Not as tightly plotted as LION, but has more nuanced characters and some fascinating (and unexpected) things to say on education, race, colonialism, eNot as tightly plotted as LION, but has more nuanced characters and some fascinating (and unexpected) things to say on education, race, colonialism, etc.
"how extremely unfair that the greatest female led fantasy novel of all time was written in 1956 by CS Lewis and Joy Davidman"
- a thing I tweeted las"how extremely unfair that the greatest female led fantasy novel of all time was written in 1956 by CS Lewis and Joy Davidman"
- a thing I tweeted last week while wending my way in utter delight through the dazzling, dizzying complexities of TILL WE HAVE FACES, revisiting this favourite book for the first time in oh, so many years I don't even remember.
I stayed away, to be frank, because I was intimidated. I'd last read the book in my early 20s, at which point I first began to feel I was peeling back the layers to fully understand it - only to find more and deeper layers beneath. For the first time I had just an inkling of how far down this book truly went. The next time I read it, I wanted to tame as many of those layers as I could. One is reminded of GK Chesterton's adage about the philosopher trying to get the heavens into his head, and his head splitting. I couldn't bring myself to embark upon the re-read simply because I knew that it would only exhaust me to try to tame it.
I'm glad that in the end, I simply approached the book as a reader. This time I think I grasped many more things about the book even than last time - I took notes, y'all - but I'm still floundering in its depths. As a result, in this review I'm going to confine my comments to one specific aspect: the point of view.
The point of view - Orual's - in this book is the thing that staggered me the very first time I read it (I couldn't have been any older than 13, possibly younger). For one thing, it was not what I expected from the author of Narnia or even of PERELANDRA, which I had discovered at 11. Orual's perspective was grim, dark, jaded, gritty - she's a grimdark character determined to believe she lives in a grimdark world, constantly deliberately closing her eyes to the possibility she does not. It was also, and this blew my mind even the first time I read it, still wet from the eggshell - the perspective of a woman. By my late teens (after a second read, in which I decided that the book had been a terrible mistake and what was Lewis thinking, and a third, in which I decided that I had been wrong and it was a masterpiece) I was having to explain to a male acquaintance who had recommended Jasper Fforde's THURSDAY NEXT books to me with the very confident proclamation that they were the best example of a male-penned female narrator in existence, just how comprehensively wrong he was. (I read the THURSDAY NEXT books. Not only was Next not a patch on Orual, she was dreadfully wrong about THE FAERIE QUEENE). Women who read TILL WE HAVE FACES at a later age than I did have described to me the sheer sense of unreality that came from hearing a woman's voice so strongly and so convincingly from a man's pen - as though he'd somehow seen directly into our brains and dragged our private thoughts out, kicking, into daylight. Me, I just knew for a fact that no man had ever written a woman like this, and perhaps never would again. (I am delighted to have discovered Anthony Trollope since, who is nearly, though not quite as freakishly good. Nobody else even comes close).
This time around I was blinded by things that flew right past me in my youth. Orual's observation that men are comforted by the sound of their own voices. Or the utterly poignant depiction of what it's like to have male friends who will stand by you when so many do not. Or the biting comment about how many ways men have of torturing a man who really loves his wife.
It's become much more common knowledge these days that Lewis' wife Joy Davidman, a poet and writer in her own right, contributed substantially to TILL WE HAVE FACES. Indeed, according to her son Douglas Gresham, Lewis wanted Joy credited as a coauthor and it was her decision to remain anonymous. To any woman, this will come as an absolutely convincing explanation. How else could Lewis have known what almost no other male author ever has? Even he didn't know these things in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH - nor in Narnia, though he arguably wrote better and better female characters as he matured as an author.
To be honest, for a long time I actually felt a tiny bit disappointed to realise that Joy had had a hand in Orual. I did so love to think of her as the greatest female character ever written by a man; but if she had been co-written by a woman, she lost that status and Anthony Trollope took Lewis' place as Best Male Author of Female Characters. After re-reading TWHF this week, I no longer think so. The book is so evidently Lewis' creation. Other male authors have had feedback from the women in their lives, and have failed miserably in producing anything recognisable. Not only that, but Orual's female perspective is utterly foundational to the book not just on a characterisation level but on a conceptual and thematic level. Lewis conceived of the book, imagined Orual as its lynchpin, wrote her, listened to his wife, adopted her ideas, (who knows?) perhaps incorporated some of her writing - Joy lives and breathes through this entire book as evidently as does Jack, but he had both the imagination and the humility to see the ways in which this added to the story; and what he did with her input went far, far beyond the odd token line or two slung in to improve characterisation: this is the work of a man who has taken hold of what he's being told with two hands and exercised considerable skill, enthusiasm, and creativity in incorporating as much of it as he can into the very bones of the story.
