes. Miss Hardcastle shoots Jules dead before herself being torn to shreds by the tiger.
These animals – we realise – were just some of the animals which the N.I.C.E were conducting vivisection experiments on. Still it comes as a complete surprise when this happens and seems utterly random.
Some of the bad guys escape. Wither and Straik force the injured Filostrato along to the laboratory which contains the head. The head makes them bow down and worship it. then it demands another head. Wither and Straik manhandle Filotrato over to the guillotine and behead him, offering the Head this new head and chanting to him. Then at the same moment they both realise the Head will ask for another head, and attack each other. Straik flees but Wither kills him with a knife and is just contemplating his body when a bear walks into the laboratory, reared up on its two hind legs, inflamed by the smell of blood, and kills him.
Frost makes his way to the laboratory, discovers the three corpses there and – his mind suddenly taken over by some force – finds himself locking himself in, pouring petrol everywhere and burning to death.
Some of the baddies escape further, namely Lord Feverstone, a slimy politicking member of the college, who also had a seat in the House of Lords and so helped to secure the state of emergency which allowed the N.I.C.E. to take over Edgestow.
But now there is an earthquake, all the land surrounding Edgestow turns into the cone of a volcano and all the buildings, roads, cars and people trying to flee – including Featherstone – are tipped tumbling down into the inferno.
Aftermath
Ransom / the Director / Pendragon, assembles his team – Dr and Mrs Dimble, Mr and Mrs Denniston, Ivy (now reunited with her husband, who had been doing time in prison), Jane and sceptical old MacPhee.
He delivers the last of the explanations which are required i.e. a long account of how he came to be the Pendragon, having inherited it from the old man in Cumberland, and what Logres means and why it is always at odds with ‘Britain’.
And he says goodbye one by one to his ‘disciples’ touching their heads and blessing them. He is leaving. He is returning to Perelandra where he gained his wound and where it will be healed.
And the book ends where it began: with Mark and Jane Studdock. I haven’t had space to mention it, but at the point where Wither and Frost began clamouring for Mark to bring Jane to them, he had realised something was wrong. Not just with the N.I.C.E. but with him, and his whole life, and his whole attitude to life. He had been undergoing training to join the really inner circle of Wither and Frost, a training in abnormality, a training designed to burn out of him any morality, normality and decency. But when it came to spitting and treading on the helpless figure of Christ, on a big crucifix laid on the floor of the training room, he refused, he rebelled and from that moment hardened his heart against the N.I.C.E. and all its works, and began to repent.
Thus, in the confusion of the escaping animals, the massacre of dons, and then the fire which starts in the Laboratory and quickly spreads, he escapes, makes it up out of the earthquake zone and finds himself trudging towards St Anne’s, miserable, humbled, willing to apologise.
And, when ransom dismisses Jane, he sends her to the cottage in the big house’s grounds, where Venus appears to her in a vision. She also has been chastened and humbled. She has learned that the beginning of wisdom is to realise other people are as important as you, that there are powers above you, that egotism always turns in on itself, whereas charity expands the soul and obedience, paradoxically, leads to a wonderful freedom.
And so the chastened young couple enter the cottage and proceed to a new marriage bed, based on mutual respect and understanding.
Quite a story, eh?
Comment
Where to start with what is really an enormous hodge-podge of a book?
I’ll start with the disappointing elements.
1. The prophecy that doesn’t arrive At the end of the previous novel in the sequence, the great spirit presiding over Perelandra had made the following prophecy regarding the ‘final battle’:
‘We shall fall upon your moon, wherein there is a secret evil, and which is as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra – scarred with many a blow. We shall break her. Her light shall be put out. Her fragments shall fall into your world and the seas and the smoke shall arise so that the dwellers in Thulcandra will no longer see the light of Arbol. And as Maleldil Himself draws near, the evil things in your 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 your 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.’
Nothing like this happens. The moon isn’t smashed into fragments which fall into the sea creating a fog which blots out the sky, plagues and horrors do not cover the land, the Black Oyarsa doesn’t come into it, and there is no sense at all of the world swept clean.
The opposite. Towards the end Doc Dimble – who seems to know a surprising amount about Logres and so on – explains to the others i.e. Jane, MacPhee and the ladies, that the tension between ‘Britain’ and ‘Logres’ is a permanent state of affairs on these islands, in England, in Albion. I.e there is never a final anything. Conflict between the ancient and the modern technocratic vision will be permanent.
