Friday, 20 April 2018 09:10 pm
Book Review: Till We Have Faces
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deckardcanineMy last C.S. Lewis reading didn't do much for me. This one at least promised to be very different, and the female first-person narration I mentioned before is just the beginning of that difference.
The back cover of my antiquated volume simply summarizes the book as a reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Oddly enough, the name "Cupid" never comes up in the entire telling; he remains a god with no formal name. This may have something to do with the setting in a fictitious land called Glome, where Greek is not the first language -- indeed, Venus is almost exclusively known as "Ungit" -- but there is enough Greek in the narrator's life to say "Psyche" much more often than Glomish "Istra."
I might have heard the gist before in a play based on Metamorphoses, but I'd quite forgotten. Only at the end of the book does Lewis note the key details he changed, with the primary effect of making one of Psyche's otherwise vilified sisters much more sympathetic.
That sister, Orual, is the narrator. Though a princess and then a queen, her long life contains precious little joy. Early on, her mother has died, her maid is harsh, her sister Redival is scheming, and there is no love lost between her and her barbarous father, who keeps berating her appearance. We never find out exactly what about her is so ugly, but she doesn't doubt the truth of it for a moment and has no hope of marrying. On the plus side, this does make it easy for men to treat her like one of them, so she gets some opportunities that Redival wouldn't. But in the old days, ugliness was considered a sign of ill favor with the gods, so she would trade for beauty if she could.
Orual's life brightens a bit with lovable half-sister Psyche. The one other sort of friend she has is a Greek slave, nicknamed "the Fox," assigned to teach the princesses despite disagreements with the king. The Fox is an atheist, so Orual develops a dim view of religiosity before long.
Imagine what this means to her when a high priest declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to save the kingdom from continual disaster -- and their father concedes. Imagine further the rift that occurs when Psyche says it's for the best, since legend has it that she'll live as a goddess afterward, and her life to date has been going nowhere promising. Now imagine what happens when Orual later finds her alive but insisting that the glen she lives in is a divine castle and that she must stay with a husband she's never properly seen. It makes for quite a debate.
About halfway through the book and less than halfway through the timeline, Psyche is gone and Orual has understandably gone from atheist to misotheist. In fact, the first page establishes that her purpose in writing the story is to accuse the gods of total unfair cruelty. That's right: The author of God in the Dock put the Greek gods in the dock.
This seems a good place to note how TWHF differs most from any other Lewis work I've read: Even when the book was more than half over, I wasn't sure what his aim was. There's no need to condemn gods whom no one believes in anymore, and doing so can provide an opening for similar criticisms of his God. Conversely, if he was using pagan gods in an allegory for Yahweh, then he risked making them look too good -- too equivalent. My mom suggested that he might not have had any preaching in mind, but come on; this is 1956 C.S. Lewis we're talking about.
Well, it turns out that more than 80% through the book comes Part II, Orual's addendum. She has finally received what she perceives as an answer from the gods -- and we finally, in the last chapter, get the context of the title: "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" This metaphor has something to do with poor communication on the mortal end rather than the divine end. It also takes a visual form for Orual: She had taken to covering her face with a veil all the time (prompting various rumors from people who'd never seen the queen unveiled).
Ultimately, this reminds me of nothing so much as the Book of Job, where the protagonist complains and complains about personal injustice and at long last gets a mind-changing divine answer, followed by a hard-won reward. And in both cases, readers may not be so satisfied, because it seems incomplete. That's my attitude.
I will note that Orual, though well-meaning and a great improvement on her father, is not utterly innocent, especially when it comes to thinking about the feelings of anyone but herself. To some extent, she may have cultivated her own misery, given how little the gods appear to intervene overall. I got the impression that she could have chosen to look on the bright side by her reign.
But the fact remains that she had asked for a sign and not gotten one that she could recognize as such; the gods had expected her to make a questionable judgment call and basically punished her for not doing so. And if they aren't responsible for the inaccurate and insulting myth about Psyche (as we are to understand the more commonly known version), then who is? AFAICT, the rebuttal amounts to "Because gahhhhhds, beeyatch! You suck and we don't! Now worship us and we might make you happy for a change."
Don't get me wrong; I do kinda like the book. The writing, though mostly slow, is pretty engaging. Some characters merit special interest. It's nothing if not emotional. But for once, Lewis could have stood to spend more time spelling out his points.
