The esteemed Dr. Bruce Charlton at Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers re-posts a review of That Hideous Strength. This post, from the Toast blog, is by a woman named Felix Kent. I found it delightful, for two reasons. First, I’ve come to assume that all modern women will hate THS (which remains one of my favorite novels). Secondly, Ms. Kent gets it precisely right.
“Don’t read That Hideous Strength,” my mother said. My mother is a great C.S. Lewis fan, also a believer, in the religious sense. One of my best sources for what to read. And a woman who grew up in the Fifties and became an academic. Became, like Ransom, the trilogy’s main character, a philologist.
“Why not?” I said.
I don’t think my mother used the word “yucky” in her reply, but that was more or less what she meant. I went ahead and read the book anyway.
“That Hideous Strength” somehow doesn’t have quite that Lewis taste that is so prevalent in the rest of his books, even in his scholarly tomes. It took reading it pretending that someone else entirely wrote it before I could appreciate it. Then I loved it. 🙂
But the cover is certainly Hideous!
If anyone’s interested, my long paper “Bright Lights Under the Shadow of the Hideous Strength” is here:
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2012/09/under-shadow-of-hideous-strength-by.html
It’s not an academic paper. Rather it was the keynote for a retreat, almost 15 years ago, focusing on insights from C. S. Lewis.
Thanks for that insightful study. Also for the plug for Wolf Time.