2. The silly massacre Instead of this world-shattering prophecy, what we get is a massacre in a college dining hall. Lewis tries to jive it up by saying that in the days leading up to the climax a thick fog settles over Edgestow, a small town in the Midlands. But that’s not quite the same as the moon being shattered into pieces and falling into the oceans, is it? Fog over small town in the Midlands is not headline-grabbing news. But nothing can hide the fact that the massacre in the dining hall falls far short of what the build-up had led us to expect, in lots of ways.
a) Farce It is treated more as farce than tragedy, beginning as it does with an entirely comical caricature of H.G. Wells and his pompous lecturing of the fawning dons. The way that he, and then everyone in the hall, starts speaking gibberish is a very small piece of magic, for such a mighty magician as Merlin to perform. It seems more like a parlour trick.
b) The animals’ revenge And then the way they are massacred by wild beasts is just not properly built-up to. Sure, we’d been told a few times that part of the N.I.C.E.’s experimental work involved vivisection, but it was never a central part of the novel at all. Using it as the central instrument of revenge feels random and contrived.
3. Merlin The central part of the novel deepens the mystical significance of events by invoking all manner of medieval and pre-medieval beliefs, by taking us – very atmospherically – back to the darkest of the dark ages after the Romans left and all kinds of pagan spirits reasserted their presence, and both Dimble and Ransom hint that Merlin’s powers in fact stretch far back before that, to the earliest days of humankind.
Jane’s creams of Merlin in his chamber, and Ransom and Dimble’s accounts of his deep ancestral magic are very evocative and a bit scary. It is, then, a profound disappointment that Merlin’s main role is to be chastened by Ransom, to be told he can’t use any of his old magic, to be told he has to act within the framework which Ransom dictates.
It is a fundamental failure of the book that the rip-roaring ancient magic which we had been led to expect does not then arrive. Instead, Merlin is persuaded to dress up as a curate, inveigle his way into the N.I.C.E. masquerading as a priest who knows arcane old languages and so may be able to speak to the old man they’ve brought in (who Mark and the reader knows to be a harmless old tramp just after a warm place to kip and some decent grub).
Instead of being big, mighty and transformative, this scene is small, paltry and silly, more reminiscent of a French farce. Merlin in disguise hypnotises the tramp into speaking gibberish which Merlin then translates to Wither and Frost as a wish to see the facilities. Once touring round them Merlin a) casts the spell which makes everyone at the dinner speak gibberish b) sets the animals free.
That’s it. Very anti-climactic.
4. The gods Now Lewis tries to juice up Merlin’s role by having the tutelary spirits, the oyarsa, of the planets of the solar system appear one by one and infuse Merlin with their powers. This is a highly symbolic and schematic scene – one where we are meant to recognise and enjoy the depiction of the attributes of each planet, which could almost be a scene from Chaucer or Spenser, and yet… in the end…. What does Merlin do with all this mighty extra-terrestrial power? Put a spell on some doddery old academics and let the animals out of their cages. Hardly needed spirits from the solar system come down to help him do that.
5. The devil I was led to believe the devil was going to appear, the ‘bent’ oyarsa or darkarchon who rules this world – and that he would be overthrown and everything wiped clean. This doesn’t happen. Ransom disappears off to Perelandra at the end, and Mark and Jane go to bed together, for the first time to make love with courtesy and respect – which is all very nice – but what happened to the Dark Archon? Is the world still in his control? Has the new era prophesied at the end of Perelandra come about?
Emphatically not.
It doesn’t gel
They don’t mesh. The prophecy and expectation built up by the first two books of an Last Battle and global cleansing – the sense that the future of all mankind is at stake – the yoking in of Merlin and Logres – and setting it all in the broadly comic setting of the senior common room of a dusty old college or in a nice English country house – it is too much to manage, to pull together, and Lewis fails to deliver on all fronts.
Of the three novels, Perelandra is much the best, because its setting on another planet allowed Lewis’s imagination absolute free rein to dazzle us with his imagination, and to create from nothing a magnificent setting which truly dramatised the themes he was dealing with (the nature of evil, the fall, the nature of faith).
Some issues
The original version of That Hideous Strength was, as I’ve pointed out, nearly three times as long as the first book in the trilogy. Lewis clearly threw everything into it, creating an unstoppable outpouring of rambunctious ideas and social criticism.
While the main narrative of the book alternates between Mark’s adventures and Jane’s adventures, hardly an incident occurs which he doesn’t use to promote his view that the modern world with its blind belief in science and technology and efficiency and materialism has led modern man to a cliff edge, is destroying age-old values of courtesy and chivalry and charity and love and, above all, belief in something outside ourselves, something bigger than our individual selves, which made the world and deserves our respect and gratitude and obedience.
The experience of reading the book is to be almost continually lectured, either by the Dark Side characters lecturing Mark about everything from how to manipulate committees, how to write propaganda, how to manage the media, how to create talking heads, how to promote efficiency to such a degree that you end up abolishing mankind altogether – or, on the Light Side, Ransom’s explanations to innocent Jane of everything we learned in the first two books about the spirits of the universe, the oyarsa which rule each planet, and Dimble’s lengthy lectures about Merlin and Logres.
