C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (conclusion)

“If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point where there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides…”

It probably seemed that way to C.S. Lewis, writing in the latter days of World War II. I think here he succumbs to the same mistake he finds in Modernists, that they see all history as a seamless progression from point A to and anticipated point B.

But whether Dr. Dimble is mistaken or not, Mark and Jane Studdock have found themselves on opposite sides of a cosmic war and there is little neutral ground to stand on. The age-old conflict between Good and Evil is about to enter a startling new phase.

We are not told how Mr. Bultitude first came to St. Anne’s. He seems to have just shown up one day. Very likely, MacPhee’s guess that he was a trained bear who wandered away from a carnival is correct; but if Mr. Bultitude was ever a wild animal, the peaceful environment of St. Anne’s has tamed him. The manor is like a second Eden, where man and animals co-exist in harmony, and even the mice are welcome to eat the crumbs which fall from the Master’s table. This is largely due to Ransom’s influence. The Director’s brief sojourn on the unfallen world of Perelandra has given him the rapport with animals which is Adam’s neglected birthright.

Mr. Bultitude is largely contend to live in the garden, occasionally wandering into the manor house to startle unwary guests, like Jane, or to sit by the fireside and receive affectionate scratches from Ransom. He is vaguely aware that he is not supposed to stray from the garden, but being a bear of little brain, his thought processes get a bit fuzzy. When he finds the garden gate accidentally left unlatched, his curiosity gets the better of him. This passage, told from the bear’s point of view, is one of my favorites in the book.

A couple of workers from the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments happen to drive by. They have been assigned to acquire animals for the N.I.C.E. laboratories and are a bit behind quota. Coming across a stray bear wandering loose is quite a stroke of luck for them – one might almost say a Godsend – and they easily lure Mr. Bultitude into their truck.

What they don’t realize is that Mr. Bultitude is not your average bear. Merlin has identified him as one of the Seven Bears of Logres, and in one of the strange oracular moments that seem to strike him occasionally has prophesied “…that before Christmas this bear would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except for other bear that none of us had ever heard of.”

The Director has asked Jane and some of the other women to put the Lodge, a small cottage on the manor grounds, in order. Household chores at St.Anne’s are done on a rotating basis; the men do them one day, the women the next. Jane doesn't see how this democratic division of labor fits in with the Ransom’s insistence that wives need to submit to their husbands, but the system seems to work; at last so long as the women don’t look too closely at the dishes on the guy’s day to wash.

Previously I've said that in Lewis’s world the gods and goddesses of classical myth are something like racial memories of the actual cosmic beings which rule the planets. This is not strictly true. There are echoes of those cosmic entities here on earth; reflections like the shadows in Plato’s cave of the actual planetary beings. “That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a Heavenly one,” Ransom explains, “and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian.”

Jane comes across such an avatar in the lodge: a tall, intimidating goddess in a flame-colored robe. Were she a pagan, Jane might worship her; were she a Christian, like Mother Dimble, she could trust in God’s protection. Lacking the spirituality of the former and the faith of the latter, Jane finds herself overwhelmed by the terrifying apparition.

Later Ransom offers another suggestion why the goddess seemed so terrifying, reflecting again Lewis’s orthodox views of gender. Jane is neither matron nor maid. She has renounced her role as a virgin – which is not by itself a bad thing – but has refused to take on the role of a mother. Are these the only two roles permitted a woman? I think Lewis over-simplifies things; and once again, I have to wonder how Dorothy L. Sayers would have written such a scene; but I have to admit, it makes sense that a fertility goddess would have strong opinions on this subject.

Ivy Maggs and Mrs. Dimble do not see the apparition. They lack Jane’s psychic sensitivity. But the goddess’s appearance probably has a good deal to do with the presence of Merlin. “We are not living exactly in the Twentieth Century as long as he’s here,” Ransom explains. “We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred.”

And what of Merlin? Merlin has been wondering about that himself. He’s been taken out of time for 1500 years and brought back in the present day to combat the Forces of Darkness; but what is he to do?
Ransom has been trying to bring him up to speed on the 20th Century, and he’s managed to wrap his brain around the idea that the present king is what he’d call a Saxon; but he doesn't understand why this king doesn't just send an army against Belbury and crush the N.I.C.E., or why the Ransom, the Pendragon, doesn't try to raise the populace against the tyrants. “They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived,” Ransom tells him.

Merlin offers to summon magical forces to come to their aid, but Ransom forbids it. The spirits Merlin once commanded are long since gone, dormant under centuries of industrialization. Times have changed, and the kind of meddling with natural forces Merlin used to do is no longer permitted by the cosmic forces Ransom serves. “It was never very lawful even in your day.” Merlin is not sure that the forces of nature he knew are completely dormant, and from Jane’s experience in the lodge we see he may be right. Nevertheless, he concedes to Ransom’s other point.

But the question remains: what is Merlin here for and what is the Director’s plan? Ransom’s answer is the same as the one he earlier gave MacPhee. He is waiting on his Masters, the Oyarésu.

But surely they will not intervene directly, Merlin protests. The cosmic planetary powers are forbidden by divine edict from crossing the Lunar orbit, as part of the cease-fire decreed following the rebellion of Earth’s own Dark Archon.

Ah, but that’s just the thing. The treaty has already been broken. The cosmic entities were forbidden to cross the orbital embargo, but nobody ever said that humans using their own intelligence and science couldn't. By travelling to Mars, Weston has already crossed the line; and when the Enemy possessed Weston on his trip to Venus the decree was broken. The Oyarésu are now free to come to earth; but they too are waiting for something.

Jane’s husband Mark, meanwhile, is still a prisoner at the N.I.C.E. headquarters in Belbury, where Wither and Frost wish to initiate him into their Inner Circle. Mark wants nothing to do with the Institute. He has finally realized how they've been manipulating him all this time; but since he is a captive, he sees no choice but to play along while Frost subjects him to bizarre rituals which seem to be intended to desensitize him to societal taboos and, by extension, to ethical norms and conventional notions of Good and Evil in order to inculcate “Objectivity”.

Mark has an unexpected ally in the form of a nameless tramp, picked up by the N.I.C.E., whom Wither and Frost have mistaken for Merlin. The tramp has neglected to undeceive them, partially because they keep speaking to him in Latin; (they think he’s a 5th Century wizard who wouldn't understand Modern English) and so he assumes they are foreigners; and partially, I think, because he’s been arrested enough times to know that you never volunteer information to the cops. As far as the tramp is concerned, he’s been given a warm place to sleep, and good food. His confinement is undoubtedly better than many jails he’s been in. The tramp comes from a culture so alien to Mark that he has trouble understanding him; and yet Mark feels an affinity to him based on their shared captivity.

Every now and then, Wither and Frost come in with an expert in old Celtic languages hoping to find someone who can communicate with “Merlin”. They've been unsuccessful so far. The philologist Elwin Ransom would be an obvious choice, but their people have had difficulty in finding him; (undoubtedly one of the reasons why Ransom has changed his name to Fisher-King). Finally, Wither resorts to putting an ad in the newspaper for linguists.

When he sees this ad, Ransom knows that their opportunity has arrived.

That night, Ransom tells his household to remain downstairs. He and Merlin are going to entertain visitors in his upstairs study. The Oryarés are going to descend in person. In this memorable passage, Lewis describes parallel scenes how the presence of the gods affects the people in the manor house. Their conversation becomes lively and witty, almost giddy, as Vilitrilbia, whom men call Mercury, arrives; a sweet peacefulness descends upon them and the couples begin to snuggle as upstairs Perelandra, the personification of Venus appears. The men become more aggressive and impatient for action with the arrival of Mars. One by one, the great planetary powers manifest in Ransom’s study, and one by one, they infuse some of their power into Merlin.

