The Chronicles of Narnia are popular for a reason, but…
In writing this, I’m not knocking C.S. Lewis’ most popular fiction. I love the Chronicles of Narnia. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of the few books to influence my dreams; I will never forget dreaming that I stepped through the wardrobe and met Aslan.
Then there’s the Space Trilogy… especially Perelandra. I love the scene in which the Un-man taunts Ransom by repeating his name, and then, when Ransom responds, the Un-man replies, “Nothing.” It’s a child’s game, yet somehow chilling.
And while it has been a long time since I’ve read The Great Divorce, I cannot forget Lewis’ depiction of Hell as a gloomy place where people keep moving further away from each other because they cannot bear each other, while Heaven is so solid that, when tourists from Hell arrive, the blades of grass cut their feet.
But I think that Lewis’ best work of fiction may be his least known.
Till We Have Faces is in a class by itself.
Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces is his retelling of the myth of Eros (or Cupid) and Psyche, which had fascinated him since his youth. Instead of choosing Psyche or Eros to tell the story, he picked Psyche’s oldest sister, whom he named Orual.
From the outset, the story sounds nothing like what I usually think of as C.S. Lewis:
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.
Orual: Lewis’ most developed character?
Unlike the sisters in the original myth, Orual is a sympathetic character. You understand why she encourages Psyche to look upon her husband despite his command. Poor Orual is not beautiful and, often neglected and sometimes abused by her father, is lonely much of the time. She loves Psyche as much as she can love anyone — an imperfect love, to be sure, but nonetheless a love of a sort. It’s easy to imagine yourself as Orual, embittered against gods who are largely silent and who seem capricious and cruel. Job-like, she asks, How could the gods take away the person I loved the most? Why did they not make it clear to me that her husband was a god and not something monstrous? How dare they then punish me for guessing wrongly by punishing Psyche?
Orual is not Lewis’ first strong female character. Tinidril, the Green Lady in Perelandra, has a great deal of strength in her innocence. There are several strong female characters in the Chronicles of Narnia, chief among them Lucy. But in Orual, Lewis created a woman who is strong, complex, and, because of her complexity, very real. People say that Joy Davidman helped Lewis alter his perspective on women, and when I read Till We Have Faces, I can believe it. Orual has a depth that none of his other female characters reached. In fact, I would argue she feels more real than any of his characters, male or female.
Nearly halfway through the book, Orual travels with Bardia, captain of the guards, to find and bury Psyche’s remains after she is given to the god of the Grey Mountain. They must spend the night on the mountain, where it is bitterly cold, so Bardia suggests they lie close, “back to back, the way men do in the wars.” Lewis writes:
I said yes to that, and indeed no woman in the world has so little reason as I to be chary in such matters. Yet it surprised me that he should have said it; for I did not yet know that, if you are ugly enough, all men (unless they hate you deeply) soon give up thinking of you as a woman at all.
I don’t recall anything else quite like that — so bitter, so real — from any other character in Lewis’ fiction.
Faith meets mythology
Lewis brought his faith rather overtly into all of his fiction. That’s just as true for Till We Have Faces as it is for his other books, but here it seems more subtle and nuanced. Part of that may be because he was working with an existing myth. The god of the Grey Mountain (Eros) is the son of Ungit, a strange, dark goddess who is the counterpart to Aphrodite in Glome, Orual’s birthplace. In her old age, Orual dreams that her father drags her to a mirror and asks her, “Who is Ungit?”
“I am Ungit,” she replies, just before she wakes. While she realizes that she was dreaming, Orual also believes that the dream has shown her the truth.
It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that… all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web—I the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives.”
A few pages later, she muses: “I was Ungit. What did it mean? Do the gods flow in and out of us as they flow in and out of each other?”
The god of the Grey Mountain is clearly a Christ figure, but with Ungit, Lewis introduces such complexity that we cannot read Till We Have Faces as a straightforward allegory. There are certainly allegorical elements, but the story is far more than that. It’s something that must be pondered and returned to, and that is part of what makes it so good.
Not a beach read, but a good read.
Till We Have Faces is a beautiful, powerful book, but I don’t recommend it for a relaxing read. While it is nowhere near as taxing as James Joyce’s Ulysses nor is it troubling like Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, it is not lightweight. Read it when you are prepared for something thoughtful. But do read it if you haven’t already.