Somewhere the American novelist Saul Bellow laments that, these days, everyone is an expert, everyone is ‘a reality instructor’. Well, almost all the characters in this book seem to be lecturing each other about something or other. Here is Dr Dimble lecturing the sceptical MacPhee who is used as a butt for his and Ransom’s arguments.
‘You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised – some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each.’
Here is Lord Feverstone (who I only realised, half way through, is the same slimy, selfish adventurer who helped kidnap Ransom and transport him to Mars in the very first novel) who has got himself made a lord and is now a mover and shaker at Bracton college, here he is early on explaining things to naive young Mark:
‘Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.’
‘What sort of thing have you in mind?’
‘Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilisation 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.’
You can see why Mark is taken aback, Sterilisation, liquidation? Oh yes old chap, drawls Feverstone, all in the name of progress, doncha know. Elsewhere Filostrato opens up the possibility that the two world wars they’d lived through are just the start of a sequence of wars which will all but wipe humanity out.
Throughout the book Lewis conflates modern management techniques in big organisations with special constables, underground cells, torture, liquidation. There are hundreds and hundreds of digs at the entire vocabulary of modern social services. there’s a section where Feverstone explains that the N.I.C.E. have persuaded the government to let them undertake the ‘rehabilitation’ of prisoners (as opposed to what Lewis clearly sees as the more honest, traditional view of punishment) but that this rehabilitation actually means a license to carry out experiments and torture.
Mr Straik is a clergyman who has gone profoundly wrong, whose theology has become so other-worldly that he has lost all touch with human life in all its imperfection. He tells Mark why he has joined the N.I.C.E.
‘The feeblest of these people here has the tragic sense of life, the ruthlessness, the total commitment, the readiness to sacrifice all merely human values, which I could not find amid all the nauseating cant of the organised religions.’
Dr Filostrato is the ‘scientist’ masterminding the bringing back to life of the head of the guillotined criminal Alcasar. During a college dinner early on, he explains to Mark that, having seen a metal tree made as a work of art in an art gallery, he realised, why stop at one? Why not replace all real trees with metal trees?
‘Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.’
‘Do you mean,’ put in a man called Gould, ‘that we are to have no vegetation at all?’
‘Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.’
‘I wonder what the birds will make of it?’
‘I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.’
‘It sounds,’ said Mark, ‘like abolishing pretty well all organic life.’
‘And why not? It is simple hygiene.’
It is no accident that Mark’s academic subject is Sociology. Lewis obviously loathes Sociology. It sums up everything which is wrong with the modern world, which is regarding people as numbers and units instead of rich, complex human beings. Mark’s
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 group’, ‘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.
Early on, one of the dons who disapproves of the N.I.C.E., Bill Hingest, makes a telling point to Mark:
‘I happen to believe that you can’t study men, you can only get to know them.;
Good idea, good thought. For his opposition to the N.I.C.E. his car is flagged down in a dark country lane and he is beaten to death by N.I.C.E. goons.
Ancient versus modern
Wither witters on in interminable and obscure sentences designed to confuse his listeners, and also ensure they never know where they stand. He is obfuscation versus Lewis’s ideal of the simple autoritative clarity with which Ransom speaks. Here is Wither:
‘Good morning, good morning, Mr. Studdock,’ he said. ‘It is with the greatest regret that I–er–in short, I would not have kept you from your breakfast unless I had felt that in your own interests you should be placed in full possession of the facts at the earliest possible moment. You will of course regard all that I am about to say as strictly confidential. The matter is a distressing or at least an embarrassing one. I feel sure that as the conversation proceeds (pray be seated, Mr. Studdock) you will realise in your present situation how very wise we have been in securing from the outset a police force–to give it that rather unfortunate name–of our own.’
Here is Ransom:
‘I am the Director,’ said Ransom, smiling. ‘Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyéresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me–as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us–sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household.’
Light versus dark. Clarity versus obscurity. Good faith versus deliberate uncertainty. Sunlight versus fog. Love versus fear. Openness and permission contrasted with a paramilitary police and torture cells. Country versus city. Rural landscape versus industry. Tradition versus novelty. People versus statistics. Muddling through versus inhuman ‘efficiency’.
Filostrato wants to abolish all organic life from the planet. In sharp contrast Ransom is shown going out of his way to be courteous and loving to animals, to the unexpected bear Mr Bultitude, but also to a covey of mice who he rings a bell to summons to eat the crumbs left over by the humans, his pets Baron Corvo the jackdaw and Mr Pinch the cat.
Ransom’s is a supra-human vision which encompasses all life forms.
The cosmic view
‘Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.’ (Grace Ironwood)
Merlin
Lewis writes wonderfully evocatively of the Dark Ages whose literature he knew so well.