These entities are mind-bogglingly powerful, and here I’m reminded of something from The Simarillion, by Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Although the Simarillion was not published in its finished form until after Tolkien’s death, he had read portions of the unfinished stories from it to his friends. Lewis might have borrowed this idea from his friend, or it is just as possible that they were both drawing off a shared Christian Cosmology.

In The Simarillion, the Valar, god-like beings subordinate to the Creator-God, are also barred from interfering in the affairs of Middle-Earth. They remain on the sidelines throughout Melkor’s age-long war against the elves until one of the elves makes the arduous voyage to return the last of the Simarils to Valinor. Only then do the Valar come to personally kick Melkor’s butt. The powers they unleash to do it, however, obliterates half of the continent.

Likewise, the Oyarsés could easily leave all of England a giant hole in the North Sea if they unleashed their full powers. Instead they are going to channel their powers through a mortal. This is why Merlin was important. Using their power thus is going to be hard on the vessel receiving it. The Oyarsés refuse to subject even a volunteer to this. But Merlin is no stranger to powerful spirits. He he has never met any of the Oyarsés scale before, but he has channeled supernatural forces. Metaphorically speaking, he is not a virgin. Merlin realizes he is not likely to survive this experience and it frankly terrifies him; but he understands that this is the purpose for which he has been brought here and so he resolves to go through with it.

The next day another visitor comes to the N.I.C.E; a Basque priest who understands not a word of English but who somehow has come in answer to Wither’s newspaper ad. When he is brought before the supposed “Merlin”, he is actually able to converse with him. This is because the priest is the real Merlin, using his Jedi Mind Tricks to control the tramp. We have a comical situation where Merlin is making the tramp give orders in ancient Celtic, which he then translates into Latin for Wither’s benefit.

Wither is perplexed by this situation. It certainly looks as if the priest is controlling the wizard instead of merely interpreting for him, but that couldn't possibly be the case. At Merlin’s orders, he gives the supposed wizard and his interpreter a tour of the Institute. Adding to his confusion, he realizes that a dinner has been scheduled for that evening with several important backers of the Institute in attendance. Of course, Merlin will have to attend, but how will Wither explain the wizard to all these big-wigs who think that the N.I.C.E. is all about Science?

As Wither goes off with the two Merlins, Frost takes Mark back to the Objective Room for another training session. A large table in the room has been moved aside to reveal an ornate carving on the floor depicting Christ nailed to the cross. Frost tells Mark to trample on the image.

Mark hesitates. He is not a Christian; unlike Jane he has never been one; but this seems so pointless. “This is all surely a pure superstition. … Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn't it just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it? I mean – damn it all – if it’s only a bit of wood, why do anything about it?”

Frost insists. “Of course, it is a superstition; but it is that particular superstition which has pressed upon our society for a great many centuries.” But Mark looks at it another way.

Mark has never had a really firm grip on the notion of Good vs. Evil, but for the past few days, he has come to regard everything about Belbury as an affront to everything that he saw as Straight or Normal or Wholesome. Looking on the suffering man on the cross, he does not see it as a religious icon or an image of worship; he sees it as what happens when the Straight meets the Crooked; what the N.I.C.E. would do to him if he refused to warp himself in their demented image.

Frost prods him. “Do you intend to go on with the training or not?”

Mark made no reply. He was thinking, and thinking hard because he knew, that if he stopped even for a moment, mere terror of death would take the decision out of his hands. Christianity was a fable. It would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. This Man himself, on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable, and had died complaining that the God in whom he trusted had forsaken him – had, in fact, found the universe a cheat. But this raised a question that Mark had never thought of before. Was that the moment at which to turn against the Man? If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? Supposing the Straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the Crooked, what then? Why not go down with the ship? He began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished. They had been a safeguard … they had prevented him, all his life, from making mad decisions like that which he was now making as he turned to Frost and said, 

“It’s all bloody nonsense, and I’m damned if I do any such thing.”

And here things start to get really surreal.

The session is interrupted by the simultaneous arrival of Wither’s little tour group, and the dinner guests, including Jules, the self-important public face of the N.I.C.E. Most critics regard him as a particularly unkind caricature of H.G. Wells, and they are probably correct. Jules knows nothing about the Macrobes, the diabolical cosmic entities who control the Institute through the severed head of the executed murderer Alcasan; he knows nothing about the severed head. He thinks that he’s in charge of the Institute, and part of Wither’s job is to keep him thinking that. Jules does not understand what the old man in the robes and the foreign priest are doing here, and it takes all of Wither’s powers of diplomacy and double-talk to soothe him.
Mark is allowed to change into dinner clothes. This is England after all, and there are some societal norms which even Objectivists like Frost must follow.

The dinner is a peculiar one. The tramp seems to be enjoying himself, accepting the bizarre things that are happening to him with a cheerful fatalism. During the dinner, several things happen, and Lewis show them unfolding as they occur to several individuals.

Wither first notices something wrong when in the middle of his after dinner speech, Jules makes a remark about something being “as gross an anachronism as to trust to Calvary for salvation in modern war.” Of course, he means “cavalry”; “Calvary” is the name of the hill upon which Christ was crucified; and Jules’s significant slip has always stuck in my mind to keep me from confusing the two words. But the next sentence out of his mouth is utter gibberish, and not the type of gobbledygook platitudes he usually uttered.
Wither tries to prevent Jules from embarrassing himself further by taking the podium himself, but finds the guests staring at him as if he were speaking gibberish too. Actually, everyone in the room has suddenly lost the ability to communicate intelligibly.

Frost attempts to pass a note to Fairy Hardcastle, but the note reads “Blunt frippers intantly to pointed bdeluroid. Purgent. Cost.”. So she takes a wild guess as to what her boss wants. She discreetly gets up from the table, locks all the doors leading out of the dining room, pulls out a pistol, and shoots Jules dead.
That’s when the real panic starts. And that’s when the ferocious man-eating tiger comes out of the kitchen. Tiger? What’s going on here?

What has happened is that Merlin has unleashed the Curse of Babel on the crowd. You may recall that the novel’s title, “That Hideous Strength”, comes from a medieval poem about the Tower of Babel, that dreadful stronghold. Merlin now possesses the power of Mercury, the god of Language, to take away their ability to communicate. I recently read another critic who observed that the curse doesn't end with language; With the power of Mars, he removed from the N.I.C.E. the martial discipline they once had and with the power of Venus the camaraderie and co-operation they once enjoyed. Well, to be honest, the crew at Belbury despised all those things; their organization was based on fear, not discipline; on ambition, not comradeship; and they used language as a tool to deceive, not to communicate. So, in a way, Merlin is merely taking away from them virtues which they weren't using anyway.

Merlin leaves the banquet hall quietly without being observed and takes the tramp with him. No one sees the tramp again, although I like to think he made off with some of the N.I.C.E.’s silverware and got many a drink at the local pub telling of his adventures. Merlin goes to the labs where the animals are kept for vivisection experiments and frees them, sending them to the dining room. To dine. Here he finds Mr. Bultitude, and gives him a special blessing, temporarily freeing him from the tameness Ransom had imposed upon him and reminding the bear that he is a carnivore.

Merlin also releases other captives, prisoners who have been transferred from the local jails to the N.I.C.E. as part of the Institute’s takeover of local civil government. One of these prisoners is Ivy Maggs’s husband, and Merlin gives the man a note from his wife instructing him to come to St. Anne’s, but to avoid Edgestow.
Belbury is now utter chaos, which is only intensified when the Macrobes, seeing that their plans have been upended, decide to destroy their tools. Wither along with Filostrato and Straik flee to lab where Alcasan’s severed head is kept.. The men find themselves compelled to worship the head as if it were some kind of scientific Lord of the Flies. Then the head commands them to get it a new one, and Filostrato finds himself dragged off to the lab’s mini-guillotine. They kill Filostrato and are in the process of trying to kill each other when Mr. Bultitude comes in to finish the job.

