I am doing a blog series on Novels Every Christian Should Consider Reading.
Matthew Lee Anderson is the author of The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith and the Lead Writer at the blog Mere Orthodoxy.
He is a DPhil candidate in Christian Ethics at the University of Oxford.
There was a story, invented by himself, that The Times had once sent a representative to ask for explanations about a new play, and that Stanhope, in his efforts to explain it, had found after four hours that he had only succeeded in reading it completely through aloud: “Which,” he maintained, “was the only way of explaining it.”
Stanhope, a playwright, is one of the central characters of Charles Williams’ elusive Descent into Hell, a novel that is as terrifying as it is good. It may seem like a contradiction to describe Descent as Christianized horror novel, but I think the label fits. While other horror stories might invoke our fear of the unknown or death, Williams’ universe is even more freighted, and hence more terrifying. It is a Christian universe, after all, and for Williams the stakes between our choices are nothing less than the triumph of heaven or the solitary dissolution of hell. No book I have ever read has captured the joy and dread embedded in that line from Paul, “Awake, oh sleeper, and rise from the dead” (Eph. 5:14).
Charles Williams is not the household name that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were, yet as a member of the Inklings he was known by them both, and particularly admired by Lewis. Williams’ writing does not flow as easily as Dickens, nor is he as existentially tormenting as Dostoyevsky. Yet his visionary landscape in Descent is populated by phantasms and other supernatural creatures which seem to exteriorize and so heighten the interior drama of the spiritual life. Lewis articulates well why his novels are so unique here:
Descent into Hell has its darker creatures—a succubus makes an appearance, for instance—and while Williams is never grotesque or lewd, the book touches some mature themes. Which is why I can only give it a qualified commendation: I think every Christian should consider reading the book, even if they do not decide (in the last analysis) it would be good for them to do. I have read through the book with high schoolers, who have enjoyed and learned from it. But it is a book that needs a conversation (or two) after, if only to figure out what has gone on in Williams’ world. Read Descent into Hell, but maybe not alone.
The disturbing quality at the heart of Descent into Hell, though, is of the best and most memorable sorts. And while the drama of the book takes an obvious form, Williams’ awareness throughout is as subtle as the temptations we face on a regular basis. As he writes of one young woman who asks for help from Stanhope for the cast of his play, yet refuses to acknowledge her self-interest, “Nothing personal in this desire to clothe immortality with a career?” Williams subtle insight is akin to Lewis’s much more famous line about playing with mud-pies while we have been made for a holiday at the sea: yet where Lewis managed to capture the light-hearted nature of joy, Williams (in this novel) gives it a graver, much more serious hue. Descent into Hell is a reminder that joy is not necessarily akin to frivolity, that in the conflict with dark powers it comes to us as a tremendous power.
The conjunction and terror and goodness may find some readers as overwrought, and others as simply strange. In a world where we have domesticated the angels and so rendered the “Fear not” which they repeatedly announce themselves entirely unnecessary, encapsulating a “terrible goodness” requires the kind of shocking, marvelous visions that Williams provides. But for Williams, the terror and the awe is embedded within the meaning and flows from it. It is goodness, not horror, which governs his vision and which makes him worth reading. I close with his own words on the matter:
“The substantive governs the adjective; not the other way round.”
“The substantive? Pauline asked blankly.
“Good. It contains terror, not terror good.”
