Descent into Hell: A Novel

W. H. Auden and T. S. Elliot admired this eccentric author and found his novels great reading. My small voice echoes "Darn Right!" Gently invite anyone still laboring under the illusion that you "make your own reality" or that "by following your heart you'll never go astray" to a good slow read of this mystical horror. Laurence Whitworth is as good a cautionary protagonist for which one could hope. Two parallel themes, the lightness of love's burden and the burdened suicide's call to light are both deeply moving. After my third reading I'm glimpsing what Williams' tried to reveal, but hope subsequent rereads will take me even deeper. Don't give up! this book's worth every minute you spend in it.

Ask any minister what part of the Apostle's Creed elicits the greatest number of questions from parishioners. He or she will say without hesitation, "He descended into hell." This is a puzzling phrase for us. If we want to have a Biblically accurate and theologically sound understanding of the most difficult phrase of the Apostle's Creed, we may wish to turn to The Book of Confessions. Or John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. Or we might want to read this novel, by one of the most dazzling Christian novelists of the past (Twentieth!) century. Charles Williams should be better known that he is, as a brilliant scholar, inventive writer and faithful Christian of modern times. A forceful, inventive and compelling person, Willams was a member of the famous "Inklings"-the creative Oxford University Christian writers whose company included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The setting of the book is an affluent suburb of a large city where a group of interesting residents have prevailed upon one of their most famous neighbors, a world-renowned playwright, to produce his newest play. We meet them all as the rehearsals are taking place-and we learn that each person is on a spiritual journey fraught with dangers, toils and snares. There is love and lust, loss and confusion, the meaning of life and the meaning of work, all wrapped up in the preparations for performing the play. If Shakespeare is to be trusted, all the world's a stage... Williams uses the metaphor of the play to portray life, in this world and the next. So we have the world of "The Hill" (their neighborhood-but could it be any suburban enclave), intersecting with the world of the play. We also have a larger challenge. For, as he does in all his novels, Williams reveals the intersection between the "real world" and the spiritual realm. Past and present at times merge. Memory and hope combine. People make choices that will affect their lives for all eternity. Sometimes, without thinking. We meet the wise and kindly playwright, Stanhope. The eminent and ambitious historian Wentworth. The beguiling and mysterious Mrs. Samile. The fear-stricken Pauline, whose perils help us grasp the key to the most famous verse in Galatians... "Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ." For that passage alone, the novel is unsurpassed. But you will also not want to miss Wentworth's Choice. Classic Christian truth portrayed unforgettably. If you are of a literal bent, you may find it hard to wrap your mind around some of his images. Don't give up! Allow yourself to be guided by a pro, into a world you may not have visited before. Read this book slower than you are accustomed to read novels. Intersperse its reading with Biblical study on the same concepts: wholeness, healing, Christian love, jealousy, anger, fear, faithfulness, joy, life and life eternal. (Note: This novel is one of a series that also includes these titles, by the same author and

Among the writers associated along beside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien with the "Inkling" writers, Charles Williams' voice is arguably the most curious. Williams' seven novels discuss the triumph of a vibrant, mystical, rather unorthodox Christianity over the forces of occult despair. Williams was by instinct a poet with more than a bit of Tennison among his influences. His books are fairly easy reading, even though he alternates between rather vivid literary allusion and an idiosyncratic stream of narrative consciousness. In this book, he personifies salvation and damnation in characters who, despite all the odd phrasing and high flown prose, seem eminently human. The passage in which a character meets a final damnation is extremely effective, neither preachy nor filled with that sort of "tacky Mr. Scratch and his horrid fire" sensibility that some writing about the afterlife can have. This, along with the other six novels in the series (the series is linked thematically and stylistically rather than by plot), is certainly worth a read.In our time, we see a lot of Christian fiction which seeks to tell stories of salvation and damnation through the use of fantasy characters (Peretti and his imitators come to mind). Yet, Williams' work, consciously literary, willing to risk heterodoxy to make a point, and infused with a victorian poetic sensibility, consistently takes the reader to places that the modern works fail to glimpse. In short, Charles Williams is the real thing, and well worth a read.

I have heard it said that one either finds Charles Williams' novels repellingly strange or utterly fascinating. I have found this to be untrue: I find Descent Into Hell both repellingly strange and utterly fascinating. All of Williams' novels are difficult reading: the depth of his thought baffled even C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (good friends of his, and no mean intellects themselves).Williams' writing style and content will seem highly unorthodox to many modern Christians, but this is perhaps his greatest strength. Admittedly his works are strange, very strange (Descent Into Hell is perhaps the strangest), but at their core, beneath all the gothic style and occultic atmosphere, they are almost scintillatingly orthodox. Williams takes biblical Christianity, strips it of all the trappings and additions imposed by our culture, and dresses it up entirely different. This is not to say he regards Christianity as merely a creed; anyone who has read his books can tell you he does not "demythologize" Christianity--the books are steeped in the supernatural. Rather, he believes in a Christian cosmos, bound by both natural and supernatural laws, and subject at last to the will of the I AM.Although Williams' style is not entirely to my Chestertonian tastes, every time I read one of his novels I can hardly stand to put it down. At times they indeed seem like "clotted glory," but rest assured that the Williams' meaning will hit you at a later date with the power of a bolt of lightning. He's just so intelligent it takes the rest of us a while to catch up....

Everyday characters participate in the grand abstractions of good and evil, their lives becoming destroyed or glorified by their willingness or refusal to participate. Williams' notion was that the metaphysical is intimately available to all of us, and the stories he tells challenge the materialistic, amoral view common in our culture (and thus Williams' lack of popularity). The action of many of his other novels make for a good read at any level; Descent into Hell is less adventurous and more philosophical. But his fictional treatments of a young woman's willingness to participate in Eternity, and a man's willingness to succumb to complete degradation of the spirit are both clear and memorable