Frost finds himself compelled, as if his body was controlled by superior forces, to gather all the flammables in the lab and immolate himself.

Lord Feverstone, ever the opportunist, manages to slip out of the banquet before everything goes pear-shaped; but when he heads towards Edgestow, he finds an exodus of people leaving it. He presses onward, and so is swallowed up by the unexpected earthquake which destroys the town.

As it happens, very few people die in the destruction of Edgestow. Many had already been displaced. Many more providentially left town for seemingly coincidental reasons. But in any case, the only people left in Edgestow when it was destroyed were the Very Good, who were ready for Heaven anyway, and the Very Bad, who were getting what they deserved. George Orwell disliked this eldila ex machina ending, feeling that it detracted from a perfectly good cautionary dystopia; but Lewis re-wrote Paradise Lost so that the Snake loses; he’s not about to end the novel with a boot on humanity’s face forever.

The next morning, many of the animals freed from the N.I.C.E. turn up at St. Anne’s. Mr. Bultitude returns, in the company of a friendly she-bear. Many of the other animals also have arrived two-by-two and celebrate their new freedom under the blessing and sanction of the goddess Venus. “This is becoming indecent,” MacPhee complains as the elephants begin copulating in the garden. “On the contrary,” Ransom replies, “decent in the old sense, decens, fitting is just what it is.”

Lord Byron once said that every tragedy is ended with a death, and every comedy with a marriage. This comedy ends with couples united. Ivy is reunited with her husband. And then there’s Jane.

The Director is bidding all his friends good-bye. Ransom’s task here is finished. He is ready to go. Like Frodo, he has suffered wounds which cannot be healed in this world; but the eldila are going to come and take him to Perelandra, where he will wait with Arthur and a handful of others until the End of Days.
Jane would like to stay with the Director until he leaves, but Ransom tells her that she is being waited for. “Your husband is waiting for you in the Lodge. It was your own marriage chamber that you prepared. Should you not go to him?”

Since Ransom requests it, she accedes to his will. “But – but – am I a bear or a hedgehog?” Is she just another female to be paired off at the end?

“More. But not less,” Ransom says. “You will have no more dreams. Have children instead.”

Mark too has escaped the chaos at Belbury. Merlin also found him and gave him a letter from his one-time friend Dennison, telling him that his wife was waiting for him at St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill.

When he was a prisoner at Belbury, he flattered himself in thinking himself heroically resisting the N.I.C.E. He doesn't feel so heroic now, and can only think of how badly he’s treated Jane and how unworthy he is of her. What he’s feeling is the flip side of Paul’s admonition for wives to obey their husbands; the husbands need to strive to be deserving of that deference. As he approaches the small cottage on the manor property he encounters a gigantic woman in a flame-colored robe with a beautiful but sternly enigmatic face who opens the door for him and wordlessly commands him to enter.

Jane does not see the goddess this time. But she sees through the window that Mark has left his shirt lying draped over a chair. How like the man. She goes in to him.

And do Mark and Jane really reunite and re-establish their relationship? Lord Byron would say yes. And so would every Happily Ever After. But for all his theoretical musings on the proper relation between the sexes, C.S. Lewis never shows the two actually together and trying to make things work.


So maybe it’s best to leave it as a Happy Ending. Jack has his Jill, and the Forces of Darkness have for a time been forestalled. The darkness will gather again, but for the time being Venus presides over St. Anne’s and elephants are dancing in the rose garden.

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 4)

There has always been two Englands: a nation of shopkeepers and a nation of poets; behind every Arthur a Mordred and behind every Milton a Cromwell. The secular land of Britain ruled by the King, and Logres, the spiritual core, ruled by the Pendragon. There have been eras, as in the time of Arthur, when the King and the Pendragon were one and the same. Currently, Logres consists of about maybe a dozen people and a trained bear living in a commune at the Manor of St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill near the university town of Edgestow, and it’s director, the current Pendragon, is Mr. Fisher-King, formerly the philologist Elwin Ransom.

St. Anne’s stands in opposition to the National Institue of Co-ordinated Experiments at Belbury, or the N.I.C.E., a think-tank ostensibly dedicated to improving society through scientific means but actually to imposing a totalitarian regime on the world. The Director has done very little to actually combat this threat, though, apart from raising vegetables and taking in the occasional stray, like Mr. Bultitude, the tame bear; or the Dimbles and Ivy Maggs, evicted from their homes by the N.I.C.E., or Jane Studdock, seeking answers to her disturbing dreams. MacPhee, the group’s resident skeptic, finds this lack of action infuriating, but Ransom says he is waiting for instructions from his Masters, the cosmic entities he calls the eldila.


This wait is about to end.

Jane’s clairvoyant dreams have revealed that the forces behind the N.I.C.E. seek to revive the wizard Merlin, who like sleeping under Bragdon Wood, a piece of property formerly owned by nearby Bracton college but recently acquired by the Institute. They've been delayed in their search because the ground of the wood is marshy and needs to be drained before they can perform major excavations.

This makes me wonder: why was Merlin buried in such an unsuitable location? Well, from a plot point of view, it’s an excuse to delay the N.I.C.E. while they much about diverting the river flowing through Edgestow to drain the marsh and displace half the population in the process. But there is another peculiar parallel.

In his History of the Kings of Britain, medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth tells of how King Vortigern tried to build a tower but the foundation kept collapsing. His seers advised him to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a fatherless boy. They find such a child, the son of no mortal man, but the boy is himself a seer who reveals that there is a lake under the tower with two dragons, symbolizing the Saxons and the Britons.

Which doesn't actually have anything to do with the story, except for the swamp and the legend that Merlin, the boy in Geoffrey’s tale, was rumored to have an inhuman father. This is why the N.I.C.E. thinks they can recruit him for their side.

Ransom is not entirely sure about that. He notes that the magic of Merlin, as portrayed in legend, seems of a different sort than that of the wannabe sorcerers and alchemists of the Renaissance.

“What common measure is there,” [Dimble] would ask, ‘between ceremonial occultists like Faustus and Prospero and Archimago with their midnight studies, their forbidden books, their attendant fiends or elementals, and a figure like Merlin who seems to produce his results simply by being Merlin?” And Ransom agreed. He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different – something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know.

(And yes, C.S. Lewis is giving a shout-out here to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who at the time Lewis wrote this was still struggling to finish The Lord of the Rings. The tribute bugged Tolkien, because Lewis misspelled “Numenor.”)

Jane’s latest dream has shown her a tunnel leading to Merlin’s resting place. The entrance, an ancient and forgotten cairn, lies outside of Bragdon Wood and the property under the N.I.C.E.’s control. This is the opportunity Ransom has been waiting for. He sends a small team, guided by Jane, to the site; but when they get there, they find that the sealed tunnel entrance has been broken open – from the inside. The stones have been rolled away and the tomb is empty.

Jane’s husband, Mark, meanwhile, has been arrested for the murder of William Hingset. He’s pretty sure that the N.I.C.E. really killed Hingset and framed him for it; but he has finally come to realize that the management philosophy of the Institute greatly resembles the aphorism of Nixon’s: Once you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Not that I think Lewis was familiar with the wit and wisdom of Richard Nixon, but he undoubtedly knew the sentiment.

Mark is not actually being held by the police; he’s in N.I.C.E. custody. Wither and Frost, the chief administrators of the N.I.C.E. have decided to let Mark sit in a holding cell overnight, believing that marinating in apprehension and fear for a few hours will make him more compliant. And it might have too, except that Mark has been dwelling on the royal chewing out that Dr. Dimble gave him on his visit to Edgestow.

