Urth Net
Digest urth.v028.n089
↰ answers Michael Straight
· by quotation
Rostrum said, a while back:
1 quoted line
I was just thinking about recommending Lewis's book Till We Have Faces to fans of Wolfe's Solider series. It is a re-telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but also a tale of adventure and intrigue set in a small barbarian kingdom on the outskirts of Greek civilization. It has a little of the same flavor as the Solidier books, featuring inscrutible gods meddling in the lives of the characters. TWHF also attempts to answer the question of why God, if he exists, does not simply show himself to us, but the book is much less overtly Christian than Lewis's other fiction. I think it's a great story, but would be interested to know what folks who aren't Christians think of it.
Which intrigued me enough to go back to TWHF to see if I could give it a Christian reading. And I couldn't; in fact, I kept forgetting that I was trying to winkle out a Christian sub-text. What did amaze me, however, was how close Lewis's tone here is to Wolfe's in TBOYNS. There are many paragraphs where, proper names aside, you would scarcely know which writer had penned them. Also, Orual as monarch seems to me very similar to Sev as monarch. And there's even a hallucinatory judgment, based on the old story, to be sure, but having somewthing of the feel of Sev's judgment.
Those of you who love NS for its tone will surely like this book. The rest of you might like it too.
-alga