That hideous book

A few years ago I read CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (to which I objected) and Perelandra (which I approved). Approved, also, was "The Inner Ring". I started but failed to finish That Hideous Strength, titled from a Spell from Lyndsay's pompous and otherwise-illegible epic.

The storyline juxtaposes the collapse of a marriage between a careerist and a visionary, with the man's career shown - through the visions - as in service of the Dark Powers. Unfortunately it then separates these protagonists physically for most of the book's span. CS Lewis at the time did not understand married life; his writings idealised it.

What Lewis understood better (at this stage) was feminine domination. The White Witch here is ("the") Fairy Hardcastle, one of the better-realised characters in this book. Another well-realised character is a, er... bear. And not a Talking Bear.

That Hideous Strength cast something of a shadow in dystopian and Christian literature. "George Orwell" reviewed it; it likely inspired 1984. A Wrinkle in Time wears this one more on its sleeve, in Camazotz; whose Institute, Co-Ordinated its Experiments with more success thus bringing that world fully under the Black Thing. Lately there's John Dies At The End. THS, I concede, hasn't finished teaching us moderns about the risks of transhumanism. Or, as Wall Street Journal would have it lately, about the Project State.

We might also ponder how the N.I.C.E. medicalises the criminal-justice system. We're told of how Japan has more psychiatric capacity than the US has, thus Ending Homelessness. Lewis reminds that if you are convicted of a crime in Britain, you go to British prison for six years where, if you've more-or-less behaved yourself, you get out. If you're deemed incompetent, only a doctor can let you out... and your doctor is paid to keep you in. The WSJ's Review section, for its part, reminds that once upon a time the West would take people away for mental disorders like homosexuality. I suppose today we'd do it to "homophobes". Was Michel Foucault as wrong as the Right pretends he is?

But hey - the book is Hideous necessarily if it is to portray a hideous conspiracy to deliver a hideous future. What, possibly, brought Professor Tolkien to reject this one, and inspired a more serious critique by Orwell, is the ending, which is ridiculous. You know how Prof. T. was able to illustrate, at the mountainbrink of Doom, Eucatastrophe, and how evil cannot understand Good? Lewis calls upon the angels to wrap things up. Which might, I think, work well-enough - arguably the climax of the Silmarillion is when Eärendil returns the last light of the Trees to Valinor - except that Lewis bungles how the summoning happens, involving near-pagan spirits of the classical planets. (Uranus and Neptune care little, in Lewis' sight, for the affairs of inyalowdas.)