In Lewis’s stories, the most important action always seems to occur in the protagonists’ heads, which is possibly why they are so infrequently adapted. Here Mark looks back on his own life and takes stock of what a mess he’s made of it. He should have seen immediately that Wither, with his alternating vague flattery and vague threats, was playing mind games with him. Except that Dick Devine, Lord Feverstone, had vouched for him. And why did he ever trust Feverstone, with his flashy, cynical manner and his insincere grin? Because Feverstone seemed so wise and knowing compared to puppets like his old colleague Curry. But he didn’t always think Curry was a puppet…

Mark comes to the disquieting realization that all his life he’s been trying to get into the “in crowd” and he has nothing to show for it. Even when he was a boy in school, he ditched his best friend in order to get into a popular clique. And for what? The only real joy he’s gotten out of life has been from people outside his ambition track, like his sister, like his boyhood pal, like his friend Denniston from his undergraduate days, and like Jane. He realizes with horror that in his deepest fantasies about his career, he pictured Jane as serving as a kind of Perfect Hostess whose beauty and charm would reflect credit on her husband; not an individual in her own right, but merely an extension of himself. Mark recoils at this thought and realizes glumly that perhaps his being hanged for murder might be the best thing that could happen to Jane.

He now realizes that he has somehow wound up on the wrong side. He doesn't think of it as a matter of Good and Evil, or even of Right and Wrong, because, as Lewis frequently tells us, his upbringing and education have provided him with no sort of ethical grounding. All he knows is that he wants to be on Jane’s side, and that he doesn't want to be on Belbury’s.

It is while he is in this state of mind that Frost comes to visit him. Frost and Wither have decided to accelerate their “treatment” of him. Frost believes that initiating him into the innermost circle of the Institute will be the impetus to bring him completely on their side.

Frost is a pure Materialist; he believes that all emotions, all morals and all social interactions are at their root merely chemical reactions in the brain. But this does not mean he does not believe in a Higher Power. He explains to Mark the existence of beings he calls “Macrobes”. Not microbes, mind you – “The formation of the word explains itself.” -- but beings as far above human reasoning and intelligence as humans are above the bacteria.

“These organisms, then,” said Mark, “are friendly to humanity?” 

“If you reflect for a moment,” said Frost, “you will see that your question has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought.”

It occurs to me that Lewis is playing here with the toys of H.P. Lovecraft; although being Christian, Lewis uses them for different ends.

It is these macrobes who are the true force behind the organization at Belbury. Filostrato, the Italian transhumanist, is deluded. Although he has doubtless scored a great scientific achievement in keeping the severed head of the scientist Alcasan functional, it is not Alcasan who commands the N.I.C.E. but rather the macrobes using the Head as a conduit. Frost coolly explains the goal to cull humanity until only the intellectual and technological elite remain. The previous two wars, he says, are merely the first of a series of sixteen wars scheduled for the 20th Century as part of this plan.

Mark finds these revelations abhorrent; yet at the same time enticing. Now he is on the verge of becoming the ultimate insider, one of the handful of mortals who really know what is going on.

But the interview is cut short. Frost is summoned away. Merlin has been found.

The workmen excavating Bragdon Wood uncovered the empty burial chamber, and followed the tunnel to the surface. After a search on the dark and rainy moor, they came across a bearded old man, weathered and gnarled, lying naked in some sort of a trance. They immediately brought him back to the Institute.

He is nothing like what Wither and Frost expected. When the stranger awakens, Wither addresses him in Latin, for of course a 5th Century wizard would not know modern English; but the man does not seem to understand. He happily accepts the food and drink Wither provides, although he seems more interested in the beer than in the bottle of port; but he says nothing; he doesn't even seem to pay attention to Wither at all. Most of all, Wither is disturbed by the man’s face; it shows none of the signs he associates with a “Master”, or even one who could be made into a “Master.” Still, Merlin is a man from the 5th Century. One must make allowances for these things.

Except this man is not Merlin.

The real Merlin appears at the door of St. Anne’s, dressed in the raggedy clothes of a tramp. He at first mistakes Ransom and MacPhee for servants, and he puts MacPhee to sleep using something the narration describes as hypnotism but which seems more akin to Jedi Mind Tricks. He does not believe Ransom’s claim to be the Master of the House and challenges him to answer three questions of Ancient Lore. Ransom can answer him from the knowledge he gained in his trips through the Heavens and his conversations with the eldila. Merlin acknowledges him as Pendragon.

When the party sent out to look for Merlin returns, they find the two men in conversation. Merlin shocks the party by calling Jane “the falsest lady of any at this time alive” and suggests that it would be a charity for the Pendragon to order her head chopped off.

And here we run up against another of Lewis’s bêtes noires; one which is frustrating because it seems so irrelevant to his story. Merlin’s condemnation of Jane comes because she uses birth control. Now what does that have to do with anything?

A couple reasons. The first one, which Merlin gives, is that if Jane and her husband had conceived a child, he would have grown up to be a great champion in the struggle against Evil. They didn't, and the opportunity has passed. This doesn't mean that Evil will win; but it means that a good which could have happened now won’t, and something else will happen instead.

Another reason is that Lewis wants to emphasize for us that Merlin is a man from another century. Like the old saying goes, the Past is a another country; they do things differently there. Lewis gives us a couple of vignettes in the next chapter or two to illustrate how different in manner and psychology Merlin is from a 20th Century man. He just whacks us in the skull with this first instance.

But deeper than that, it resonates with Lewis’s greater theme of marriage and the relationship between the sexes. We've seen that Mark and Jane are in an unhappy marriage. Throughout the book, Lewis introduces other relationships with which to compare them. We have the Dennisons, a happily-married couple; we have the Dimbles, an old established marriage, which like the Studdocks’ is childless, but unlike theirs is not childless by choice. Mrs. Dimble is a loving, maternal woman, who over the years has become a surrogate mother for her husband’s many students. Ivy Maggs has a difficult marriage in that her husband has had trouble with the law, but was mostly reformed since marrying her. This hasn't ended his problems with the law, but she deeply loves him despite his fallibility. Neither the argumentative MacPhee nor the intimidating Miss Ironwood are married, although Ransom at one point jokes that if they continue fighting he might be forced to marry them. One gets the strong sense that Miss Ironwood is in love with Ransom, but it is a chaste love which she understands will never be consummated.

On the Belbury side, we have no married couples. Fairy Hardcastle is portrayed as an unnatural woman with mannish habits. She likes her subordinates to be fluffy girly girls; she is less Pussy Galore than Rosa Klebb. The scientist Filostrato is described as a eunuch. But then there are the natives of Sulva, which we call the Moon. Filostrato earlier described how the inhabitants of the Moon had almost succeeded in purging their sphere of biological life forms. In Merlin’s riddle challenge with Ransom, we learn that the people of Sulva practice “cold marriages”, where couples mate not with each other, but with artificial surrogates; and that children are incubated in artificial wombs. Merlin lumps birth control in with these other “practices of Sulva”; as being unnatural.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel that both Merlin and Lewis are being needlessly dogmatic here, and if Dorothy Sayers were writing the book she would have done things much differently. This section never fails to take me completely out of the story.

Merlin grudgingly allows that Jane will not be decapitated; one of the many aspects of the 20th Century he has difficulty grasping. But despite his bloodthirsty impulses, he is not on the Enemy’s side. The tale of his being the offspring of a demon he calls a lie. He has always been on the side of Heaven, and he is willing to serve the present Pendragon.

