That Hideous Strength

 

See here for my review of Perelandra: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/07/perelandra.html.
When I started That Hideous Strength, the third and final part of CS Lewis' Space trilogy, I had to double-check I had downloaded the correct audiobook. The first few chapters are a story of a kind that I had never imagined Lewis writing; what felt to me like a criminal conspiracy thriller, almost like The Godfather. Ransom is not present at first and apart from a very brief referral to Weston it apparently had no connection at all to the two previous books of the trilogy. The main characters are called Mark and Jane, an English couple who live in an imaginary grand old university town called Edgestow, modelled on Oxford or Cambridge. Mark is a lecturer at the university. An organization with the insidious name of National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, NICE, wants to buy a piece of beautiful forested parkland in one of the colleges to turn into a new laboratory. The land will be ripped up and cemented over, HS2 style. They end up offering Mark a job, which he accepts. At the same time Jane is having clairvoyant dreams and she goes to see a psychologist. It doesn't take long for Mark to regret his change of career, but he soon finds out that nobody ever leaves the NICE. The land is sold and the local countryside destroyed; the river is rerouted down a canal. The NICE actually has a secret objective to transform the world into a diabolical, post-modernist, robotic technocracy. It even involves radical transhumanism and eugenics. In this way it will sound astonishingly familiar to modern readers who are concerned about the Tavistock Institute or the WEF. Mark is bullied with an increasing level of intimidation. The very names of his persecutors are menacing; Hardcastle, Wither, Frost. It is a very skilful and perceptive portrayal of subversion by bureaucracy, social violence, induced confusion, moral blackmail, passive aggression, exposure to degenerate artworks, ostracism and what you might call "gaslighting". It reminds me of a scene in the recent TV series 3 Body Problem in which one of the characters is offered a job, which they decisively refuse; yet their would-be employers just keep talking as if the character has accepted the job, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/03/3-body-problem.html. The extremely sinister individuals who make up the leadership of the NICE remind me a bit of the angels in Good Omens, but without the humour, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/02/good-omens.html. Readers like me who are very familiar with The Chronicles of Narnia might not be able to make the transition easily to That Hideous Strength. While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its sequels is aimed at children, this earlier novel is definitely adult material. In its pages you will find black magic, violence, murder and torture. It actually includes some horror elements.
 
CS Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength during the last couple of years before the end of World War II when the British government had already made preparations for "redevelopment", ostensibly to repair the damage done by the Blitz; but, with typical bureaucratic lust, they ended up repairing much that was undamaged. They demolished thousands of beautiful old buildings and replaced them with new ones that were considered far less aesthetic. It was this dark age of architecture that coined the phrase "concrete jungle". One of my favourite city centres, Bath, had a very narrow escape from this "urban improvement". The elimination of ancient structures and especially the natural world also inspired Lewis' friend JRR Tolkien. The NICE uses tactics to achieve its ends that we would today call false flags including engineered riots. One of the other best elements of the narrative, and one of the most disturbing, is the reader sees the process of corruption by evil in real-time from the viewpoint of a central character. However, as Galdalf said, there are forces of good as well as evil at work in the world. Ransom reappears following his return from Venus and, together with allies, fights against the destructive and hateful "bent" eldila. They use Jane for what in the modern world is called "remote viewing". It's interesting that the bad guys' organization is called "nice". Nice is a word that means benevolent and pleasant, but it is rarely used that way colloquially. I've found that if you are called "nice" it is often a subtle insult. I like warm and friendly people and I try to be one myself; however I've learned to be wary of people who appear "too nice". Very often that niceness is a haze of treacle intended to camouflage malevolent aspects of their personality. The personnel at the NICE organization smile, shake hands and speak politely and eloquently; but it's all a ruse, a crafty lure. They are really a gang of megalomaniacs who literally want to create hell on earth. The villains are complex and detailed, a bit like Ayn Rand's. I think they will be very recognizable to most modern readers. For example the NICE deputy director, Wither, talks in long monologues full of uncommon words that are impossible to comprehend yet deliver the superficial impression of being very clever. This reminds me of the satirical TV comedy series Yes Minister in which a feckless statesman, James Hacker, is constantly manipulated by his sneaky assistant Sir Humphrey Appleby. The evil that has infected the earth cannot be beaten by any physical weapon. It is in essence a spiritual war and good people will need to call on the ancient mythological forces of virtue to win it. Such as it is in real life, I believe. Our battle is between the divine and the profane. In the story, this battle is played out and the book's connection to the rest of the Space trilogy is made clear. The isolation caused by the "bent" forces controlling the earth is lifted. There is a brief but touching afterword by the author's best friend and fellow writer, JRR Tolkien.