intellectually informed faith, they are rare in his fiction. Instead, where Lewis places his energy—in creating the “atmosphere,” the “weather” of another world—he is extremely successful. In creating Malacandra, Perelandra, or Narnia, he invests sensory details with a suggestion of the symbolic and the mythic. Narnia varies little from England in its plants and animals, yet it contains centaurs, dryads, and talking beasts. Its charm lies in part in its distance from mechanized England, so that time slows down and moments may be savored. Lewis’s only novel written about contemporary England,That Hideous Strength, points up the contrast: Only in Bragdon Wood, where the magician Merlin is buried, and at St. Anne’s, where Ransom is, are there moments of stillness and joy.

Lewis has been accused by some of writing allegory, particularly in the Narnia stories, in which Aslan the lion, creator of Narnia, appears to take on the qualities of Christ. He responded to the charge by describing the genesis of the stories in scenes recalled from dreams and commenting that the central figure, Aslan, suddenly intruded into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the first story, unbidden. A distinction that Lewis made in Perelandra seems appropriate, that between myth, truth, and fact. In the sacraments, particularly in Holy Communion, participants eat bread and drink wine or grape juice, in fact; yet they participate in and reenact a mythic celebration, in which a man who said he was God offered himself for all humanity. Lewis’s fiction, then, has sometimes been described as “sacramental” in this sense; it is not allegory, which Lewis did use in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Allegory implies a simple retelling of a story with different names—England becomes Puritania, the church becomes Mother Kirk. Instead, characters in his fiction are called to act as Christ might have acted, or to act on His behalf, in their separate stories. This is as true of the human “patient” to be tempted in The Screwtape Letters as it is of the Pevensie children in Narnia.

The Space Trilogy

First published: Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945

Type of work: Novels

Contemporary Englishmen discover that they are participants in a battle against spiritual powers seeking to enslave humanity.

Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy is sometimes called the Ransom Trilogy, after the central figure of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged linguistics professor at the University of Cambridge, grows in the course of the novels from a lonely independence to find relationships with others, maturing into a leader against hostile nonhuman forces. Lewis transforms a conventional science-fiction pattern by making his villains demoniac powers and his protagonists Christians literally on the side of the angels. While science fiction has frequently dealt with issues of religion, Lewis lays aside the typical dualistic “good against evil” plot for an explicitly Christian worldview. All three of the novels attempt to make believable the presence of a spiritual reality transcending the everyday life.

Out of the Silent Planet opens as Ransom, on a walking tour of England, falls in with two acquaintances, one an old friend from his prep school. His friend Devine and the scientist Weston kidnap Ransom, carrying him to Mars, or Malacandra, in Weston’s spaceship. Late in the voyage, Ransom learns that the others were commanded to bring another human back as the condition of their return. When they land, Ransom escapes. The novel is so far entirely conventional: mad scientist, greedy assistant, innocent victim, threatening aliens.

Here, however, Lewis diverges from convention. Ransom finds Mars inhabited by three species of rational beings, all friendly. More, he finds present a fourth species, the eldila, something on the order of angels. After Ransom learns the Martian language, he is reunited with Weston and Devine, who have killed a Martian. Judged by the ruling eldil, the Oyarsa, all three are exiled to Earth. Ransom learns from the Oyarsa that Earth is the “Silent Planet” because of the rebellion of its Oyarsa millennia ago. It becomes clear to Ransom, already a Christian, that the biblical story of the incarnation of God in Christ is historically true, one incident in a war that has left Earth isolated and dominated by evil powers.

Two elements of the story are particularly significant: first, the minimal place of “science” in the action, and second, the “reperceptions” that Ransom experiences. The “good society” of the Martians is almost Rousseauian in its rejection of technology, and the one species with which Ransom spends much time is a tribe of hunters and farmers. Ransom must repeatedly adjust his perception of the landscape, his understanding of culture, and his sense of what it is to be “human.” He discovers a new sense of his own place and that of humanity in a universe of many intelligent species and a new humility, in that humankind is the sole species in need of redemption.

In Perelandra, Ransom is summoned to Venus to defend its inhabitants from an unknown threat. He discovers that only two “humans” have been created, the Adam and Eve of their race. Like Adam and Eve, they have a single commandment given them, which they must obey to show their love for God. Weston’s sudden arrival in a new spaceship makes clear the nature of the threat. Proclaiming himself the servant of the demoniac Oyarsa of Earth, Weston begins a campaign of temptation against the unfallen Eve, the Queen.

Lewis’s study of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) lies behind many of the novel’s scenes; the temptation, for example, recapitulates Milton, not the Bible. Like Milton, Lewis faced the problem of portraying “goodness,” unfallenness, in the Queen. The difficulty of successful characterization is enormous: She is simultaneously innocent, gracious, wise, and naked. At the same time, Lewis must portray the decaying personality of Weston as suggesting the sterility and misery of the Satanic.

Ransom matures in this novel, and at its climax he must physically battle Weston, in a scene recalling Beowulf (c. sixth century) or Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614). Before he can bring himself to kill Weston, however, his understanding of Christianity itself must change. Previously, his faith had been intellectual and passive; he discovers that as a Christian warrior he stands, for the moment, in the place of Christ defending innocence.