Mark continues grappling with his conscience. He is more convinced than ever that wants no part of the N.I.C.E., but he keeps finding his thoughts slipping back into old habits and familiar patterns. In this Lewis is a little more realistic than some of his latter-day admirers, who claim that once you have your Moment of Conversion you are Heaven Bound. Lewis had enough difficulty with his own conversion to know it isn't that easy. Mark has a vague sense that it ought to be, though, and that he ought to be rewarded for finally resolving to Do The Right Thing. It seems unfair of the Universe that he keeps sliding back.

Frost now institutes a new phase of Mark’s initiation; one designed to break down his preconceptions. He is taken to a special room, called the “Objective Room” where everything, by design, is just a little bit off. Mark quickly realizes the point of all this; Frost wants to break him of preconceived notions of Good and Bad by immersing him in an environment where nothing is regular and everything is just slightly crooked. He puts Mark through exercises where he is made to perform pointless, silly, but non-normative actions. Mark plays along with Frost’s little games because he sees little else he can do, but the whole farce does the exact opposite of what Frost intends: it helps solidify Mark's idea that there is Normal and there is Abnormal and he wants to be on the side of Normality.

He is aided in this by an unexpected ally. The mysterious stranger whom Wither mistook for Merlin has been put in the same sleeping quarters as Mark. It turns out that the man is a tramp. He hasn't spoken to Wither and Frost, because they keep talking to him in Latin so he assumes that they’re foreigners. The man seems a cheerful fatalist, who takes being a prisoner in stride. It seems that the night before a fellow came across the tramp and somehow commanded him to give him his clothing -- the real Merlin. Mark has difficulty understanding what the man says, and the man understands as little of Mark; but Mark comes to regard him as an ally against Wither and Frost. And in a way, Mark has finally become the Ultimate Insider. After all, he now possesses a secret that both Wither and Frost would dearly love to have, and he has become friends with a man whose intimacy they desire.


NEXT:  The Gods Descend; Dinner at Belbury, and Venus Comes to St. Anne’s

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 3)

When I was growing up back in the ‘70s, my Mom used to fret about cults and worried that my brother or I might get “sucked into” one.

Jane Studdock is also worried about getting “sucked into” the group from the Manor of St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill, a small community opposed to a sinister conspiracy out to take over the government; but she’s come to trust her new friends the Dennisons, who are members of the St. Anne’s group. They've convinced her that her strange dreams truly are clairvoyant.

Jane’s husband, Mark wants to be “sucked in”. He’s always longed to be an insider, one of the “in crowd”, one of the people “in the know”. The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (or the N.I.C.E.) seemed like a wonderful opportunity. The people at the Institute have tempted him with glimpses behind the curtain, “love bombed” him with flattery and drinks, and kept him off-balance by cutting him off from his previous acquaintances and alternating the promises and ego-boos with truly frightening threats of what might happen if he decided to leave. And he is getting in deeper.


Mark and Jane are each about to meet the respective heads of these organizations.

Lately, Jane’s dreams have included a disturbing man with a pointed beard and pince-nez glasses who seems to be observing her and taking notes. She doesn't know it, but this man is Frost, one of the Inner Circle at the N.I.C.E, who wants to put her psychic visions to the Institute’s service. That is why they are so interested in recruiting her husband, so they can get at her. When Jane happens to see Frost in real life one day on the streets of Edgestow, she finally decides to return to St. Anne’s to meet with its Director.

The Director is actually Elwin Ransom, the hero of the previous two books in the trilogy. He has changed his name to Fisher-King at the request of an eccentric relative’s bequest, which has helped conceal his identity from the powers behind his enemies.

His previous journeys through Deep Heaven have changed him. He is no longer the fearful, self-doubting middle-aged academic whom Weston and Devine kidnapped in Out of the Silent Planet. He has gained understanding of cosmic mysteries, and he regularly converses with the eldila, entities without physical bodies as we know them, native to the depths of space who might easily, and have been, identified as gods or angels. His journey to the unfallen world of Perelandra has physically changed him as well; his brief stay in Paradise has rejuvenated him, giving him a youthful appearance and a sense of vitality.

It has also, like the Fisher-King of Arthurian legend, left him with an unhealing wound, which is an unending source of pain. This also brings to mind the prophecy made to the Serpent in Genesis:

"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Gen. 3:15 KJV)

This is generally considered by Christians to be a prophecy of Christ, smiting Satan though taking a grievous wound. This is probably why I never made the connection before, but Lewis must have been thinking of it. Ransom, a descendant of Eve by virtue of being human, crushed the Tempter’s head when he killed the demonically-possessed Weston; but Weston bit him, rendering him hopelessly lame.

Jane is awed by the Director’s presence. He seems radiant and, well, kingly. And in a certain respect, he is a king. He is the Pendragon, a title going back to Arthurian times denoting the head of Logres, the spiritual core of Britain. These days Logres consists of less than a dozen people and a trained bear, but he still carries with him a sense of kingly awe, which is a reflection of the awe generated by the heavenly beings with whom he converses.

Lewis is scrupulously careful not to say that Jane falls in love with the Director, although his description sounds a lot like that. Her reaction is certainly not sexual; perhaps a profound admiration would be a better description. Upon meeting him, all Jane’s doubts about the group at St. Anne’s vanishes and she is willing to side with the Director. Which is why it frustrates her that he keeps on bringing her back to her husband.

The Director, you see, feels that Jane should not come to stay at St. Anne’s unless her husband is okay with it. Jane bridles at the thought of having to go to Mark for permission, but the Director insists that on something this important, husband and wife need to be on the same page. He claims these are rules his Masters would insist upon. The fact that Mark is currently with the N.I.C.E. complicates things, and the Director does not want a situation where Jane would be divided in loyalty between St. Anne’s and her husband. Jane doesn’t see how Mark’s opinions have anything to do with the matter and there follows a lengthy discussion on the subject of obedience and the proper relationship between Men and Women. Jane isn’t fully convinced, but she agrees to go home and ask Mark to leave the N.I.C.E.

She never gets the chance. As she disembarks from the train arriving in Edgestow, she finds herself caught up in the middle of the riot which the N.I.C.E. has engineered to fit in with their propaganda campaign. Trying to avoid the crush of the mob, she gets picked up by the N.I.C.E.’s private security force and ends up in a room being interviewed by Fairy Hardcastle.

Fairy sees this as a golden opportunity and begins interrogating Jane to learn where she has been. When Jane is reluctant to co-operate, Fairy becomes more sadistic with her questioning and tortures her with the lit end of her cigar. But in transporting Jane across town, the police car breaks down in the middle of the still-ongoing riot and Jane is able to escape. A friendly bystander helps her back onto a train and she returns to St. Anne’s. Edgestow is no longer safe for her.

Mark is oblivious to all this. He hears about the riot after the fact and takes some pleasure that the propaganda he wrote for the N.I.C.E. seems to have been useful. In the wake of the riots, the public, swayed by the talking points the Institute had prepared before the riots even occurred, are now demanding that the N.I.C.E. take over the reins of local government.

He has met other members of the N.I.C.E. elite: Straik, the “mad parson” who is obsessed with the idea that the Institute will bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and Filostrato, a brilliant Italian scientist and a eunuch. Straik is intended to represent the modernist theology which ignores stuffy church doctrine and concentrates on social programs, but in his manner and speech, he is a full-barrel fire & brimstone Evangelical. Filostrato, I suppose, is what we would today call a Transhumanist. He looks forward to the day when man can overcome the limits of biology. I mentioned he was a eunuch, didn’t I?

In one conversation he goes into his philosophy, rhapsodizing on the ideal tree: an artificial one made of aluminum.

“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? … You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”

His ideal world will someday do away with organic matter altogether. His vision recalls the passage in The War of the Worlds comparing Wells’s Martians to a hypothetical future human, where the brain has evolved much larger and more complex and all the other bodily organs have atrophied leaving only what is necessary to sustain the super-brain.

Filostrato takes Mark aside and tells him that he will be taken to see the Head. This confuses Mark, because he understood that Jules, the public face of the Institute, was unimportant. “You were mistaken … Our Head is no figurehead.”

He goes on to explain that his ideal of a pure, sterile world has already been achieved on the Moon. It is, he tells Mark, inhabited, but the technologically advanced natives have completely purified their world, all except for a small, stubborn patch of green on the far side held by savages. He has learned this from the Head himself. The Head is the one who commanded that Mark bring his wife to the N.I.C.E.’s headquarters in Belbury, and has ordered that Mark be brought before it.

Mark is confused. He still thinks Filostrato is talking about Jules.

“Do you mean really to join us, young man?” said Straik. “There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. And there are no reservations. The Head has sent for you. Do you understand – the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: tonight, you shall see what it symbolized. This is real man at last, and it claims all our allegiance.” 

“What the devil are you talking about?” said Mark. The tension of his nerves distorted his voice into a hoarse blustering cry. 

“My friend is quite right,” said Filostrato. “Our Head is the first of the New Men – the first that lives beyond animal life. As far as Nature is concerned, he is already dead: if Nature had her way his brain would now be mouldering in the grave. But he will speak to you within this hour, and – a word in your ear, my friend – you will obey his orders.”

The Head on the N.I.C.E. is Alcasan, the French scientist recently executed for murder, whom Jane dreamed about and about whom the N.I.C.E. had Mark work on articles rehabilitating his reputation. Filostrato has managed to keep the Saracen’s Head alive, like Donovan’s Brain, and it has been giving the Institute its orders.

We do not witness Mark’s interview with the Head directly; we hear Jane’s description of a dream she had in which she witnessed it. This makes our experience of the ghastly disembodied head less visceral, but manages to build the suspense of the scene better as she bit by bit describes what she sees.

This latest dream confirms that the malignant conspiracy the Director seeks to thwart is headquartered in Belbury, something he previously only suspected. It also confirms that Jane’s husband is deep inside the N.I.C.E., although perhaps not irredeemably deep. He seemed even more squicked by the Head in the dream than Jane did and passed out.

Jane is pretty much established in the community of St. Anne’s now. The group seems more like a commune than a secret organization. The Dennisons, she knows, are members. So is her old tutor Dr. Dimble and his wife, Mother Dimble. Like the Studdocks, the Dimbles are childless, but not by choice; yet Mrs. Dimble is a warm, motherly person and her husband’s many students over the years have become surrogate children to her. Jane is also surprised to see Ivy Maggs, the woman who used to do her cleaning once a week, in the house; and more surprised to see her acting, and treated, as an equal in the company. Jane’s modernist views seem to still have a bit of class-consciousness in them; or perhaps she didn't expect someone with such old-fashioned views of marriage as the Director to have such egalitarian views as to doing chores around the house.

Rounding out the commune are Grace Ironwood, whom Jane met on her first visit to St. Anne’s, a doctor who considers the Director’s health to be her primary responsibility; Angus MacPhee, an argumentative Ulsterman (not a Scotsman, thank you) who is an old friend of the Director’s and an arch-skeptic who provided the role of Devil’s Advocate; and Mr. Bultitude, a bear who just sort of wandered in one day and became a member of the family. (St. Anne’s has become a sort of second Eden, with animals and humans living in harmony, thanks to the Director’s influence; another side-effect of his brief sojourn in Paradise).

MacPhee is an affectionate parody of Lewis’s old tutor William T. Kirkpatrick, “The Great Knock”, who instilled in Lewis a rigorous appreciation for Logic when he was a young man. Kirkpatrick appears in as the jolly Professor Kirke in the Narnia books, as well as the crotchety and skeptical dwarf Trumpkin. In That Hideous Strength, MacPhee is played largely for laughs, but Lewis obviously has a great deal of affection for him. He is on the side of the Angels, even if he insists on observing that there is no verifiable proof that angels exist. The Director values him as an old friend, and also as an unblinkingly honest man who helps keep the group grounded in reality even when dealing with extraplanetary entities.

“He’ll be about our best man if we’re going to be defeated,” the Director says. “You couldn't have a better man at your side in a losing battle. What he’ll do if we win, I can’t imagine.”

Jane’s dreams have also given the Director important clues as to the N.I.C.E.’s goals. She has dreamed about a man with a long beard sleeping underground. Bragdon Wood, the piece of property bought by the Institute from Bracton college, has long had legendary associations with the stories of King Arthur, especially of the wizard Merlin. A powerful wizard would be a valuable tool for the forces behind the N.I.C.E., especially considering the legends that Merlin was the offspring of a mortal woman and a demon.

Meanwhile, Mark has recovered from his revolting and terrifying interview with the Head. The pressure on him has become even greater to bring his wife to Belbury. He tries writing a letter to her, but has trouble drafting it. On one level, he is so terrified, he’d be willing to do anything. But then he wonders if they will force Jane to look upon the Head as well, and this he can’t stomach either. Fairy Hardcastle visits him and hints that his wife might have some hereditary mental problems. She claims that Jane has been making false accusations of being tortured by the N.I.C.E. security. (This is some butt-covering on the Fairy’s part; Wither had been very displeased with the way she handled Jane’s arrest during the riot).

Wither calls Mark in for another dressing down. He tells Mark that his billfold, lost several days ago when he first came to Belbury, was found next to the murdered body of William Hingest. Mark realizes it must have been planted there; but he also realizes that now they have an irrevocable hold over him. Since the billfold is in the hands of N.I.C.E. security and not the regular police, he has nothing to worry about. But he is to bring his wife to Belbury. Immediately.

Mark decides to flee. He tried to do this once before, but the sudden sight of Wither strolling the grounds cowed him. This time, he is determined. Once again, he sees Wither, although the latter seems not to notice him. Mark charges the man and passes right through him. Was it only Mark’s imagination? Or can Wither actually send phantom projections of himself to wander the corridors of the Institute? Mark doesn't care, he just wants to get back home.

Arriving in Edgestow, he finds it mostly deserted. Much of the population has been displaced, and the remainder are like citizens living under the occupation of an invading force; the N.I.C.E. He goes back to his home, but Jane isn't there; nor has she been for some days. He guesses that she might be staying with the Dimbles, so he goes to the nearby woman’s college where Dr. Dimble teaches to confront him.

The interview does not go anything like he expects. Dimble refuses to tell Mark where Jane is. “I have no permission to tell you. She is not in my house nor under my protection. She is well and happy and safe. If you still have the slightest regards for her happiness you will make no attempt to get in touch with her.” Dimble tells Mark about Jane’s arrest by N.I.C.E. security and pointedly says that since these are Mark’s friends who did this, he has no reason to trust Mark.

All Mark’s self-righteous bluster fails him. He pleads to see his wife and claims that he’ll leave the Institute. Dimble softens a bit. If Mark will come with him right away, Dimble will take him to safety; but it must be now. Mark’s old indecision comes back and he hesitates. He asks for an hour to think about it.

Leaving Dimble’s office, Mark doesn't even get an hour. As he arrives at his lodgings, he is accosted by policemen who arrest him for the murder of William Hingest.


NEXT:  Merlin awakes! But who will get to him first? And cue the Holst music for the Descent of the Gods!

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 2)

Jane and Mark Studdock are a recently-married couple living in the small college town of Edgestow. Mark has recently gained a fellowship at the local Bracton Colleges and has an opportunity to join a prestigious think-tank, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. Jane has been trying to pursue her own academic career, but has been troubled lately by disturbing dreams. On the advice of a former mentor, she decides to visit someone who might be able to help her.

