Reading C. S. Lewis's 'That Hideous Strength' - Part 1
Reading is a mysterious business. We may cast a book aside the moment we reach the final line, but books aren’t always that easy to shake off. Sometimes we discover that they have put down deep roots and are impossible to grub up. I can recall a few books like this: books which changed my perception of the world when I first read them and which continued to thrust down roots long after that.
I’m thinking of books like Simon Tugwell’s two books on prayer, which I first read as an evangelical Anglican undergraduate, Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, which I first read while teaching in Cumbria, and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, which I also first read as an undergraduate.
That Hideous Strength is still not as widely known as it should be. Even diehard Lewis fans sometimes give it a miss because they assume it’s science fiction and science fiction isn’t for them. And indeed the trilogy of which That Hideous Strength is a part is often marketed as a “Space Trilogy”. But that’s not the description Lewis himself used in Surprised by Joy; he called these three books “planetary romances”.
But what did he mean by “romance”?
In an essay called ‘The Anthropological Approach’, he wrote:
The romancer creates a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history than the errant knight would have expected; a world of endless forests, quest, hint, prophecy.
This is the world of That Hideous Strength. A world where most things point beyond themselves. A world of quests, hints and prophecies. A world of marvels rooted in a very ordinary town. Forget space ships and journeys where no man has gone before: That Hideous Strength is set in a university town in England some time after World War II.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but my point is that this is no ordinary sci-fi novel. It’s a book that’s firmly rooted in British soil.
But what was Lewis up to when he wrote it? Why did he turn to a pre-novelistic genre? A commentary attached to one of Tolkien’s letters (number 294) provides the answer:
L. said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.”
Lewis and Tolkien were not fans of modern literature or the modern technology-driven world and so they turned to pre-novelistic genres in order to capture something of the worldview that existed before “the Break” (as the poet David Jones called it). Here’s Tolkien again in letter 329:
I have… no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ‘novel’. My work [The Lord of the Rings] is not a novel, but an ‘heroic romance’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.”
Tolkien reached back but Lewis reached both back and forwards (just as the great contemporary Russian author, Eugene Vodolazkin, does). He drew on both the romance genre and the sci-fi of H. G. Wells and others to create something radically new: a deeply Christian, terrifyingly realistic fairy-tale.
Fairy-tale?
Yes, the subtitle of the book is ‘A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups’. Lewis knew full well that “romance” (which is as protean a genre as the novel) was capable of being misunderstood, so, like Orwell with Animal Farm - a book published at almost exactly the same time as That Hideous Strength - he drew on a more familiar term to ensure that he brought his readers with him, explaining that:
I have called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment.
(His full explanation is actually rather misleading, but that may be a discussion for another time.)
So, don’t be put off by the “Space Trilogy” label or the “romance” label or even by the fact that That Hideous Strength is the third in a trilogy. It really can stand alone. And don’t assume that it’s simply a book of its time. It certainly was shaped by the Second World War, during which it was written, but it’s also a book that has tremendous contemporary significance, as I hope to explain in part two of this essay, where I’ll be discussing AI, Google and other problems you may not associate with C. S. Lewis.
(In the meantime, I’d better get on with planning my presentation on Tolkien and the Liturgy which will be broadcast on Radio Maria England next Tuesday 4th October from 8.30-9.30pm. Do call into the show if you have any questions on the topic.)