In treating the temptation that the Queen endures, for the first time Lewis focuses on the necessity of intellectual maturity in Christians. The twisted arguments Weston develops, suggesting the abuse and perversion of language itself, Lewis had foreshadowed in a comic scene in Out of the Silent Planet. In Perelandra and in That Hideous Strength, the intellectual theme of armament against evil is much more prominent.

That Hideous Strength, the only story set in modern England, Lewis subtitled A Modern Fairy Tale for Grownups. He seems not to suggest the simplicity of the traditional tale but its associations with magic intruding into everyday life. That is precisely what happens. The story is not told from Ransom’s perspective but from that of an ordinary English university community. The protagonists, Jane and Mark Studdock, are a modern, well-educated postwar newlywed couple; Mark teaches sociology at Bracton College, and Jane is working on a degree in literature.

Both long for professional success and personal recognition. Neither realizes the selfishness these goals represent or what means they must use to achieve them. Mark, greedy for peer approval and power, joins a scientific and industrial combine, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). Behind the NICE, however, is a demoniac conspiracy to conquer England. Jane’s latent psychic powers make her a desirable pawn to NICE, as well, and she eventually flees to sanctuary in Ransom’s household.

In the previous novels, Lewis’s criticism of modern life had been a minor element. Here, he sharpened his critique of Western culture, particularly its materialism and skepticism. Jane and Mark, in their self-enclosed worlds, are forced to reckon with a spiritual reality and authority their culture has denied. What eventually saves them is a core of genuine love for one another, which leads them to repentance. Many in the novel, however, never rise above a self-consuming self-love.

The Screwtape Letters

First published: 1942

Type of work: Novel

In a series of letters, a senior tempter advises a junior devil how to succeed with a patient.

The Screwtape Letters made Lewis’s popular reputation. An epistolary novel from a senior tempter, Screwtape, the letters advise his junior colleague and nephew, Wormwood. The narrative traces Wormwood’s attempts to enslave the soul of a “patient,” a human on Earth, so that he may end in Hell at his death. Over the course of thirty-one letters, set in contemporary England during the Blitzkrieg, Screwtape reviews strategies based on exploitations of human nature.

Lewis’s purpose is frankly didactic, although his use of Screwtape as a narrator means that readers must often “invert” the truths he reveals. In the process, Lewis’s satire ranges over much of modern life, for Screwtape is ironically aware of human failings invisible to humans. Yet Screwtape himself is satirized, too; at moments he appears confused, contradicting himself, admitting truths about God that he later denies. Lewis succeeds in creating both a character and an atmosphere: Hell is the mind-set in which selfishness becomes self-absorption.

Early in the novel, the patient experiences a religious conversion, permitting Screwtape to discuss how the Christian life may itself be perverted. This development becomes the major interest of the work, for the church is the real enemy of the demoniac. As Screwtape provides advice, Lewis is able to portray the Christian faith in opposition to those facets of modern life that are diabolical.

Over the course of the novel, Screwtape encourages Wormwood to promote four illusions held by moderns. The first is that total freedom and independence lie in casting off inhibitions and that God is somehow opposed to this. By contrast, Screwtape casually notes that God intends that humans grow to maturity and intellectual and emotional independence. God intends that they be free from whatever might enslave them, including themselves, and thus offers them the power of self-transcendence through the church. He lures them toward his freedom with joy and love, and to that end provides both in human life as shadows of what awaits those who love Him.

A second illusion lies in modern beliefs about the Christian church. Screwtape reveals that the church is, first of all, mostly invisible, for it includes all of its members in time and eternity. The church opposes modern culture in its emphasis on interdependence, while industrial life emphasizes competition. Screwtape notes that interdependent life in community can be maintained only by love, while selfishness motivates competition. Since Christianity demands love and condemns selfishness, competitive attitudes are a direct threat to it. Further, the church offers access to permanence and security, while modern culture perceives these as stodginess.

A third illusion is that emotions, rather than the intellect, are trustworthy. Lewis implicitly stresses repeatedly the role of reason in everyday life, especially for the Christian. Screwtape cautions Wormwood to confuse, rather than argue with, his patient, and especially to employ jargon or emotion-laden terms to motivate him.

Finally, Screwtape gives the lie to the belief that personal faith has no social implications. He urges Wormwood repeatedly to separate his patient’s convictions, especially his religious faith, from outward conduct and habits. Because most men and women lack consistent intellectual and moral beliefs, they remain inactive when called to moral choice. To Lewis, a mature Christian life is one in which the central attitudes and beliefs work their way into every moment. Screwtape reviews a catalog of occasions to separate conduct from belief, including relationships within the family, moments under stress, attitudes toward Christians of differing faith, and relationships with non-Christian companions.

The Chronicles of Narnia

First published: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian, 1951; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952; The Silver Chair, 1953; The Horse and His Boy, 1954; The Magician’s Nephew, 1955; The Last Battle, 1956

Type of work: Novels

Into the parallel world of Narnia come a series of English children who meet the lion Aslan, confront evil, and grow to maturity.

