This August marks the 80th anniversary of publication of the final cosmic/dystopian volume That Hideous Strength (THS) of C.S. Lewis’ first fictional series, written well before the uber popular Narnia series.

One leading educationalist has told me that he reads THS every year, partly because it is an exciting story but especially because it contains so much prescient wisdom for our times.

During this 30th anniversary of John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, THS is a worthy reading touching as it does on trans-humanism, eugenics, medical experiments, the natural order, organisational ethics and psychology, politics and most surprisingly on natural marriage in relation to all of these issues.

There are many striking images and scenes in this rousing novel. Perhaps one of Lewis’ most chillingly familiar creations in the book is the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). At first NICE seems to be a banal and bureaucratic enterprise committed to utilitarian scientism, but we learn that it is powered by forces much deeper and darker than pettifogging empiricism.

The trilogy is made up of what might be described as Lewis’ metaphysical science-fiction novels, comprising: Out of the Silent Planet(1938) which is set on Mars, Perelandra (or Voyage to Venus, 1943) and THS takes place on Earth and firmly in England.

The three titles of The Space Trilogy can be found in many paperback forms but also in a newer release, with a preface of letters between Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in a single volume.

The full title of the earlier edition is That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale For Grown-Ups. This reveals a great deal about Lewis’ interests and style in THS.

Lewis writes in the preface to one edition that THS is a “tall tale” about “devilry” beginning in a very familiar and domestic setting like all fairytales, and it is a story of “the outer rim of that devilry (which) had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. In this case my own.” NICE operates through a university college: the fictional Bracton College at the University of Edgestow.

The novel brings into fictional/mythical form many of Lewis’ concerns about education, the ontology of language, the value and the loss of love and friendship and the denial of objective truth in the institutions of late modernity. It reflects his thought about the crisis in human meaning from the essays of Abolition of Man (1943) and the lectures which form The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964).

The Lewis novel has often been compared to the classic and more widely known secular novel, 1984 by George Orwell, which was published a few years after THS in 1949.

Interestingly, though somewhat put off by what Orwell calls “the undisciplined” irruption of the “miraculous” which Lewis employs towards the end of the THS, he readily and quickly praises Lewis’ depiction of a scientist/bureaucratic totalitarianism of the protagonists of NICE and the utter deformation of their personalities. Orwell writes in his typically spare way of THS:

“His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.”

Lewis opens the novel in what he calls the “humdrum” setting of a small home, and as if he is channelling the trend at his time for novels of “social realism” he reveals that one of his key characters, Jane Studdock, is struggling with a failing marriage and she is trying to come to terms with her womanhood and her place as a wife while trying to continue as a doctoral student at university. We hear her no-nonsense inner thoughts for avoiding children, but we also hear her sadness.

There is an ironic note struck when we discover that Jane’s doctoral topic about which she has grown listless is “Donne’s Vindication of the Body”. It is through her growing recognition of the “natural order” in the drama which unfolds and her unexpected role as a seer that Jane joins the resistance movement headed by the protagonist and hero of the previous science trilogy, Dr Elwin Ransom. Other ordinary and extraordinary characters discover a heroic fellowship at the house, St-Anne’s-on-the-Hill.

We learn that the forces of NICE stoke apparently “nice” political correctness by which to fuel the emotions and ambitions, which lead to a polarisation in the politics of the land. One of the villains explains:

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

One of the truly frightening characters is Deputy of NICE and is tellingly named, John Wither. He is a man of shrivelled soul and humanity and is a grotesque mannequin of the deeper forces. He speaks in grey and tangled slogans and never answers questions. C.S. Lewis writes of him:

“He had learned to withdraw most of his consciousness from the task of living, to conduct business, even, with only a quarter of his mind. Colours, tastes, smells, and tactual sensations no doubt bombarded his physical senses in the normal manner: they did not now reach his ego.”

There are many other memorable characters and scenes and, yes, the end of the novel is laden with mythological and apocalyptic scenes which are very far removed from Orwell’s style.

A novel such as That Hideous Strength, however, does show that sometimes the most effective way of understanding the underpinning of our lives and of reality itself, and communicating to our dislocated culture, is through the return to story – even “modern fairy-tales”.

Fr Dwight Longenecker writes very well on “Why Myth Matters” here.

That is why the Thomas More Centre values the powerful wisdom of painters, poets, authors of fiction, filmmakers, musicians and even those guardians of the poetry of the soil and air – gardeners, housekeepers, apiarists, vintners and children.

Blessings for the coming Palm Sunday.

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre