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Book Review: That Hideous Strength
Aug. 3rd, 2023 08:10 amC. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength was evidently Lewis’s attempt at writing a spiritual thriller in the vein of Charles Williams, and upon the basis of this attempt it appears that this genre is not his forte.
At first, the book is dominated by the story of Mark, a man so desperate to be in the Inner Circle that he nearly sells his soul to Satan for a conspiratorial smile. Mark is recruited by NICE, although at no point is it clear what he’s been recruited to do or who he’s going to work with or how much he’s going to be paid or even how he’s going to be paid, and all his attempts to achieve any kind of a clarity are met with stonewalling and anger. He’s going to do what he has to do! A good NICE employee simply goes with the flow!
(Mark’s de facto guide to NICE is the leader of the NICE police, Miss Hardcastle, a cheroot-smoking lesbian stereotype who did some time with the British fascists before she joined the quasi-fascist NICE. I’m sure I ought to deplore this depiction, but like Mark, I clung to her like a life raft as we paddled through the incredibly stressful waters of NICE’s toxic work environment. Miss Hardcastle may be evil but she’s having a great time.)
NICE’s goal is to improve Britain through Science, whether the British want to be improved or not. Mark appears to have no intellectual or moral allegiance to this goal, or indeed to anything else, and listens without any evident reaction as he learns that NICE’s goals include cutting back the exorbitant amounts of plant and animal life that exist in the world, preventing the unfit from breeding, putting Britain under martial law, and also digging up Merlin from the underground cavern where he sleeps in order to harness his powers.
Yes, this book is also an Arthurian tale! Which brings us to Mark’s wife, Jane, who all her life has made it her goal “to avoid entanglements and interferences,” but finds herself getting entangled in the resistance to NICE, because she has begun to have prophetic dreams.
The leader of the resistance is Ransom, who in the previous books was based on Tolkien but now is based on Lewis’s new BFF Charles Williams. Jane kind of falls in love with him, in a “I would follow you to the ends of the earth” kind of way, and there’s an extended musing on how she always thought it was embarrassing to hear a girl say that about a man, but now she gets it.
Ransom, through the laying on of hands, has been anointed the new Pendragon. (This happened offstage at some point in between books.) The other members of the resistance, sadly, don’t seem to have Arthurian counterparts. They are a ragtag band of misfits, including a bear named Mr. Bultitude (yes, an actual bear), and they do basically nothing except find Merlin before NICE does. Jane’s dreams help lead them to him.
(One of the darkly funny aspects of this book is that NICE only recruits Mark because they want to get at Jane. He’s so desperately pleased to be included and they actually only want him in order to get access to someone else.)
There is one glorious chapter in which Merlin Meets the Modern World. I loved this chapter! I would have read ten chapters of this! Merlin is so gloriously alien, and the other characters are so puzzled and awed and a little bit frightened of him.
However, instead Merlin is imbued with the powers of the Oyarsa of various planets, and he goes off to NICE headquarters and unleashes an orgy of destruction reminiscent of (though far more violent than) the scourging of Experiment House at the end of The Silver Chair, or indeed the Dionysian revel at the end of Prince Caspian.
As a kind of side note, when the Oyarsa are coming down to Earth to imbue Merlin with their powers, Merlin informs us that there are Seven Genders, and they are masculine, feminine, the sadness of deep time (this one is associated with Saturn), and, um, Jove? The Jupiter gender.
“But that’s only four,” you object. Indeed that’s true! Lewis has no intention of telling us what the other three genders are. Then you inquire, “Does the whole Seven Gender thing in any way impact traditional gender roles on Earth?”
I’m glad you asked! Absolutely not in the slightest. Jane, in her determination to avoid entanglements and interferences, has erred in her duty to be a properly humble and obedient wife.
Okay, so the thing that makes C. S. Lewis so maddening on this topic is that he’s clearly given this a lot of thought. Some male authors parrot this sort of thing and you have the feeling that they’ve just never in their life considered what it’s like to be a woman, but Lewis has absolutely considered it. With eerie accuracy, Jane voices worries that many intellectual women, in particular, are likely to relate to. Will anyone ever take me seriously? Will other people always see me as a silly little girl when I want to be seen as a serious thinker?
Lewis lays out those anxieties and says, “Your worries are absolutely justified! No one will ever take you seriously (except God) and the way other people see you IS more valid than the way you see yourself.” There’s even a scene where Jane complains that her husband no longer listens to her and Mrs. Dimble, the model for a Christian wife, is like, how could you expect any man to listen to all we have to say?
Now later in life, Lewis fell in love with Joy Davidman, apparently because it burst upon him like a shooting star that you could have stimulating intellectual conversations with a woman? just as if she were a man?? and after he had no choice but to fall in love, which is extremely funny in light of everything he wrote here. But also GOOD GOD.
In consequence, at the end of the book Jane is reunited with her husband Mark, even though (1) she no longer loves him, and (2) he nearly joined NICE, a quasi-fascist organization in touch with literal demons! And, okay, he wasn’t a true believer, but to be honest that makes it worse for me. If you’re going to join an evil organization of ultimate evil, then you at least ought to BELIEVE that you’re doing the right thing!
And, sure, he repented at the end, and part of his repentance is realizing that he doesn’t deserve Jane… And he doesn’t! He just doesn’t. And they’ve only been married for six months and they might as well cut their losses and get on with their separate lives.