The Chronicles of Narnia traces the experience of a number of modern children in their encounter with a “medieval” world. Lewis apparently envisioned key scenes in the story when he was in his adolescence but may have had no thought of developing a series of stories until he was well into them. Into the stories flow memories of the works of authors such as Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, and George MacDonald. Each story portrays the growing maturity of the children who find their way into Narnia, and the plots are, in that respect, very similar. Each child must confront wickedness, spiritual evil localized in some individual, and overcome it. Perhaps more significant than the plot, Lewis creates settings that are richly described, in which magic is possible and everyday actions may have deeply symbolic value. If any of his fiction succeeds in creating that longing for “Joy” that he experienced in his own life, the Narnia stories do.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe introduces the Pevensie children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, who discover Narnia, where the White Witch has brought a hundred-year winter without Christmas. Although the children enter Narnia apparently by accident, they are expected, and welcomed. Humans are meant to rule in Narnia, despite the fact that its chief inhabitants are talking beasts and creatures such as centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, and dryads. When the children learn that a prophecy of their arrival means that humans may help to free Narnia, three enlist to fight the White Witch. Yet she has already enchanted Edmund into betraying them.

Christian truth is never far under the surface of Narnia, though children who read the stories may not notice it. Each story demonstrates the necessity of relying on Aslan, the lion who is a thinly veiled image of Christ. His entrance into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe transforms it from fairy tale to spiritual romance. Edmund is saved when Aslan offers himself to the White Witch to die as a substitution, and Lewis thus makes understandable to children the incarnation and Crucifixion of Christ. One of the novel’s most effective scenes is Aslan’s return to life the next morning. With his power, the children swiftly defeat the witch’s army of monsters, and spring is renewed.

Prince Caspian returns the Pevensies to a Narnia again enslaved. This time the materialistic humans, the Telmarines, are at fault. Fearful of the talking animals and other intelligent Narnian creatures, they first drove them out to the forest and then in later years denied their existence. The Telmarine Caspian’s battle on behalf of “Old Narnia” fails until he depends on Aslan, and the Pevensie children similarly must listen to Aslan and trust him before they can be effective. A comic element of the story is the failure of adults to recognize the moral authority of children when directed by Aslan.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader brings together Caspian, Lucy, and Edmund. They return to Narnia, this time with their cousin Eustace Scrubb, an insufferably modern child. Caspian has resolved to find seven missing noblemen who sailed east from Narnia. At first glance, the story might simply be an adventure like any other children’s novel. Again, however, Lewis develops lessons of religious truth through the children’s adventures. The journey results in a literal transformation of Eustace, who must be freed from a physical enchantment and, simultaneously, from the enchantment of modern skepticism.

The Silver Chair returns Eustace to Narnia with a schoolmate, Jill Pole. They arrive in Aslan’s country, escaping the persecution of schoolchildren at their “modern” school, and are dispatched to rescue Caspian’s grown son, Rilian, kidnapped by a witch. The children and a companion eventually defeat the witch’s enchantment in what is explicitly a test of faith, of faithfully remembering Aslan’s directions. At the novel’s conclusion, Lewis includes the comic scene of Jill, Eustace, and Caspian, still in armor, terrifying the bullies who had persecuted Jill.

The Horse and His Boy is an episode from the rule of the Pevensie children during the time of the first novel. The story line reminds one of intrigue and mistaken-identity novels, or even of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (pr. c. 1592-1594, pb. 1623), and is the slightest of the stories in symbolic depth. Shasta, a young boy, though the son of the King of Archenland, near Narnia, had been kidnapped as an infant. Later, he escapes to Narnia with a Calormene girl, Aravis, and two Narnian talking horses. In the process they foil a planned Calormene attack on Narnia. Aslan appears to guide Shasta and disciplines Aravis, whose selfishness has resulted in suffering for others.

In the last two books of the series, Lewis completes the story of Narnia by narrating its creation and its final destruction. The Magician’s Nephew describes how Digory and his friend Polly discover Narnia and inadvertently bring evil into it. Lewis’s picture of the creation as spoken and sung by the power of Aslan’s voice is a remarkable evocation of the biblical story in Genesis. The story accounts for several mysteries in the series, not the least of which is the source of evil in an unfallen world.

The Last Battle is Narnia’s version of the book of Revelation. Narnia is overthrown; the servants of evil triumph; and Eustace, Jill, and the Narnian defenders are flung into a stable to die. What they find inside, however, is another Narnia, one so intensely real that the world outside the door seems a shadow. This is Heaven, and Aslan welcomes them and the Pevensies to their real home. When Aslan judges and unmakes the world, they see him retain in the new Narnia all the good things in the old. It is clear that Lewis focuses in this last novel on consolation, both for the fears children have about death and for their anxiety at the scriptural theme of the end of the world. Yet, as in That Hideous Strength, Lewis attacks the unbelief, decadence, and corruption of modern life, which make inevitable the final battle. Further, he shows the self-destructive nature of evil, for the triumph of evil is the occasion for Aslan to end Narnia itself.