All Hallows' Eve

Rating:
Summary: A major twentieth century author delivers very well in this
Review: Charles Williams reveals the occult and makes it everyday reality. And he does this without resorting to traditional western occult conventions or by trying to frighten or mystify anyone. This story includes some characters who are alive and some who are dead, some are magicians and some are lawyers. And yet, they are all treated with the same emphasis and value, their motives and feelings are well within our understanding. Their lives intersect and interesting things happen.Williams has a very christian theology but christian tradition discourages any interest in the occult. William's writings are doubly fascinating for this.

Rating:
Summary: A ghost story, but not as we know it
Review: Published in 1945 and still in print, this is the last of the novels of Charles Williams, who along with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis was one of the Oxford literary group the Inklings. The recent increase in popularity of his fiction, initially boosted by his association with the Inklings, is probably due to the current success of the Frank Peretti thrillers, and the LaHaye-Jenkins 'Left Behind' series. However, in contrast to the current populists Mr Williams is intellectually quite a demanding read.

All Hallows Eve is another Williams ghost story, gently told in his own highly unorthodox style. Two young women have been killed in an accident in the aftermath of the WWII air raids on London, but their ghostly participation in the story is as real as that of any of the living people. It is probably fair to say that this novel, as with most Charles Williams fiction, is not recommended for the overly sensitive person, and could easily be misinterpreted the overly hasty.

Simon LeClerk is a powerful mage, more a Saruman than a Gandalf, and his plan is domination of this world and - more worryingly - any other that he can access. His adoring acolytes form the powerbase of his support for a new world religion. Betty, daughter of one of these acolytes, is the unwilling dupe of the magician, and the key subject in his most daring and horrible experiment. An artist is the bereaved husband of Evelyn, one of the ghosts, and a civil servant is Betty's intended husband.

The characters have depth and robust individual style. While many an author can paint real villains doing convincingly bad things, Williams is unusual in that his good characters and their goodness are equally if not more convincing. Their goodness is genuinely felt and is strongly attractive. There is no hint that the villains have all the fun or that the author really has little idea of how to portray true goodness, or even what it is.

From this novel I also gained a valuable insight into the true nature and function of art. Rather like 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', two of the artist's paintings play a pivotal part in the story. The artist manages in one picture to catch and portray something of a hidden truth about the city of London, and in the other something about the magician himself (who approves of the picture). As these things could not be captured by any mere photograph, the art has to say what can best be said, or perhaps only be said, in a painting.

Rating:
Summary: Charles Williams: The Patron Saint of Goth
Review: Regent College has done us all a service by reprinting Charles Williams' best novel. Oddly enough, it's the one many readers have missed because it wasn't reprinted when Eerdmans brought out the various editions of his other half dozen novels. This is thinking man's(or woman's) Goth; there are more ideas in one chapter than in an entire Stephen King novel. Another difference is it's the Good and not evil that is truly terrifying (evil is a shade or shadow of the Good). The occultic plots are somewhat drawn from Williams' involvement in The Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society headed by A.E.Waite, best known for the Waite Tarot Deck. Its members variously included poet W.B.Yeats (known for his poem, "The Second Coming") and Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism. At one point, Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Great Beast," attempted to wrestle control of The Golden Dawn, and one can only speculate what the outcome would have been had the many converts to Crowley's "Magick" have stumbled on Williams' books instead. Instead of "Mr. Crowley," would Ozzy be singing "Mr. Williams?" Instead of buying Crowley's mansion and opening occult bookstores to propagate his teachings, would Jimmy Page have renovated Williams' tiny flat and opened Golden Dawn branches all over England? Would "Stairway to Heaven" be about the Web of Souls and Exchange and the Way of Affirmation and vicariously bearing burdens and the Holy Graal and coinherence and all the rest of Williams' dazzling ideas? Who knows? But this reader joins the many who, having encountered Charles Williams, will never be the same.

