Book Club: That Hideous Strength
Publication context and Lewis’s preface
Lewis had completed That Hideous Strength by late 1943, and it was published in 1945. Like Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it was written in the thick of World War II.
In the preface Lewis tells us, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry,” though it has behind it a serious ‘point,’ which he says he tried to make in The Abolition of Man.
The title and the Tower of Babel
The title That Hideous Strength comes from a 1555 poem by Sir David Lyndsay. There’s a couplet in the poem that refers to the Biblical Tower of Babel:
“The shadow of that hideous strength,
six mile and more it is of length.”
In many editions of That Hideous Strength, you will see the couplet in the front matter. The term “strength” is an archaic use of the word, and it means “tower” or “fortress.”
Plot overview and themes
By “a tall story about devilry,” Lewis means a story about an attempt by demonic forces to corrupt the West. In Britain, where the story takes place, these forces co-opt the “progressive element” at a major university, defang the local police, replace them with their own shock troops, and stage riots to justify martial law and a complete takeover of the area.
Within the framework of this larger plot is the story of a newly married couple, Mark and Jane, personifications of the type of people who so easily become useful idiots in schemes that corrupt and destroy a culture. They are intelligent, but intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Early on they are separated from each other by the bad actors, so each must navigate their respective situations without the other’s input.
We also see the return of Elwin Ransom, the hero of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and the eldila, the angelic beings from those books. Ransom’s role here is essential, yet oddly passive. Because he knows the planetary rulers of Mars and Venus, he opens the door through which the eldila enter this arena for a cosmic battle.
The Abolition of Man, dramatized
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis lays out an anthropology where the head and the belly are mediated by the chest. The result is a whole human: a rational animal whose passions and intellect are trained toward their proper ends. Against that, he warns about a false “mind versus body” dualism that dehumanizes us, leaving either pure spirit or mere animal.
It reminded both Clare and Hannah of Star Trek’s “Spock’s Brain” episode! The “disembodied brain” problem.
But separating Mind from Body is literally one of the goals of the villain: to become pure mind divorced from the body.
The Babel motif
Lewis makes clear in the book’s title and in its climactic scene that the Tower of Babel is the primary governing image of the story. The villains, different as they are, all “speak the same language,” as in Genesis 11:1–9. Their language is pride, hubris, and ambition. Their project is to make a name for themselves, to ascend without God’s blessing. Any top-down uniformity enforced by an elite cabal of powerful people is a tower of Babel.
The tower is an idol to their own ingenuity. “Look at what we can do.”
The villains of NICE
The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, or NICE, is anything but nice.
The deputy director, Wither, specializes in meaningless word salads, full of evasions and little qualifiers. Like a savvy politician, he will not answer a direct question. There are hints he has achieved a kind of disembodiment, always appearing where you do not expect him.
In contrast there is Frost, exact and precise, described like a shark or a machine, sharp as a needle. He pushes objectivity and the denial of bodily feeling to an extreme. He is the pure head unmoored from the rest of the person. Contemporary thinkers talk this way too. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, has said things almost identical to some of Frost’s statements:
We have the apostate Rev. Straik, who says the church is blinded by its culture and humanitarianism, and that he finds himself joining communists and materialists to expedite a so-called second coming. He does not mean Christ’s return. He means a totalitarian utopia of his own making. Straik is an example of how this ideology can corrupt the church.
Miss Hardcastle is the head of NICE’s secret police. She is brusque, sadistic, and masculine in bearing, a bit like Mrs. Trunchbull from Matilda. She smokes a cheroot. When they capture Jane, Hardcastle tortures her, burning her with a cigar. Others tell her it was counterproductive because they want Jane on their side. Hardcastle says she did it because she wanted to, because it was fun. Hardcastle is one of the creepiest characters in the book.
Then there is Professor Filostrato, who wants to rid the world of human beings, and in fact all organic life. He wants our brains to “live with less and less body, to build bodies directly with chemicals so we no longer need to stuff them with dead brutes and weeds.” He is proud of a scientific “advancement” in the basement of NICE—we will offer no spoilers here! Read the book to find out what it is!
And Lord Feverstone is Dick Devine from Out of the Silent Planet, now ennobled. He is an opportunist with both sides covered. If NICE wins, he wins. If NICE falls, he will present himself to his old colleagues as the savior who warned them.
Taken together, Wither, Frost, Straik, Hardcastle, Filostrato, and Feverstone are different versions of the thoroughly corrupted progressive human being Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man.
Ransom and the eldila
Ransom knows the planetary rulers of Mars and Venus, so he opens the way for the eldila to work in this battle. His action is essential, yet his posture is strikingly humble and still. The planetary cosmology Lewis built is one of the book’s great strengths.
Genre: is That Hideous Strength science fiction or something else?
In his taxonomy of science fiction, Lewis named five types:
displaced persons
engineers’ sci-fi
speculative fiction
eschatological tales
strange new worlds.
Out of the Silent Planet is SF of the “strange new worlds” variety. Perelandra blends strange new worlds with the “what if” of speculative fiction, where Lewis offers the following “supposal:” What if a newly-created rational species on the planet Venus were tempted by the devil—and what if a man from planet Earth was sent there to intervene?
