From Word To Word

I was recently able to find a copy of Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion from an online bookseller who operates out of Guelph, and it has reminded me of how much I love Williams’ novels. Though very few remember him any longer and those who do only as a name peripherally associated with J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, Williams was highly regarded in his own time by such writers as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for his poetry, criticism, history, theology, and drama, as well as for his novels.

I first encountered Williams’ name among the members of the Inklings, a literary society that grew up around Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford, but it was through mere chance that I first read any of his work. I was looking in a used bookstore for something by T. S. Eliot, I forget exactly what, when I found among Eliot’s works a copy of Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve, for which Eliot wrote an introduction. I knew the name, and the book was priced at all of two dollars, so I took it to the counter, where the proprietor told me that he had just taken in another of Williams’ novels, Many Dimensions. I bought both.

I can hardly describe the experience of reading those two books together, because they are so unique in mood and sensibility. Though Lewis’ That Hideous Strength has many similarities, clearly informed by Williams’ fiction, there is nothing quite like a Charles Williams novel. I always describe his books by saying that they are to mystical theology what good science fiction is to science. Just as true science fiction is the fictional exploration of a scientific hypothesis, so Williams’ novels are the fictional exploration of a mystical or theological idea. The stories are set in Williams’ present time, but each relates a scenario in which this present time is disrupted by supernatural events. The result is always eerie and sometimes even horrific, as the central characters, usually conflicted in regard to their religious faith but nevertheless moving toward Christian principles, struggle against strange and terrifying powers.

The novels are not great literature, though they approach it more closely than most thrillers do, and Williams is not a great novelist, though he is perhaps a great storyteller. His characters are full and complex, but they do not strike a contemporary ear as being realistic. His philosophising is sometimes profound, but it often breaks the flow of the narrative. Where he really excels is in creating a sense of mood. The books are all profoundly disturbing, as if their fiction somehow falls too close to a truth, as if it might yet become a truth. They are hauntingly possible, not physically perhaps, but spiritually. Though they may not rank very highly in the history of literature, I would choose them over any number of those that are usually placed above them.