Name: War in Heaven
ISBN: 9781502505125

Charles Walter Stansby Williams

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 - 1945) was a British poet, novelist, theologian, literary critic, and member of the Inklings. Although Williams attracted the attention and admiration of some of the most notable writers of his day, including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, his greatest admirer was probably C. S. Lewis, whose novel That Hideous Strength was at the time regarded as entirely inspired by Williams's novels.

War in Heaven

Tim Pendry

This was the first novel (1930) of Anglican fantasist Charles Williams. It contains all his opacity, irony and subtle and sometimes sardonic humour about a weak but basically decent humanity faced with the ineffable, set within something close to a pastiche of interwar popular fiction. Elsewhere I have reviewed his later (1937) 'Descent into Hell' which is a much more intense and difficult work and which I know I am going to have to read twice in order to understand it adequately but this first novel is a good starting point for entering his world. Williams is never an easy read but here he is possibly at his most accessible if only because he frames his theology within a murder mystery (which is not the point of the tale) and a tale of Satanism and dark magic (which is) as well as a fantasy about the San Graal. His books have been called 'supernatural thrillers' but the thriller aspect should not be exaggerated. This is essential a book of 'ideas' that uses magic and fantasy to convey concepts that, in other hands, would require poetry to convey. His gravestone has 'poet' upon it. I may be wholly out of tune with Williams' religious position, a form of High Anglicanism that can mock gentle but kindly fun at rival Catholics and Wesleyans whilst seeing them as allies in the fight against evil, but I consider Williams to be a subtle genius. He may not be widely read now but his influence on Anglo-American fantasy fiction is substantial and he is definitely a major figure within a specific genre of it, Christian fantasy, a category that includes the more didactic C S Lewis and T F Powys. His genius lays not only in laying bare the complexity of the relationship between Man and God (if you believe what he believes) but in doing so in a way that manages to have quasi-allegorical characters who are also human-all-too-human. They are both representative and somehow real. In his rather peculiar way, he manages to ground magic and the transcendant in everyday reality and sometimes to make reality, and especially human behaviours faced with reality, transcendent and magical. The Arthurian aspect of the tale sets the transcendental within a great tradition. Human foibles are dissected with compassion. The prize at the end is to see one character of undoubted piety translated to eternal happiness and his counterpoint defeated not in some grand guignol descent into hell but by becoming human again and 'confessing'. There are descents and ascensions into otherworlds which are never over-explained. Indeed, in other hands, too much might be spelled out. He has not converted me and will not convert me to his way of seeing the world, one which is essentially mystical and ritualistic but he has helped me to respect it as something more than catholicism made pragmatically viable for the English character. Anglicanism is, of course, very English (not British but English) and even today defines the easy-going country Tory mentality. Williams, the Oxford intellectual, allows fantasy to be the tool for introducing the magical into English pragmatism where it is very much at home. Outsiders often find it difficult to understand the traditional English character. It seems to be a classically bourgeois trading and practical mentality (which it can be) and to be a little distant in its social relations, with gradations as complex as those of a Chinese court. But it is also very romantic about its ideals and about nature and not merely tolerant but hungry for the magical and the fantastic. After all, its only contribution to the creation of a world religion was to be Wicca later in the century. This one of those books that requires either a relatively brief review on the lines of 'read it because it is unlike anything else you might read' and a lengthy and close critical analysis that would involve as much attention as the Bible, Homer or a Greek Tragedy. But life is short. I suspect only literary critics and engaged Anglican would do such a thing but, for the rest of us, it is a book that bears reading for the diamonds in the conventional thirties coal seam.

War in Heaven

Reviews

Highlights