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A review by kjcharles
All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams
Ugh. This would have been amazing except for a horrible kernel of antisemitism which taints the whole thing.
Opens with a woman waiting on Westminster Bridge for her husband and slowly realising she's dead. Extends out to an astonishing imaginative look at loss, love, redemption, and hope, includes a fine portrait of an abusive mother, and a deep, sharp look at how casual 'mean girls' type social cruelties are actually on a continuum with extremes of malice and cruelty. Also a great portrait of the central rabble-rousing false preacher, some terrific scary scenes around a portrait and a mystical view of the City which reminded me of Eliot.
Only the resemblance doesn't end there, because of course the false prophet is Jewish, and not in passing either, and this book was written post WW2 for crying out loud. No decent human could pretend they didn't know where antisemitism led at that point, and it's farcical and grotesque to watch a writer meditating on the importance of open-hearted love and the malignancy of petty cruelty to other people while mounted on a sodding great trumpeting woolly mammoth in the room. Bah.
Opens with a woman waiting on Westminster Bridge for her husband and slowly realising she's dead. Extends out to an astonishing imaginative look at loss, love, redemption, and hope, includes a fine portrait of an abusive mother, and a deep, sharp look at how casual 'mean girls' type social cruelties are actually on a continuum with extremes of malice and cruelty. Also a great portrait of the central rabble-rousing false preacher, some terrific scary scenes around a portrait and a mystical view of the City which reminded me of Eliot.
Only the resemblance doesn't end there, because of course the false prophet is Jewish, and not in passing either, and this book was written post WW2 for crying out loud. No decent human could pretend they didn't know where antisemitism led at that point, and it's farcical and grotesque to watch a writer meditating on the importance of open-hearted love and the malignancy of petty cruelty to other people while mounted on a sodding great trumpeting woolly mammoth in the room. Bah.