And suddenly all that Britain which had been so long familiar to him as a scholar rose up like a solid thing. He could see it all. Little dwindling cities where the light of Rome still rested – little Christian sites, Camalodunum, Kaerleon, Glastonbury – a church, a villa or two, a huddle of houses, an earthwork. And then, beginning scarcely a stone’s-throw beyond the gates, the wet, tangled, endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood.
And the figure of Merlin is, at least initially, presented with a powerful sense of the old pagan beliefs.
his great mass stood as if it had been planted like a tree, and he seemed in no hurry. And the voice, too, was such as one might imagine to be the voice of a tree, large and slow and patient, drawn up through roots and clay and gravel from the depths of the Earth.
And Lewis gives Merlin some great speeches, commenting on what, to him, are the peculiarities of 20th century life.
‘I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit.’
Compared to the thrilling power of his own days.
Merlin saw in memory the wintry grass on Badon Hill, the long banner of the Virgin fluttering above the heavy British-Roman cataphracts, the yellow-haired barbarians. He heard the snap of the bows, the click-click of steel points in wooden shields, the cheers, the howling, the ringing of struck mail. He remembered also the evening, fires twinkling along the hill, frost making the gashes smart, starlight on a pool fouled with blood, eagles crowding together in the pale sky.
Wow! Such a shame that this primal force then has to be tamed and neutered by Ransom.
The choice
What the books brings out is that both Jane and Mark are brought to the point of having to make a choice. Which side are you on?
In his normal condition, explanations that laid on impersonal forces outside himself the responsibility for all this life of dust and broken bottles would have occurred at once to his mind and been at once accepted. It would have been “the system” or “an inferiority complex” due to his parents, or the peculiarities of the age. None of these things occurred to him now. His “scientific” outlook had never been a real philosophy believed with blood and heart. It had lived only in his brain, and was a part of that public self which was now falling off him. He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself–nothing else in the whole universe–that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.
Even realising that you have a choice, even realising that we must all take responsibility for our own lives is presented by Lewis, as almost a lost knowledge, as a basic prerequisite for being human which modern society does everything it can to obscure. Mark:
became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed.
Feminism
There is a massive amount to be written about Lewis’s depiction of the female characters. I imagine modern women students will want to throw the book in the nearest fire when they read the howlingly stereotyped characterisation of Miss Hardcastle, the leather-clad lesbian chief of police and torturer – although I enjoyed her character on an entirely cartoon level.
But central to the book is the way both Mark and Jane have to be cured of their modern scepticism and atheism and brought to see that there are people outside them a world outside them, powers outside them, that they are really very small and have to smother their egotism and learn to love others, and to love their Creator.
Jane is a moderately complex figure, in some ways the most sympathetic character in the book (Mark is depicted as an unrelentingly selfish fool in a hurry to suck up to anyone who’s in a position of power). Feminists might sympathise with the opening where Jane is depicted as frustrated by married life and excluded from an academic career, and by her later comments about sexism.
For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man and this preposterous Indian fakir simply as men – complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. (‘And so the king promised that if anyone killed the dragon he would give him his daughter in marriage.’) She was very angry.
But feminists presumably wouldn’t like the sections where she has to overcome these feminist views, in order to progress to the next level, the level Lewis depicts as to do with very ancient symbols of gender, of male and female coming together in rituals and ceremonies celebrating fertility and, at the end of the story, in a traditional marriage bed – cleansed and healed from their modern angry scepticism. Brought to realise that they should both be humble, forgiving and charitable.
Continually, throughout the book, the good things evoke whole systems of personal and folk memory, so that this generation is seen as repeating, echoing, and confirming the wisdom of the ages.
It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamions – age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth.
Maybe much of this can be critiqued as outrageously sexist, patriarchal and patronising, bit I, for one, can see where Lewis is coming from in invoking folk traditions, religious traditions, pagan traditions, pre-Christian traditions, and non-Western traditions, all of which see humans as aspiring to literally superhuman ideals of masculinity and femininity – ideals none of us may be able to attain, but which are guides to behaviour.
Or we can do what many people are doing in our day and age, try to rewrite our understanding of human nature and gender from scratch. But even if they’re not true, even if they are not exactly a guide for modern living, I – like Lewis – love and reverence the old literature, the old traditions and the old magic.
In Perelandra the theme and the treatment have a unity which completely transport the reader and make you accept all kinds of stately, ceremonial behaviour, at bottom based on gender norms and traditional views of fertility and procreation.
But when he tries to set the same ideas in the ‘modern’ age (well, 1940s England) they, along with much else in this mad gallimaufrey of a story, fall to really cohere or convince.
Related links
Other science fiction reviews
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
Books & Boots 