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A review by robintelldrake
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
4.0
A strange turn from the first two books in the series. I did expect, long before Voyage to Venus was through, that book three would bring us back to Earth somehow. And so it is. Now that Lewis has explained all about Space God and established a protagonist familiar with the harmonious universe outside our own benighted sphere, it's time to have a talk about the state of affairs at home and how it appears in light of these revelations.
What ensues is strongly reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged, in that a good sensible world is depressingly beleaguered by a seemingly unstoppable tide of foul new-fangled ideas backed by government, and the reader spends a lot of pages watching the cultural villains talking amongst themselves, justifying their misconceptions. Also, it's unexpectedly preoccupied with marriage, which we examine through our rather tedious protagonists, the unhappily married and unhappily modern Jane and Mark.
Mark makes it nearly to the end of the book before showing any redeeming virtues at all, which makes it hard to face any chapter (or whatever one calls the numbered divisions within every chapter) that switches back to his point of view. When at last he reaches his personal rock bottom and realizes that he's been an ass all his life, it seems too little. Meanwhile, while Mark is off confronting the ugly apotheosis of his own modern views, Jane falls in with Ransom's secret and largely academic resistance, where she must confront the disconnect between those modern views and Ransom's unflappably antique Space Christianity. And that part is indeed the hardest to swallow for a reader following a generation or two later; not only is he quite rigid about marriage (Jane, long out of love with Mark, falls so hard for Ransom that she immediately assents to devote herself to Mark because that's what Ransom wants), he's also troublingly sure of his gender essentialism (indeed he has already laid down in Voyage to Venus that gender is the underlying reality and sex is merely how essential gender expresses itself in biological beings). So in the end we see Jane wondering if through all these years of her trying to be an independent woman with an intellectual life, almighty God saw her as being essentially sweet and cute, and she might as well not fight it. (It is hard not to get the feeling, sometimes, that all this female submission is expounded on as much because it gets Lewis hot as because he thinks it's theologically important. Also like Ayn Rand, Lewis likes his kink.)
The most enjoyable strand of the story--not at all the one that gets the most pages--is the Arthurian mythology, which takes a moral struggle that might generally feature in Christian storytelling as universal, but which within this series is strictly limited to our unfortunate planet, and makes it seem to be more or less a struggle for the soul of England specifically. This material lends a sense of magic different from Ransom's converse with angels, and it gives rise to a series of conversations lovingly crafted to echo old Welsh primary sources, beginning with my favorite bit, a series of bizarre challenge-questions asked with such ritualized pomp as to seem a miniature of Ysbaddaden's challenges to Culhwch. Lewis, who must always be assumed to have read any given text, pulls that material off with delightful authenticity.
Also, the Arthurian bits are the only chances we get in this volume to see from the point of view of Ransom himself. That is one of the principal disappointments of the book: our established protagonist is sidelined, laid up with an injury that for symbolic reasons never heals, dispensing insights received from angels and acting as a sort of life coach for his little group of followers but rarely taking center stage. Instead, for the most part, we follow people that the author doesn't think so highly of, and it's not as enjoyable.
The ending, too, is a let-down. In the course of the Arthurian material Lewis has played a very grand card, and one wants to see some grand results. Instead, a broad political menace is resolved almost in the style of a Robert Ludlum novel, wherein too often the hero saves the world by gunning down a room full of shadowy illuminati. That's not quite it, but the means are almost that cheap and pedestrian. Some greater pyrotechnics happen offstage, but even so it's disappointing.
There are an assortment of good bits too, though. When the mysterious head of the devilish foundation of villains is finally revealed, it delivers on the suspense. Turns out a bit of steampunk gothic horror is within Lewis' range. And late in the book there's a lovely moment where the mere presence of a divinity nearby causes everyone in the house to be miraculously witty for a while, all just glowing brighter than usual; it's an arresting idea memorably presented, true to form. And the book is eminently quotable. It's a flawed book, nothing so perfect as Perelandra, but there's a lot of good in it.
What ensues is strongly reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged, in that a good sensible world is depressingly beleaguered by a seemingly unstoppable tide of foul new-fangled ideas backed by government, and the reader spends a lot of pages watching the cultural villains talking amongst themselves, justifying their misconceptions. Also, it's unexpectedly preoccupied with marriage, which we examine through our rather tedious protagonists, the unhappily married and unhappily modern Jane and Mark.
Mark makes it nearly to the end of the book before showing any redeeming virtues at all, which makes it hard to face any chapter (or whatever one calls the numbered divisions within every chapter) that switches back to his point of view. When at last he reaches his personal rock bottom and realizes that he's been an ass all his life, it seems too little. Meanwhile, while Mark is off confronting the ugly apotheosis of his own modern views, Jane falls in with Ransom's secret and largely academic resistance, where she must confront the disconnect between those modern views and Ransom's unflappably antique Space Christianity. And that part is indeed the hardest to swallow for a reader following a generation or two later; not only is he quite rigid about marriage (Jane, long out of love with Mark, falls so hard for Ransom that she immediately assents to devote herself to Mark because that's what Ransom wants), he's also troublingly sure of his gender essentialism (indeed he has already laid down in Voyage to Venus that gender is the underlying reality and sex is merely how essential gender expresses itself in biological beings). So in the end we see Jane wondering if through all these years of her trying to be an independent woman with an intellectual life, almighty God saw her as being essentially sweet and cute, and she might as well not fight it. (It is hard not to get the feeling, sometimes, that all this female submission is expounded on as much because it gets Lewis hot as because he thinks it's theologically important. Also like Ayn Rand, Lewis likes his kink.)
The most enjoyable strand of the story--not at all the one that gets the most pages--is the Arthurian mythology, which takes a moral struggle that might generally feature in Christian storytelling as universal, but which within this series is strictly limited to our unfortunate planet, and makes it seem to be more or less a struggle for the soul of England specifically. This material lends a sense of magic different from Ransom's converse with angels, and it gives rise to a series of conversations lovingly crafted to echo old Welsh primary sources, beginning with my favorite bit, a series of bizarre challenge-questions asked with such ritualized pomp as to seem a miniature of Ysbaddaden's challenges to Culhwch. Lewis, who must always be assumed to have read any given text, pulls that material off with delightful authenticity.
Also, the Arthurian bits are the only chances we get in this volume to see from the point of view of Ransom himself. That is one of the principal disappointments of the book: our established protagonist is sidelined, laid up with an injury that for symbolic reasons never heals, dispensing insights received from angels and acting as a sort of life coach for his little group of followers but rarely taking center stage. Instead, for the most part, we follow people that the author doesn't think so highly of, and it's not as enjoyable.
The ending, too, is a let-down. In the course of the Arthurian material Lewis has played a very grand card, and one wants to see some grand results. Instead, a broad political menace is resolved almost in the style of a Robert Ludlum novel, wherein too often the hero saves the world by gunning down a room full of shadowy illuminati. That's not quite it, but the means are almost that cheap and pedestrian. Some greater pyrotechnics happen offstage, but even so it's disappointing.
There are an assortment of good bits too, though. When the mysterious head of the devilish foundation of villains is finally revealed, it delivers on the suspense. Turns out a bit of steampunk gothic horror is within Lewis' range. And late in the book there's a lovely moment where the mere presence of a divinity nearby causes everyone in the house to be miraculously witty for a while, all just glowing brighter than usual; it's an arresting idea memorably presented, true to form. And the book is eminently quotable. It's a flawed book, nothing so perfect as Perelandra, but there's a lot of good in it.