Neither one realizes it, but both Mark and Jane will soon find themselves on opposite sides of a secret war for the soul of England.

Jane visits the Manor of St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill in hopes that they might help her about her dreams, but her first meeting with Miss Grace Ironwood is not encouraging. Miss Ironwood is a severe, intimidating woman. To Jane’s annoyance, she does not regard her dreams as a problem that needs curing. It’s not that she doesn't take them seriously, (a fear which has kept Jane from discussing her dreams with her husband); Miss Ironwood is convinced that Jane is a clairvoyant and that her dreams are extremely important. She wants Jane to put her talents to the service of her group and that the fate of humanity may depend upon it.
This is all too much for Jane. She doesn't want to get mixed up with vague conspiracies, she just wants the dreams to stop.

Mark, in the meantime, has gone to the town of Belbury, where the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, or the N.I.C.E., is headquartered. His friend, if you want to call him that, Lord Feverstone has arranged a meeting with Wither, the Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E.

The organization’s ostensible purpose is to put the money and resources of Government into the service of Science, and to put the disciplines of Science into the administration of Government. In many respects it sounds like a Charter School experiment placed on a governmental scale. It’s public face is a popular writer of science named Jules, whom most critics take to be a caricature of H.G. Wells. Jules has little to do with the story, though, and Mark quickly learns that he is largely a figurehead.

Mark has always longed to be an Insider, and much of his academic career has been devoted to getting into the In Crowd. At Bracton, this was a party in the faculty calling themselves the “Progressive Element”, but Mark’s acquaintance with Feverstone has revealed secret workings that he had been unaware of, and the lure of being one of the Elect Few who are In The Know is a powerful one.

He meets with Wither, a vague sort of man with a frustrating talent for speaking without saying anything definite. Mark assumes that he is going to be offered a job with the N.I.C.E., but although Wither soothes him with flattery and platitudes, he never says anything specific.

Mark is also introduced to “Fairy” Hardcastle, the tough-talking, cigar-smoking head of the N.I.C.E.’s private Gestapo, that is, security force. Lewis never calls her a lesbian, but he certainly intends her as a mannish, and therefore unnatural woman. Come to think of it, the forbidding Grace Ironwood with her austere manner and her masculine profession (we later find that she really is a doctor, which Lewis would have probably considered a male field) also has mannish qualities, but the Fairy typifies the worst in masculinity: she is crude, vulgar and sadistic and runs her department like a bully. Mark finds himself uncomfortable in her presence, but is impressed by her worldly and knowing attitude and flattered that she seems to be taking an interest in him.

He runs into another Bracton professor, William Hingest. “Bill the Blizzard”, as he’s known behind his back, is one of the few top-notch scientists on the faculty, a chemist with a high reputation among his peers. He’s considered one of the Progressive Element by virtue of being an atheist, although he has little use for academic politics. He too is being recruited by the N.I.C.E., but having looked around the place has decided to return to Bracton. He strongly recommends that Mark do the same.

Hingest is an interesting character, although he sadly gets little time in the story. Some Christians like to say that even atheists believe in something, which atheists regard as condescending and sanctimonious. Which it is. But Hingest at any rate does believe in something: he believes in scientific integrity. He’s seen enough of the N.I.C.E. to realize that these people are only interested in Science as window dressing for their greater agenda, and he wants nothing to do with it.

Mark still isn't sure he wants to join the N.I.C.E. No one will tell him what his job there is supposed to be, or even if he has a job; but they’re plying him with drink and pumping him on what great prospects he has with them. It’s assumed that he’ll spend the night at the Institute, and then that he’ll stay there for a day or two, or more. He finds that Feverstone has done him the favor of burning his bridges behind him at Bracton, which briefly causes him to panic; but the people at the Institute do a masterful job of keeping him off balance, alternating between flattering his ego and ambition, and quietly threatening him with the consequences of leaving. Every step of the way, it becomes easier for him to move forward and more difficult to move back. And so he takes the path of least resistance.

Jane is having problems at home. Her neighbors, her old tutor Dr. Dimble and his wife, have been evicted from their house. It belonged to the college and was part of the sale of land to the N.I.C.E. For the time being, Dr. Dimble can crash at the college, but his wife has to find a place to live. Ivy Maggs, the woman who comes in couple times a week to do cleaning at the Studdock home, has also been displaced, and Jane is having trouble finding a replacement.

A lot of people have been kicked out of their homes. The N.I.C.E. has bought Bragdon Wood, part of the Bracton property, ostensibly to build a new facility there. But the Wood is too marshy to build on. So the Institute is going to divert the river running through Edgestow in order to drain the Wood. A lots of the Edgestow residents are outraged, including members of the College who had voted for the sale, but by the time anyone realizes what is going down, it’s too late to stop it.

Jane has another dream, this time about a group of men stopping a car in the middle of the night and beating its driver to death. The next day she learns that Bill Hingest has been found dead and realizes that it was he whom she saw murdered.

She runs into Camille Dennison, a woman she had met at St. Anne’s, and her husband, who had been a close friend of Mark’s during their undergraduate days. They’re a nice, friendly couple with the rare talent of being able to correct each other without being annoying about it; and Jane takes an immediate liking to them. She wonders why Mark dropped Dennison in favor of his more recent crop of friends who strike her as being back-biting and unpleasant. The truth of the matter is that as Mark became more interested in climbing the greasy pole of faculty politics, he saw Dennison as more of a rival than a friend.

The Dennisons are part of the St. Anne’s group, a small community which has gathered around their leader, a Mr. Fisher-King. Readers with a background in Arthurian Romance will recognize the Fisher-King as a character from the Grail Legend, a king with an unhealing wound which can only be cured by the Holy Grail. Mr. Fisher-King is actually Ransom, from the previous books, who had changed his name for reasons that are somewhat contrived, but largely irrelevant.

They would like Jane to come and speak with Mr. Fisher-King, but they stress that this must be her own decision. This is a big difference between the St. Anne’s group and the N.I.C.E.: the one insists that Jane choose freely, the other uses mind-games and manipulation to force Mark to stay.

Jane’s dream of Hingest’s murder has convinced her that her dreams really are clairvoyant; and the good vibes she gets from the Dennisons do much to counter the earlier negative impression she got from Miss Ironwood. She decides to give St. Anne’s another visit.

Mark is still unsure what his position at the N.I.C.E. is, which is exactly how they like it. Since he’s a sociologist, he’s plopped in the Institute’s sociology department, although Fairy assures him that it’s only temporary and that there are bigger things in store for him. He is given the assignment of writing propaganda pieces. The N.I.C.E. needs to raze a village near Edgestow as part of its project to divert the river, and so Mark is directed to come up with talking points about how the village is unsanitary and unsightly and how better off people will be once the improvements have been installed. Next he is told to work on a series of articles and Letters to the Editor for the popular press to rehabilitate Alcasan, a French scientist who was recently guillotined for murdering his wife. This was the man Jane saw decapitated in her very first dream. Mark doesn't understand why the Institute is interested in Alcasan’s reputation and begins to have doubts about the N.I.C.E.’s politics

“Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?” 

“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us – to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

Finally Mark is assigned to write a couple pieces about a riot in Edgestow which hasn't happened yet.. With the displacement of the local population due to the N.I.C.E.’s extreme landscaping and the influx of workers who have come in to tear down the buildings and such, clashes are inevitable, and so the N.I.C.E. are going to engineer a riot in the next day or two that they can use to the Institute’s advantage. Mark is shocked by this, but the fact that they are trusting him with this information makes him feel like he’s part of their inner circle, and he agrees.