Now, for the first time in, I think, more than a decade, I'm taking a chance on Philip K. Dick. The book in question: Ubik.
The back cover of my antiquated volume simply summarizes the book as a reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Oddly enough, the name "Cupid" never comes up in the entire telling; he remains a god with no formal name. This may have something to do with the setting in a fictitious land called Glome, where Greek is not the first language -- indeed, Venus is almost exclusively known as "Ungit" -- but there is enough Greek in the narrator's life to say "Psyche" much more often than Glomish "Istra."
I might have heard the gist before in a play based on Metamorphoses, but I'd quite forgotten. Only at the end of the book does Lewis note the key details he changed, with the primary effect of making one of Psyche's otherwise vilified sisters much more sympathetic.
That sister, Orual, is the narrator. Though a princess and then a queen, her long life contains precious little joy. Early on, her mother has died, her maid is harsh, her sister Redival is scheming, and there is no love lost between her and her barbarous father, who keeps berating her appearance. We never find out exactly what about her is so ugly, but she doesn't doubt the truth of it for a moment and has no hope of marrying. On the plus side, this does make it easy for men to treat her like one of them, so she gets some opportunities that Redival wouldn't. But in the old days, ugliness was considered a sign of ill favor with the gods, so she would trade for beauty if she could.
Orual's life brightens a bit with lovable half-sister Psyche. The one other sort of friend she has is a Greek slave, nicknamed "the Fox," assigned to teach the princesses despite disagreements with the king. The Fox is an atheist, so Orual develops a dim view of religiosity before long.
Imagine what this means to her when a high priest declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to save the kingdom from continual disaster -- and their father concedes. Imagine further the rift that occurs when Psyche says it's for the best, since legend has it that she'll live as a goddess afterward, and her life to date has been going nowhere promising. Now imagine what happens when Orual later finds her alive but insisting that the glen she lives in is a divine castle and that she must stay with a husband she's never properly seen. It makes for quite a debate.
About halfway through the book and less than halfway through the timeline, Psyche is gone and Orual has understandably gone from atheist to misotheist. In fact, the first page establishes that her purpose in writing the story is to accuse the gods of total unfair cruelty. That's right: The author of God in the Dock put the Greek gods in the dock.
This seems a good place to note how TWHF differs most from any other Lewis work I've read: Even when the book was more than half over, I wasn't sure what his aim was. There's no need to condemn gods whom no one believes in anymore, and doing so can provide an opening for similar criticisms of his God. Conversely, if he was using pagan gods in an allegory for Yahweh, then he risked making them look too good -- too equivalent. My mom suggested that he might not have had any preaching in mind, but come on; this is 1956 C.S. Lewis we're talking about.
Well, it turns out that more than 80% through the book comes Part II, Orual's addendum. She has finally received what she perceives as an answer from the gods -- and we finally, in the last chapter, get the context of the title: "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" This metaphor has something to do with poor communication on the mortal end rather than the divine end. It also takes a visual form for Orual: She had taken to covering her face with a veil all the time (prompting various rumors from people who'd never seen the queen unveiled).
Ultimately, this reminds me of nothing so much as the Book of Job, where the protagonist complains and complains about personal injustice and at long last gets a mind-changing divine answer, followed by a hard-won reward. And in both cases, readers may not be so satisfied, because it seems incomplete. That's my attitude.
I will note that Orual, though well-meaning and a great improvement on her father, is not utterly innocent, especially when it comes to thinking about the feelings of anyone but herself. To some extent, she may have cultivated her own misery, given how little the gods appear to intervene overall. I got the impression that she could have chosen to look on the bright side by her reign.
But the fact remains that she had asked for a sign and not gotten one that she could recognize as such; the gods had expected her to make a questionable judgment call and basically punished her for not doing so. And if they aren't responsible for the inaccurate and insulting myth about Psyche (as we are to understand the more commonly known version), then who is? AFAICT, the rebuttal amounts to "Because gahhhhhds, beeyatch! You suck and we don't! Now worship us and we might make you happy for a change."
Don't get me wrong; I do kinda like the book. The writing, though mostly slow, is pretty engaging. Some characters merit special interest. It's nothing if not emotional. But for once, Lewis could have stood to spend more time spelling out his points.
Now, for the first time in, I think, more than a decade, I'm taking a chance on Philip K. Dick. The book in question: Ubik.