And mixed with this was the sense that she had been maneuvered into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their gray formalized one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like.
The time has come to review C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, and how am I to do that? I think a scholar could devote his whole career to this one. It’s packed full of good stuff. All that stuff doesn’t always work together as you might wish, but even the “failings” look different once you’ve grasped the grand design. Or (perhaps better put) designs.
The setup, in case you’ve never read the book, is that this is the third novel about Prof. Elwin Ransom of Cambridge University, who traveled, first to Mars, and then to Venus, in the previous novels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There he found the universe and its inhabitants to be very different from what he expected – more on the lines of medieval cosmology than anything imagined by H. G. Wells.
But in this third book, Ransom himself doesn’t appear until well along in the story. We first meet Jane Studdock, educated young wife of a fellow at Bracton College of the (fictional) University of Edgestowe. Jane has been having troubling dreams of a disembodied head, connected by tubes to some kind of mechanism. She confides her fears to “Mother” Dimble, wife of an older faculty member, which leads her gradually into the orbit of an eccentric community of Christians who live in the nearby village of St. Anne’s.
Meanwhile, her husband Mark is excited to be gaining entrée into the “inner ring” at Bracton – the young, “dynamic” men who know the important people and are poised to sweep the old traditions away. But soon he gets a chance to join an even more exclusive ring – the men of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which is acquiring the college property. Mark’s new duties, should he agree to take the post with N.I.C.E., are a little vague, but they clearly involve ethical compromises. And he cannot guess N.I.C.E.’s true goal – the extinction of all life on earth.
If you’ve read Perelandra, you’ll recall how the narrator, as he approaches Ransom’s cottage at the beginning, has to struggle against a “barrier” – a spiritual blockade of sorts. Readers approaching That Hideous Strength have to pass a barrier too. Ironically, this barrier exists because the author did such a good job of realizing his narrative goals.
The problem with the first half of That Hideous Strength is that the passages set at Belbury (the headquarters of N.I.C.E.) are highly effective in portraying the worst aspects of bureaucracy, as Lewis had come to know (and loathe) it. His hatreds of petty ambition, of envy, of snobbery, of fuzzy thinking, of officiousness, of chronological snobbery and moral relativism spring into sight here – not in vivid, but in muted, colors. The satire is biting. But it makes for rather dreary reading. It’s like a breath of country air when we switch to the scenes at St. Anne’s, where the breeze is fresh and there are friendly people (and animals).
Somebody said (it might have been Dale Nelson; it might have been in the comments here) that That Hideous Strength is Lewis’ catch-all book, the book where he threw in everything he wanted to say all at once. Perhaps it would have worked better artistically if he’d practiced more restraint. But it wouldn’t be what it is – a book you could study all your life.
What themes are we dealing with here? The Abolition of Man. The whole nightmare of Belbury is a vision of a new world order based on subjective values – in which all the things that make our lives worth living are dismissed as chemical accidents, reducing humanity itself to raw material for working experiments on. The “humanitarian” theory of punishment, in which the prisoner’s rights are swept away on the pretext of “treating” him. The lure of the “inner ring,” where a man sells his soul by stages for rewards of diminishing happiness. The values of hierarchy and subordination, including in marriage. The mythopoeic fantasies of Tolkien, which Lewis weds to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain. The “spiritual thriller” genre written so well by Lewis’ friend Charles Williams.
There’s something strangely familiar about Belbury to the modern reader, although the parallel isn’t apparent at first. The great goal of the N.I.C.E. is to utterly wipe out organic life, leaving only Mind (ostensibly human, but in fact diabolical). That seems like the opposite of the dominant movement of our own world, a Nature worship that seems poised to embrace human extinction.
But it seems to me the two things aren’t that far apart. Both the Greta Thunberg cult and N.I.C.E. are hostile to human procreation. Today’s progressives, though “sex-positive” in theory, in fact despise any human sexual activity that could produce natural offspring (like the inhabitants of the moon described in this book, “their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”).
I could go on and on. That Hideous Strength occupies a very special place in my heart. Every time I read it, it moves me and teaches me. It brings me to tears. I recommend it highly, but I warn you it requires a little work.