There is one hitch, though. In one of his meeting with Wither, it is strongly suggested that Mark bring his wife to Belbury. Mark can’t see Jane being happy with things there and so he kind of brushes off Wither’s hints and is dismayed to learn that his casual refusal has angered Wither. He little realizes that Jane is the real reason the N.I.C.E. cares about him at all;. They know about her dreams and want to use Mark as a tool to get their hands on her.

NEXT:  The Pendragon; Riot in Edgestow, and the Saracen’s Head.

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 1)

The title is taken from a line by the 16th Century poet Sir David Lyndsay (no relation, as far as I know, to the author of A Voyage to Arcturus):

The shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax myle and more it is of length.

The  word “strength” here is used in its original meaning of a stronghold or a fortress and refers to the Tower of Babel, that dreadful monument to pride which according to some traditions was the citadel of the first world-conquering despot.

Each of the volumes of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is its own animal; each written in a different style and evoking a different theme. Out of the Silent Planet was an admitted and unashamed pastiche of the scientific romances of H.G. Wells. Perelandra, on the other hand, drew it’s inspiration from medieval fantasies. Lewis’s third book, That Hideous Strength, is literally more down-to-earth, set in the most mundane location imaginable: a small university town.

Which is why Lewis subtitles his book “A Modern Fairy-Tale.”

If you ask why – intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels – I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.

But Lewis’s real inspiration here is not the Brothers Grimm, but his friend Charles Williams, who perhaps is best-known today for his connection with the Inkings, a circle of Christian writers which included by Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but who was a highly-regarded poet in his day and the author of fantasy novels which brought magic into the modern age. Lewis tries to adopt a style similar to Williams’s in this book and the theme of magic encroaching on the mundane 20th Century is one that Williams liked to use.

Mark and Jane Studdock are a not-exactly-happily-married couple. They’re not exactly un-happily-married, but their relationship, after less than a year of marriage, is already showing strains. Mark has just gained a fellowship at Bracton, a small college in the town of Edgestow and Jane is trying to finish her dissertation for her Master’s Degree from an neighboring woman’s college.

The relationship between Jane and Mark form an important subplot in the book and is both one of the novel’s strengths and its weaknesses. It’s a strength in that it gives the work an emotional grounding that the previous, more fantastical novels lacked. It’s a weakness in that Lewis’s experience with marriage was almost entirely academic and based on his observations of his married friends.

In the movie adaptation of William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, based on the relationship between Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham, a friend teases him that he’s a writer of children’s books who has never had children and a lecturer on marriage who has never known a wife. There’s some truth to that gibe. Lewis did not marry until very late in his life and spent most of his time in the almost exclusively male company of his Oxford colleagues.

The novel begins with Jane bitterly quoting words from the Anglican marriage service and musing on how little the liturgical ideal matches the reality. I suppose it’s appropriate that Lewis starts with words from the liturgy, because he never strays far from church orthodoxy as his characters discuss marriage. The service also contains the words “Love, Honor and Obey”, and part of Jane’s subplot is how she comes to terms with the command “Wives, submit your husbands.” This is one of several things modern readers find annoying with this book.

But St. Paul’s admonition has a flip side which is often overlooked. As wives are obliged to defer to their husbands, Paul also requires husbands to be deserving of that deference. It’s not a perfectly balanced reciprocation, perhaps, but then neither is it an entirely one-way street either. This is a lesson Mark needs to learn. He has been preoccupied with his own career and climbing the greasy pole of faculty politics at Bracton and had been frankly taking his wife for granted.

Unfortunately, although we see Mark and Jane grappling with their relationship separately, and in conversations with others, we rarely see them talking to each other. Granted, this is a big part of their problem; but since we don’t actually see them working things out, their eventual reconciliation rings a little hollow.

Jane has been suffering from disturbing dreams. She has one of a man in a prison cell receiving a visitor who unscrews his head and carries it off, and about a sleeper buried underground. They bother her, but she doesn't know what they mean.

She winds up describing her dream to her neighbors, Dr. Dimble and his wife. Dr. Dimble had been her tutor when she had been an undergraduate, and she had remained a close friend. Lewis had a great affection for his own tutor when he was a young man, and tutors in his stories are always good people. Dr. Dimble thinks her dreams are significant, but doesn't seem to think she needs a psychiatrist. “I’m not going to give you any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.”

With his fellowship, Mark has become a full-fledged member of the “Progressive Element” at Bracton College, a faction that seeks to modernize the college and opposes the calcified policies of the faculty’s Old Guard.

Lewis, ever the Medievalist, was no fan of Progress. To a large extent, I suppose, this was due to his traditionalist religious beliefs, but I suspect his love for old things, especially the old Norse sagas, which preceded his conversion to Christianity has something to do with it as well. And perhaps, although he rarely speaks of them, his experiences in the trenches, where the promise of 20th Century science quickly turned to more efficient ways of killing.

In any case, I think that Lewis’s rejection of Modernity is only partially a reactionary dislike of Change; he is also reacting to an attitude prevalent in his era and still common today, although under a different name, about Progress as a Sacred Thing. After all, You Can’t Fight Progress. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien touched on something similar once when he drew a distinction between the Scientific Theory of Evolution, which is, he said, about Change, and the Popular Myth of Evolution, which is about Improvement. When, in one of the Narnia books, the corrupt governor of a distant island defended his policy of permitting the slave trade, he did so on the grounds that it was “Progress”. Prince Caspian replies that he has seen the same in an egg. “In Narnia we call it ‘going bad.’”

But back to Bracton. The college is considering selling a piece of property known as Bragdon Wood to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or the N.I.C.E.; a kind of think tank ostensibly devoted to applying the latest in Science to Government and Social Planning.

The N.I.C.E. was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints – “red tape” was the word its supporters used – which have hitherto hampered research in this country.

I have to say, Lewis does a lovely job with the names in this book, and the N.I.C.E. is wickedly ironic. Conservatives no doubt would call the N.I.C.E. an example of Evil Big Government, but Lewis is rather vague about this. The line about “red tape” suggests the opposite to me, and the Institute's supporters sound to me very much like some of the present-day boosters of Charter Schools. As the story progresses we see the N.I.C.E. establishing its own parallel government which winds up absorbing the existing government of the city.

At the moment, the N.I.C.E. wants to buy Bragdon Wood, a small wooded parcel of land enclosed by and old wall with legendary connections to the time of King Arthur, for a new facility and it is looking to create a partnership with the college. This of course is too great an opportunity to pass up, and the Progressive Faction rigs the order of business at the College Meeting to ensure that it goes through.

At one point we have a bit where Lewis unexpectedly indulges in a bit of the prophecy which Science Fiction is supposed to provide. A couple professors are discussing the benefits which a partnership with the N.I.C.E. will bring to the college. One describes an “Analytical Notice-Board” which will compile and display all the research done by various departments in real-time, sounding very much like a localized version of the Internet. Then another administrator puts it all in perspective by gushing about the new up-to-date toilets the N.I.C.E. plans to install.

After the meeting, Mark is introduced to another of the college fellows: Lord Feverstone, who turns out to be our slimy friend from Out of the Silent Planet, Dick Devine. He has done well for himself since his trip to Malacandra and has somehow acquired a title. Mark has always considered the Progressive Element to be the “Inner Circle” of the college and his ambition had been to join it; but in talking to Feverstone, he realizes that the faculty administrators he had jealously sought to join were themselves minor players. Feverstone he confides that he has been watching Mark’s career with interest and would like to recruit him for the N.I.C.E.

Mark has always wanted to be an insider, and this is his chance. At Feverstone’s urging, he agrees to visit the N.I.C.E. headquarters to speak with its director. At the same time, Jane makes up her mind to see the person the Dimbles have recommended about her dreams.

Without realizing it, they are choosing sides in a cosmic conflict.


NEXT:  Belbury and St. Anne's