Charles Williams

Hello! Is anyone familiar with the work of Charles Williams? From a brief look online, he seems to have some similarities to MacDonald, and I thought there was a good chance some of you Wolfeans (?) would have some input. Any suggestions for a novel of his to start with?

Oh goodness, yes! In terms of sheer intensity and originality of imagination, I put him up there with Wolfe and Lafferty and Lewis and Tolkien (as a theological myth-maker). And I think he possibly veers more into weird fiction (ala Lovecraft, Howard, Hodgson, Machen, etc.) than the others. Some of his visionary passages are flesh-crawling in their numinous grotesquery. He's not a great prose writer as a novelist and the passages can come and go as to stylistic excellence. But overall incredibly enjoyable to me. His tone is very middle-to-upper-class English and and the settings are almost Edwardian - a bit like Chesterton or Sayers if they were writing weird fiction. In fact, Williams is one of the early practitioners of 'Noird' fiction (noir detective + weird), at least in the novel War In Heaven. In some ways too he's a bit of a prototype for Tim Powers's version of 'urban fantasy' or 'urban magical realism'. Lewis has an excellent essay on Williams's fiction in the collection On Stories. I thought I remembered Wolfe mentioning Williams favourably in an interview once. Anyone know? -DOJP

Interesting! I am a fan of Tin Powers for sure, it would be great to check out his precursors. I notice that Last Call and The Greater Trumps have some similarities, for example. Thanks for the input!

Yes, those were two novels by each of them that I hadn't yet read, so I read them both recently, hoping for resonances. My first impression is that they each took their own uniquely weird take on the tarot (about which, though, I know little) with about zero overlap! That's probably the best I've read by Powers so far - excellent. Williams's was a more minor effort in my opinion but had one of my all-time favourite theological moves (reminding me very much of the Wolfe's Outsider) and one of the best freakish visions in the Williams canon - whole novel was worth it for that alone. (I was subsequently weirded out to see the tarot feature in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as well!) -DOJP

That should have said "Tim" Powers, of course! I have only read *Last Call and *The Anubis Gates, but I liked them both quite a bit. I think that the latter is better, overall, but the former got off to an engrossing start. Have you read any of the sequels to Last Call? And what, out of curiosity, was the treatment of Tarot in *Blood Meridian? *I haven't read anything by Cormac McCarthy. I think I might start with War in Heaven by Williams, or possibly *Descent into Hell *...they seem to be two of his more acclaimed novels.

Williams pretty much invented modern "urban fantasy."

JJ: So Lewis and Chesterton would have been among the formative influences in your paradigm. GW: Oh yes, very definitely. JJ: Could you name others, within the area of theology and Christianity. GW: The problem with this it is hard to see where to stop. Later you say, "Gee, I should have included so and so," and you didn't think of that person at that time. J.R.R. Tolkein, just to start with. Charles Williams, not as much as the others, but to some extent. David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which is really strange, and I think very theologically oriented. Much of the theology I disagree with, but I thought it was marvelous as a work of fiction. It is a marvelous example of someone's expressing his theological beliefs in a novel.

I would definitely start with /War in Heaven/, which does indeed seem to have influenced Powers and Blaylock. The two best of his novels are, in my opinion, /Descent into Hell/ and /All Hallows Eve/, but they are much less accessible than /War/. Williams' poetry is worth a look, but many people find it impenetrable. It's certainly old-fashioned. Fernando

Several good reasons to start here, including it's Williams's first novel. There is a definite development of the density of his novels as they go along.

Not surprisingly, these are his last novels and quite dense.

If by "old-fashioned" you mean "early 20th-century modernist," I must agree. There is a strong kinship between Williams' poetry (I refer to the Arthurian poetry, which is all I have read) and Eliot's work. (Eliot, by the way, praised Williams's novels and wrote an introduction to at least one of them.)

I think the first is actually /Shadows of Ecstasy/, though it was published only later. And probably should have remained in the drawer.

And also the ones that read better if the reader understands Williams's rather strange theological ideas. That said, /Descent/ is a wonderful study of the notion of damnation.

I think that's a good description, though there are some late-Romantic things there as well. What's most old-fashioned about it is that it is intended as narrative, rather than as an exploration of the personal, which is where most poetry seems to be these days. Fernando

I haven't read the rest of Powers's 'Faultlines' trilogy, but I greatly look forward to it - everybody says they peter out a bit, but I'm just excited to see what the heck he's going to do with time, space, ghosts, and so on. Wonderfully inventive and playful imagination in usually crisp and enjoyable prose. Blood Meridian has an extended tarot reading scene by circus performers round a campfire that seems to suggest a lot philosophically (incredibly dense novel). I read an academic paper that very convincingly argued that one of the main tarot predictions came true in detail late in the novel, bringing the novel out of strict realism, the paper argued, and into romance and myth. Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: Williams pretty much invented modern "urban fantasy." Yes! And this only recently dawned on me. And Lewis's essay brings this out very effectively. GW: The problem with this it is hard to see where to stop. Later you say, "Gee, I should have included so and so," and you didn't think of that person at that time. J.R.R. Tolkein, just to start with. Charles Williams, not as much as the others, but to some extent. Thanks, Gwern! Knew I'd seen that. And for the record, I LOVE some of Charles Williams's poetry, especially in the Arthurian cycle. I mean, heck, at one point both Merlin and Lancelot are werewolves! (Lots of things in this cycle remind me of Wolfe too.) -DOJP

Agree with all the Williams recommendations (our uni library had his complete set of novels). Sidetracking onto other tarot novels (this has happened before, I think), Calvino and Eco. Cheers, David Duffy.