Till We Have Faces

I have for a very long time been a great fan of C. S. Lewis. He is easier to read than Chesterton, has a greater variety of published works than Tolkien, and has a masterful way of weaving Christian principles into his fiction without shoving them down your throat, as I have not seen equaled since his time. So, having just finished his novel Till We Have Faces, and having enjoyed it immensely while being challenged at the same time, I thought I’d recommend it here.

This book is the source of that excellent quote of his which goes thusly: “To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

The story is that of Orual, an ugly princess of pre-Christian times, who has a beautiful sister named Psyche, and a grudge against the gods for stealing her. It is based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but draws from it a much deeper lesson than that of curbing one’s curiosity.

Selfishness masquerades as love, sin is justified into virtue, and denial is called skepticism, while faith is mourned as madness, hope is seen as folly and true love is turned in Orual’s mind into disloyalty. It is a story about how one can be so wrapped up in one’s error that one never notices that it is error. It is a story of extreme jealousy, loss, misery, and finally despair, but it shows that even in the face of this there is hope. There is no sin so great that it cannot be forgiven a penitent heart. It shows the redemptive quality of suffering. And using the ancient gods, Lewis points to the True God, whose ways are above our ways, and whose thoughts are above our thoughts.

While reading, it was fun to try to pick out similarities between Lewis’ writing and Tolkien’s. Orual’s Captain of the Guards, Bardia, has a loyalty and devotion like that of Samwise Gamgee. And when you read of Glome as a web, and “the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives,” it’s difficult not to think of Shelob or Ungoliant. Even “Ungit,” the name used for Aphrodite, who craves blood sacrifices, is similar to “Ungoliant.”

There are also some threads that run through other Lewis books. Like his way of inventing names, for example. In the preface of the Screwtape Letters, he describes this: “I aimed merely at making them nasty [in the case of the demons]…by the sound. Once a name was invented, I might speculate…as to the phonetic associations which caused the unpleasant effect.” (emphasis added by me.) “Glome” definitely sounds something like “gloom.” There were also themes of “further up and further in” (in this case reversed to further down and further deep) from The Last Battle, God’s splendor affecting different people in different ways, like The Great Divorce, and the idea of loving vs. devouring, seen in the Screwtape Letters.

 

Oh dear. This seems to have turned out rather like the book reports I used to write in college. My main point is to encourage you to do yourself a favor and read Till We Have Faces. And when you do, if you figure out what the title points to in the book, let me know, will you? I still haven’t discovered it.