Where does That Hideous Strength fit into Lewis’s taxonomy of Science Fiction?
It feels like dystopian fiction. And it’s also speculative, asking what it would be like if powerful forces cooperated with demons to bring down civilization.
It also has elements of a relatively new and popular genre called urban fantasy. That Hideous Strength has been called “a Charles Williams novel written by C. S. Lewis.” Williams, one of the Inklings of Oxford University, wrote supernatural thrillers set in the real world. The hallmark of urban fantasy is the supernatural hidden or embedded in the ordinary world, known only to a few. Think Harry Potter, Twilight, H. P. Lovecraft, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or The X-Files.
Charles Williams’s books were neither critical nor popular successes, and Lewis’s foray into Williams territory was not warmly received either. Many of his critics did not appreciate the supernatural elements.
Orwell and the critical reception
George Orwell, for example, read and reviewed That Hideous Strength, which predated Nineteen Eighty-Four by several years. Orwell wrote, “One could recommend the book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately the supernatural keeps breaking in and it does so in rather confusing undisciplined ways.”
This is true, but only partly. Some of the supernatural elements are essential to the story. Omitting the eldila would have been confusing and disappointing, considering Lewis took made them such integral parts of both Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Making That Hideous Strength a cosmic showdown between the bent eldil of Earth and the uncorrupted planetary rulers is a fitting end to the trilogy.
Merlin, Logres, and Arthur
The other major supernatural elements in That Hideous Strength are Merlin and the Arthurian legends, the lost city of Atlantis, and even Tolkien’s Númenor. Tolkien famously disliked the inclusion of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for being anomalous and out of place. He also disliked the Arthurian elements in That Hideous Strength, for the same reason. These elements feel jarring and confusing, as if they’ve been shoehorned into the story.
However, it is quite funny when NICE mistakes a naked tramp for Merlin and treats him like a VIP. The tramp making the most of the situation provides some pleasant comic relief.
But Merlin, the references to Arthur, the Pendragon, and the Fisher-King, the long discussion of Logres and Britain all seemed as if they belong to a different book.
Lewis was no doubt strongly influenced and inspired by his friend Charles Williams, who was then writing his Arthurian cycle, Taliessin Through Logres. Williams had been relocated from London to Oxford during the war to work with Oxford University Press, so he became a regular at the Inklings. He had great personal magnetism, and Lewis may have caught the Arthur bug from him. Tolkien was reading parts of The Lord of the Rings aloud then as well, which is how Lewis heard the name Numenor. (Note: Lewis misspelled it in his book because he only heard it as Tolkien read aloud extracts from his manuscript!)
The result is that That Hideous Strength becomes a bit of a muddle, because it already had a robust Christian mythos with the eldila. The Arthurian thread was unnecessary, even if parts of it are amusing.
Oxford vs. Cambridge, and a question to end with
Oxford and Cambridge had different sensibilities then. Cambridge leaned toward mathematics, hard science, analysis, and criticism. Oxford was stronger in the humanities and emphasized appreciation of works of art rather than mere analysis. An Oxford exam might include this lovely question:
What do you find lastingly delightful about That Hideous Strength? Would you read it again, and why?
What we found lastingly delightful
Hannah: I would reread it if I were making it into a film. The right team could distill the story to its essentials and do something powerful with it.
Clare: For me, it is a celebration of the triumph of the normal. NICE tries to break Mark in the Objective Room with asymmetry and ugliness to free him from his “conventional” appreciation of beauty. It backfires. He wakes up to the fact that he values and desires true order, goodness, and love. His longing to be reunited with Jane blends with memories of hearty breakfasts, walks in gardens, and sunsets.
The NICE wants to eliminate messy organic life from the planet. They want sterility, even going so far as to dream of a world with metal trees and metal birds.
By contrast, the company at St. Anne’s is alive. They enjoy fellowship, meals, conversation, and animals. They live with a bear in the house and a jackdaw. Ransom feeds the mice.
The book ends in hope, with a humble bridal chamber prepared for Mark and Jane. The human story is about learning that men and women are complementary, not competitors, and that marriage is a partnership, not a rivalry.
Mark and Jane
Early on Jane thinks, “I see less of him now than before we were married.” She is working on her doctoral thesis and they have decided to delay children. She treats the marriage like a competition of careers. Mark later realizes, painfully, that he wanted a trophy wife. He discovers the humility of a lover far too late, and he is ashamed of his clownish, clodhopping presumption.
One of the major narrative questions knitting the whole book together is whether Jane and Mark will be okay.
The most punk-rock thing imaginable now is to start having children. You even hear some public figures saying they wish they had had more. That thread in the novel feels beautifully countercultural and true.
Resources for further reading
If you’d like to pick up your own copy of That Hideous Strength and the other books we mentioned, do check out Clare’s Bookshop.org page. Scroll down to the Splanchnics Book Club section, the C. S. Lewis section, or the Science Fiction & Fantasy section.
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Credits
Cover illustration for That Hideous Strength by Kinuko Y. Craft for the 1986 paperback edition, Macmillan Publishing Company.
Theme Music: “Splanchnics Riff” composed and performed by Clare T. Walker