That Hideous Strength (CS Lewis)

As a kid, in middle school probably, I read the first two parts of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Then, for some reason, I could not get into the third one. Having recently finished it, called That Hideous Strength, that fact is bewildering me. It's so good.

Those first two parts are pure, and strange, science fiction, as well as heavily symbolic in Lewis' style. They feature the same main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom, a philologist, clearly styled on Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien. The first ('Out of the Silent Planet') takes place primarily on Mars, called Malacandra, and the main character encounters a world diversely populated and functioning in every way according to its design. It's a kind of paradise, though an old one. In the second our man travels to Venus ('Perelandra') and discovers a brand new world, like Eden, one still changing and forming. He soon learns that his purpose there is to aid (or protect?) the world's first woman from an invading evil. There's a haunting middle section where that version of Eve is continually sought to be twisted and I may attempt to write about on its own, some day.

That Hideous Strength takes place on Earth, making it just a bit (literally) closer to home. Instead of following Ransom again we meet two new characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, a married couple facing malevolent supernatural forces aimed at humanity. Mark is a modern man, a sociologist and an atheist, a Fellow at a small, well-to-do English college, who's focused on his career and reputation. I say this because that's largely true and how Mark would be viewed. However, what he's really after is membership and acceptance into the exclusive clubs where real decision-making happens. At the beginning he's made the Inner Circle at Bracton, his college, and it means the world to him. Then he gets a far more prestigious opportunity, at the N.I.C.E., a new, big government funded operation taking over science of all forms at a national level. His wife Jane is an academic too, but has stepped away from her own work after their marriage. She's bored and struggling with where her life should go from here. Then the dreams begin, dreams revealing frequently horrifying real-life occurrences before they happen.

Lewis weaves a tale that's more and more gripping as you proceed. It connects well with the previous two parts of the trilogy but, while they would enhance your experience, they aren't needed to read this either. I especially like the connection to Arthurian legend and England's mythic past, making this more dystopian fantasy than science fiction in my opinion, not that that's a problem. The story really picks up once a certain famous magician appears.

So many characters throughout are such facsimiles of real types of people. Curry is the self-important and conceited university man, Feverstone is the smarmy politician always playing both sides and MacPhee is forever a skeptic no matter how much he's seen. This includes the various elements at the N.I.C.E., all working in their own directions on their own more and more nefarious agendas. It also includes Mark and Jane, who never feel like caricatures, in part because we see their inner conflicts. Mark knows, on some level, he needs to get out, but he can't stop himself. He's finally getting what he's always sought. Jane doesn't want to ask for help, particularly from people that she, in a way, looks down upon. She certainly doesn't want to fully commit herself to aiding them.

The ability of Lewis to write so intelligently on human nature is remarkably impressive. I don't want to give the plot away, except that I need to point out this is a novelized version of The Abolition of Man, and defends concepts like absolute truth and natural law in the face of an ever-changing, moral-relativizing world. Instead, I want to share some excerpts that hit hard, where, perhaps, Lewis is most effective. Because he's describing all of us.

Where in two paragraphs he sums up relational strife, or men and women more generally:

from Chapter 2, Dinner with the Sub-Warden

Mark was lying in bed and drinking a cup of tea. Jane was seated at the dressing table, partially dressed, and doing her hair. Mark's eyes rested on her with indolent, early-morning pleasure. If he guessed very little of the mal-adjustment between them, this was partly due to our race's incurable habit of "projection." We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane's body, soft though firm and slim though rounded, was so exactly to Mark's mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute to her the same sensations which she excited in him.

"You're quite sure you're all right?" he asked again.

"Quite," saud Jane more shortly still.

Jane thought she was annoyed because her hair was not going up to her liking and because Mark was fussing. She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested--the fluttering, tearful "little woman" of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. But she thought this anger was only in the back of her mind, and had no suspicion that it was pulsing through every vein and producing at that very moment the clumsiness in her fingers which made her hair seem intractable.

Where he describes a modern man:

from Chapter 9, The Saracen's Head

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 (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him out sprawling. And his head ached so terribly and he felt sick. Luckily he now kept a bottle of whisky in his room. A stiff one enabled him to shave and dress.

Where he processes our preconceived notions of our life and purpose:

from Chapter 14, "Real Life Is Meeting"

Jane had gone into the Garden to think. She accepted what the director had said, yet it seemed to her nonsensical. His comparison between Mark's love and God's (since apparently there was a God) struck her nascent spirituality as indecent and irreverent. "Religion" ought to mean a realm in which her haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest and what she called her "true self" would soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world. For still she thought that "Religion" was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven. Then quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward: rather of strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy. Supposing one were a thing after all--a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self? Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was? ... For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness. Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.

I really liked this book, published in 1945 btw. And I'm once again reminded, certainly more so than when I read Lewis' children's tales (though those are good too, in their own way!), that he was a master.