Rating:
Summary: Possible, believable picture of Evil
Review: This probably qualifies as the strangest book i've read all year. I was reminded of Williams by reading C.S. Lewis's letters; i had read one of his books before, "Descent into Hell" i think, and remembered the strangeness, but this really is amazing. How many other books do you know in which one of the two main characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary? Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet the whole thing works. It is the story of two dead women, killed during an air raid on war-torn London, and the choices they make ~ or the choices they made while alive ~ and how they affect the world of the still living. It is also the story of an evil (American) magus, Simon, who practises (actually, he's very good at it) real black magic. His desire to rule the world, and the plan he has to use his daughter to gain the power to do so, is in the end defeated by Lester, one of the dead women, her husband, his friend, and the friend's fiancée ~ Simon the Clerk's daughter. The evil is real, overbearing, even, though it is bizarre; one gets the idea that all the Clerk does is feasible, that Williams has experienced evil in his life, that he knows whereof he writes. The descriptions of the dead, of the City they inhabit (both London and not-London), are also real, persuasive; Williams must have had some foreknowledge, one feels, to write the way he wrote. Reading him takes quite an investment, of time, of thought, of disbelief suspension; it is, however, well worth the cost: The payoff is a gripping book, plenty of thought, and a clearer vision of life. I shall have to read another Williams, but perhaps not too soon.

Rating:
Summary: Possible, believable picture of Evil
Review: This probably qualifies as the strangest book i've read all year. I was reminded of Williams by reading C.S. Lewis's letters; i had read one of his books before, "Descent into Hell" i think, and remembered the strangeness, but this really is amazing. How many other books do you know in which one of the two main characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary? Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet the whole thing works. It is the story of two dead women, killed during an air raid on war-torn London, and the choices they make ~ or the choices they made while alive ~ and how they affect the world of the still living. It is also the story of an evil (American) magus, Simon, who practises (actually, he's very good at it) real black magic. His desire to rule the world, and the plan he has to use his daughter to gain the power to do so, is in the end defeated by Lester, one of the dead women, her husband, his friend, and the friend's fiancée ~ Simon the Clerk's daughter. The evil is real, overbearing, even, though it is bizarre; one gets the idea that all the Clerk does is feasible, that Williams has experienced evil in his life, that he knows whereof he writes. The descriptions of the dead, of the City they inhabit (both London and not-London), are also real, persuasive; Williams must have had some foreknowledge, one feels, to write the way he wrote. Reading him takes quite an investment, of time, of thought, of disbelief suspension; it is, however, well worth the cost: The payoff is a gripping book, plenty of thought, and a clearer vision of life. I shall have to read another Williams, but perhaps not too soon.

Rating:
Summary: Williams at his incredible best
Review: Whatever your ideas of heaven and hell, they will never be the same after reading Charles Williams. Whether the new images will be comfortable or not is another question. In some ways Williams's picture of heaven is, if anything, more frightening than the conventional depiction of hell. It's certainly considerably more compelling. His dead protagonist was one scared woman--and so was I, for most of the novel. In "All Hallows' Eve" Williams gives his eschatological images expression in their leanest, purest form, mingled with other terrific and similarly life-threatening images of the war that was then engulfing the world. Read it!

Rating:
Summary: Makes the supernatural world seem as "real" as the natural
Review: While the premise of ghosts as major characters took a little bit to adjust to, I found that Williams developed supernatural characters and a supernatural world that seemed as solid and "real" as the natural world. It is a wonderful novel that explores so many deep concepts - heaven and hell, the reality of the supernatural, the nature of evil and its limitations, body and soul,... In fact, the main difficulty with the novel is the fact that it explores so many deep questions, and dwells so much on the inner thoughts of the characters. These aspects make the novel a difficult (yet rewarding) read. I found that I needed several hours of completely uninterrupted time to really get into the novel. Then, I couldn't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Makes the supernatural world seem as "real" as the natural
Review: While the premise of ghosts as major characters took a little bit to adjust to, I found that Williams developed supernatural characters and a supernatural world that seemed as solid and "real" as the natural world. It is a wonderful novel that explores so many deep concepts - heaven and hell, the reality of the supernatural, the nature of evil and its limitations, body and soul,... In fact, the main difficulty with the novel is the fact that it explores so many deep questions, and dwells so much on the inner thoughts of the characters. These aspects make the novel a difficult (yet rewarding) read. I found that I needed several hours of completely uninterrupted time to really get into the novel. Then, I couldn't put it down.