Welcome to our Halloween edition of the Humpback Writers book feature! Even now there are no humpbacks or hunchbacks or anything of the kind, and it is a mean thing to call people who deal with the condition. But it is Hump Day, and the one before Halloween, so we have a spooky book for you. Probably the only spooky book that was published with an introduction by T.S. Eliot.
Charles Williams was one of the three most famous members of the Oxford Christian group known as the Inklings, the other two being J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Like those celebrated dons, Williams wrote fantastic fiction, fantastic in the sense of being otherworldly. While Tolkien created the most detailed fantasy world in history, and Lewis dabbled in fantasy for children and science fantasy for adults (among other things), Williams's stories were set in his current day England. He was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, a biographer, a critic -- he did everything literate that a man may do with paper and pen. It is not surprising, then, that he was friends for twenty years with Eliot, a convert to Williams's Anglican church.
All Hallows' Eve was Williams's last novel before his
untimely death in 1945. It is a ghost story, and unlike any other I have read. Here's the opener:
She was standing on Westminster Bridge. It was twilight, but the City was no longer dark. The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the buildings shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true that formal peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed and one more crisis of agony was done. Labor, intelligence, patience -- much need for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery, but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair.
We're right at the end of the war, and she's is considering what will happen next, and where her husband Richard is. But what she (and we) will soon discover is that she is dead; the last thing she remembers is going down into the Tube. And that's only the beginning of her problems. The woman's name is Lester (I guess that was a woman's name in wartime London), and in the ghostly streets she soon encounters two other deceased women whom she knew in life, the chatty and annoying Evelyn and the woeful Betty, whom Lester and Evelyn had treated badly in school. And even this is still just the beginning of Lester's problems.
Only a few people can be made aware, through brief contact, of the presence of the spectral women, including Lester's husband, and much more unsettling, a man named Simon Leclerc. Leclerc is a very bad man, and indeed Williams's books have no shortage of bad people engaged in bad acts. He is a necromancer, who uses Betty's ghost as a conduit to the spirit world, by which means he intends to amass power. It will be up to the ones who choose good to try to oppose Leclerc, if they can.
Eliot's introduction discusses the book's central battle:
The conflict which is the theme of every one of Williams's novels, is not merely the conflict between good and bad men, in the usual sense. No one was less confined to conventional morality, in judging good and bad behavior, than Williams: his mortality is that of the Gospels. He sees the struggle between Good and Evil as carried on, more or less blindly, by men and women who are often only the instruments of higher or lower powers, but who always have the freedom to choose to which powers they will submit themselves. Simon, in this story, is a most austere ascetic, but he is evil; Evelyn is a woman who appears too insignificant, too petty in her faults, to be really "bad," but yet, just because she is no more than pettiness, she delivers herself willingly into the hand of evil.
Furthermore, Williams's writing on the experience of the supernatural is truly unique, as Eliot explains:
I have already tried to indicate the unity between the man and the work; and it follows that there is a unity between his works of very different kinds. Much of his work may appear to realize its form only imperfectly; but it is also true in a measure to say that Williams invented his own forms -- or to say that no form, if he had obeyed all its conventional laws, could have been satisfactory for what he wanted to say. What it is, essentially, that he had to say, comes near to defying definition. It was not simply a philosophy, a theology, or a set of ideas: it was primarily something imaginative.
This is true, and something I have seen time and again in Williams's work. Take this simple passage from All Hallows' Eve:
She made a third effort and again she heard from her own mouth only the flat voice of the dead. She was possessed by it. Death, it seemed, was not over; it had only just begun. She was dying further. She could not call; presently she would not be able to speak; then not to see -- neither the high stars nor the meaningless lights -- yet still, though meaningless, faintly metropolitan. But she would find even this pale light too much, and presently would creep away from it towards one of those great open entrances that loomed here and there, for inside she could hide from the light.
He writes as if he has experienced these things personally, like a man desperately trying to communicate this in all his books to those of us tied down with the mundane work of living -- a Lazarus "come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." His novels are characterized with these passages, some nearly impenetrable because they can be so hard to grasp -- because they grasp what to us is the ungraspable.
So I have to say I've never enjoyed Williams's books the way I've enjoyed others, because they are a lot of work, and even then I feel like I've never quite been able to tune him in. And yet it is rewarding. All Hallows' Eve has a remarkable spiritual struggle, unlike any I've seen in any other ghost story, even the (to me overpraised) Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw.
A Reader's Guide to Fantasy (by Searles, Meacham, and Franklin) sums Charles Williams up very well thus: "In his books he demonstrates a deep knowledge and understanding of traditional magical theories and implements, and invests them all with power as symbols of an absolute reality which underlies the manifest reality of the visible world."
Of Williams's books, I think War in Heaven is my favorite, mainly because it centers around the Holy Grail. The Greater Trumps is one of the more readable, and in spots terrifying. There is a scene in Many Dimensions regarding the Seal of Solomon that made me almost jump up in shock. And Descent into Hell is not only one of the scariest books I've ever read, but one of the most aptly titled books as well.
If you are prepared to work for your ghost story, All Hallows' Eve is as good as it gets. But Charles Williams is never light reading, although he can be enlightening reading.