Yet my tweet garnered pushback right away from men who either refused to acknowledge that Joy made any meaningful contribution to the book at all, or saw Orual's POV merely as a nifty bit of characterisation. To the former I will only quote Orual's observation, that men have many ways to punish a man whom they think loves his wife too well. To the latter, I would argue that on the contrary, Orual's female POV is not incidental to the story but utterly foundational to its power.
Orual's perspective operates as a major feature of the story. In the first part of the book she tells her own story from her own perspective, and in the second part of the book she tells how that perspective has undergone a radical change. It turns out the world she lived in, the gods she lived under, were both far kinder and far more terrible than she ever imagined, and that she herself was a devourer who first demanded exclusive love and then cut herself off from any possibility of love once she had been disappointed. A huge part of the book's power lies in how uncannily convincing Orual's perspective is in the first part, and then how utterly her self-image and narrative is shattered in the second. I mean, this must be the fifth time I've read the book, and I'm STILL figuring out stuff like how the veil she perceives as radically empowering is actually a wall she's put up to cut herself off from ever being truly known and loved. And even the things one SHOULD see coming, like the reality of the god and of Psyche's house, still hit like a semi-trailer. We are so deeply and convincingly immersed in Orual's perspective that it takes all the effort we can to disbelieve any of the things she says.
Everything about Orual's perspective, therefore, is consciously used in this book to immerse us, to make us believe her. This includes, centrally, the fact that she is a woman. It's not just because the Psyche of myth had no jealous brothers - that's where Orual might have come from on a conceptual level, but it's not where she is in this story. Orual as a woman has been the target of misogyny all her life, from her father's abusiveness to Bardia's lament that she hadn't been born a man, or cool observation that she might make a decent wife if she had had any other face. (It's also no random decision that Orual uses her femininity to bait an enemy prince into the duel that wins her her throne).
Lewis uses Orual's femininity in many ways through the book - as ever I feel completely aswim in it - but there are two major ones. First, the corrupt love Orual bears for Psyche is the love of a mother for her child. Lewis wrote in THE FOUR LOVES about this sort of corrupted love; he was writing what he saw as a distinctively feminine form of love (don't forget that he spent decades of his life with a highly controlling mother figure). It's this that drives Orual throughout the whole book. Second and even more importantly, the book culminates with Orual realising that her true ugliness lies deeper than her skin: it lies in her soul. Having recognised that her soul is as repulsive as her face, she comes for a while to believe that she must have been born with an ugly soul in the same way that she was born with an ugly face, and that as such she must despair of the love of the gods in the same way she has always despaired of the love of a man. The ending of the book has Psyche bring her beauty in a casket, banishing her ugliness. This ending, as the kids say, slaps. And the whole reason it hits as hard as it does - at least, if you're a woman - is that all of us know what it is to feel we don't measure up to standards of physical beauty, all of us have felt unlovable because of it. Heck, when I put it down in black and white it seems an absolutely trite and reductive thing to say about a book this complex and protean. But it's true for all that.
In TILL WE HAVE FACES, CS Lewis takes aspects of female experience - beauty, motherhood, romantic love, misogyny and Lord only knows what else I've overlooked - and uses them as the building-blocks of his parable. In doing so he gives his heroine one of the most distinct and powerful female voices in literature written by anyone, male or female, and creates a book that doesn't only speak to, but for, many of its readers. He quite obviously didn't do it alone. Together, CS Lewis and Joy Davidman have produced a masterpiece and what is, I am convinced, by a significant margin, the greatest thing he ever produced.
Some men, I am told, complain about this. I would challenge them to meditate upon the meaning of the ezer kenegdo. ...more
Identical twins Lawrence and Chester Stoning have been brought up by an absent-minded father and socialite mother. Or rather, Lawrence has been broughIdentical twins Lawrence and Chester Stoning have been brought up by an absent-minded father and socialite mother. Or rather, Lawrence has been brought up carefully (complete with an extensive, no-frills philosophical, historical, scientific, and medical education) while Chester has been left to follow his heart into an action-packed training in all the martial arts and ripping yarns of chivalry and adventure. Each brother disdains the other’s gifts, but when Chester runs away from home Lawrence dutifully follows to keep him safe. Before they know it, they’ve been hired to protect a Spanish merchant and his beautiful ward Pacarina, who guards a deadly secret locked in the heart of the Peruvian jungle.
Suzannah Rowntree
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