Well so anyway I’ve finished C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I’ve meant to read it for about two decades now, so it was nice to get it done.
At first, the book is dominated by the story of Mark, a man so desperate to be in the Inner Circle that he nearly sells his soul to Satan for a conspiratorial smile. Mark is recruited by NICE, although at no point is it clear what he’s been recruited to do or who he’s going to work with or how much he’s going to be paid or even how he’s going to be paid, and all his attempts to achieve any kind of a clarity are met with stonewalling and anger. He’s going to do what he has to do! A good NICE employee simply goes with the flow!
(Mark’s de facto guide to NICE is the leader of the NICE police, Miss Hardcastle, a cheroot-smoking lesbian stereotype who did some time with the British fascists before she joined the quasi-fascist NICE. I’m sure I ought to deplore this depiction, but like Mark, I clung to her like a life raft as we paddled through the incredibly stressful waters of NICE’s toxic work environment. Miss Hardcastle may be evil but she’s having a great time.)
NICE’s goal is to improve Britain through Science, whether the British want to be improved or not. Mark appears to have no intellectual or moral allegiance to this goal, or indeed to anything else, and listens without any evident reaction as he learns that NICE’s goals include cutting back the exorbitant amounts of plant and animal life that exist in the world, preventing the unfit from breeding, putting Britain under martial law, and also digging up Merlin from the underground cavern where he sleeps in order to harness his powers.
Yes, this book is also an Arthurian tale! Which brings us to Mark’s wife, Jane, who all her life has made it her goal “to avoid entanglements and interferences,” but finds herself getting entangled in the resistance to NICE, because she has begun to have prophetic dreams.
The leader of the resistance is Ransom, who in the previous books was based on Tolkien but now is based on Lewis’s new BFF Charles Williams. Jane kind of falls in love with him, in a “I would follow you to the ends of the earth” kind of way, and there’s an extended musing on how she always thought it was embarrassing to hear a girl say that about a man, but now she gets it.
Ransom, through the laying on of hands, has been anointed the new Pendragon. (This happened offstage at some point in between books.) The other members of the resistance, sadly, don’t seem to have Arthurian counterparts. They are a ragtag band of misfits, including a bear named Mr. Bultitude (yes, an actual bear), and they do basically nothing except find Merlin before NICE does. Jane’s dreams help lead them to him.
(One of the darkly funny aspects of this book is that NICE only recruits Mark because they want to get at Jane. He’s so desperately pleased to be included and they actually only want him in order to get access to someone else.)
There is one glorious chapter in which Merlin Meets the Modern World. I loved this chapter! I would have read ten chapters of this! Merlin is so gloriously alien, and the other characters are so puzzled and awed and a little bit frightened of him.
However, instead Merlin is imbued with the powers of the Oyarsa of various planets, and he goes off to NICE headquarters and unleashes an orgy of destruction reminiscent of (though far more violent than) the scourging of Experiment House at the end of The Silver Chair, or indeed the Dionysian revel at the end of Prince Caspian.
As a kind of side note, when the Oyarsa are coming down to Earth to imbue Merlin with their powers, Merlin informs us that there are Seven Genders, and they are masculine, feminine, the sadness of deep time (this one is associated with Saturn), and, um, Jove? The Jupiter gender.
“But that’s only four,” you object. Indeed that’s true! Lewis has no intention of telling us what the other three genders are. Then you inquire, “Does the whole Seven Gender thing in any way impact traditional gender roles on Earth?”
I’m glad you asked! Absolutely not in the slightest. Jane, in her determination to avoid entanglements and interferences, has erred in her duty to be a properly humble and obedient wife.
Okay, so the thing that makes C. S. Lewis so maddening on this topic is that he’s clearly given this a lot of thought. Some male authors parrot this sort of thing and you have the feeling that they’ve just never in their life considered what it’s like to be a woman, but Lewis has absolutely considered it. With eerie accuracy, Jane voices worries that many intellectual women, in particular, are likely to relate to. Will anyone ever take me seriously? Will other people always see me as a silly little girl when I want to be seen as a serious thinker?
Lewis lays out those anxieties and says, “Your worries are absolutely justified! No one will ever take you seriously (except God) and the way other people see you IS more valid than the way you see yourself.” There’s even a scene where Jane complains that her husband no longer listens to her and Mrs. Dimble, the model for a Christian wife, is like, how could you expect any man to listen to all we have to say?
Now later in life, Lewis fell in love with Joy Davidman, apparently because it burst upon him like a shooting star that you could have stimulating intellectual conversations with a woman? just as if she were a man?? and after he had no choice but to fall in love, which is extremely funny in light of everything he wrote here. But also GOOD GOD.
In consequence, at the end of the book Jane is reunited with her husband Mark, even though (1) she no longer loves him, and (2) he nearly joined NICE, a quasi-fascist organization in touch with literal demons! And, okay, he wasn’t a true believer, but to be honest that makes it worse for me. If you’re going to join an evil organization of ultimate evil, then you at least ought to BELIEVE that you’re doing the right thing!
And, sure, he repented at the end, and part of his repentance is realizing that he doesn’t deserve Jane… And he doesn’t! He just doesn’t. And they’ve only been married for six months and they might as well cut their losses and get on with their separate lives.
Well so anyway I’ve finished C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I’ve meant to read it for about two decades now, so it was nice to get it done.
