Rating: 
Summary: Truly "Fantastic"!
Review: Lewis apoligizes for a slow start in having to describe the "mundane". This, however, sets the stage for the fantastic. Never before had Greek mythology or the Arthurian legends held any appeal for me. This book happily marries these
themes to a worldly mindset out of control. Much time is spent on the introspect which accents the physical events in the story. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Move Over, Huxley and Orwell.
Review: Lewis' apocolyptic vision of where mankind is headed hits far closer to the mark than the more widely read visions such as Brave New World and 1984. This is because Lewis recognizes that the evil lies not in technology or even politics but in the human heart.Lewis also shows a deeper understanding of how society functions -- as an investigative researcher I can vouch for the accuracy of his portrayal of how nefarious organizations manipulate the press, for example. He grasps what other writers never even seem to comprehend -- that it is the small choices made daily that lead down the path to Hell. As philosophy, as social commentary, or as a rolicking good story, That Hideous Strength is a compelling read.
Rating:
Summary: This book is both an Adventure and a Sacrament!
Review: Lewis' book is the modern story of *sacred England*, which is, apparently, called "Logres"..of the legacy of King Arthur, in Service to the Christ-Consciousness.(And every nation, he tells us, has its "sacred" and "profane" traditions, and its own Story.) Lewis "wakes up" Merlin the Magician and brings him into the 20th century, and enables the reader to accept, as well as know, him. And the same is true for the novelist's wonderful characterization of a *bear* who plays a very big part in the story. And many other beautifully drawn human ("all TOO human", in some cases) characters. This book is one of the greatest visionary novels I have ever read (or, in this case, listened to on tape.) The last cassette is almost inexpressively, *impossibly* beautiful. It expresses a vision of Harmony among all the Kingdoms of Evolution, and a Harmony of a Sacred Chain of Being that leads through all these Kingdoms and Beyond, into realms one might call "the realms of the gods", of "Cosmic Astrology" with the planets as living beings, all within One Living God. Hearing it is in a way an entering of Paradise. A Sacrament. I thought I would select a few passages to share: from the 11th cassette: "She comes more near the Earth than she was wont to, to make Earth sane. Peralandra (note: the goddess Venus) is all about us, and Man is no longer isolated. We are now as we ought to be: between the angels, who are our elder brothers, and the beasts, who are our jesters, servants, and playfellows." from the 9th cassette: In this heighth, and depth, and breadth, the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called "me", dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in space, without air. The name "me" was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected: a being that! did not yet fully exist, but whose existence was demanded. It was a person--not the person she had thought--yet also a thing: a *made* thing. Made to please Another, and in Him, to please all others..a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. from the 11th: "Go, in obedience, and you will find love." ps: I just found the tapes to OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, the *1st* volume of this trilogy. _______
Rating: 
Summary: good and evil
Review: Lewis's writing seems always to be about the struggle
of good and evil. His "evil", as I see it, consists
of a separation from the joy of love and life, and a
descent into passionless, dull destruction and
time-wasting. While I am not a Christian, I deeply
appreciate his insights on how we get caught in habits
of this kind of evil, and drawn away from joy.
Lewis's portrayal in this book of the advancement of evil through individuals' petty efforts at self-aggrandizement rang true. It was frightening to watch unfold through nearly content-free board meetings and hall conversations.
There were also some choice insights in the course of the book about how we can help or hinder ourselves in being good. Lewis tends to be clear about the point that devotion to God (or goodness) has nothing to do with looking saintly every Sunday in the right sort of church, and everything to do with cultivating generous impulses, enjoying the life given to us, and being good to one another, without regard for personal status.
I enjoyed the first part of the story quite a bit, as both literature and spiritual exploration. When Lewis suddenly introduced Martians (I am wildly oversimplifying for the sake of clarity) the effect was ludicrously awkward, IMHO, but I was willing to let it go, particularly since he had in fact spent two previous books, only one of which I've read, presenting these entities in more context.
The ending, unfortunately, shared this awkwardness. After a book-long buildup, it seemed to all fly to pieces in a rather unsatisfying manner that felt less like a resolution than like Cecil B. DeMille pulling out all the stops and using all his ancient Roman and Biblical costumes, props, sets, and wild animals at once.
Some great bits, good spiritual insights, thought-provoking, but flawed as a novel. I recommend it if you can forgive that and want some thoughts about goodness and evil to chew on.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable and idiosyncratic satirical fantasy
Review: Lewis's writing these days is widely regarded as of exclusive interest to the God Squad and that is a pity. Certainly this is a work of pretty straightforward religious propaganda, a supernatural thriller written by someone who takes the supernatural stuff with the utmost seriousness but, hey, so is "The Exorcist" and that needn't disqualify it from entertaining the unconverted. This novel is the last and the only earthbound instalment of Lewis's Space trilogy. It's a theological; thriller in which the forces of darkness are seeking to destroy humanity through the agency of the sinister National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments or NICE. The plot had two distinct threads. One involves Mark Studdock, a young don at the rather All-Souls-like Bracton College in the fictitious English town of Edgestow (which Lewis in a preface insists is not based on Durham). Mark is a weak man with a desperate desire for recognition and inclusion and is all to easily sucked into the unpleasant world of NICE. He fondly imagines they are headhunting him in recognition of his many talents but in fact they are mainly interested in him as a way to get at his wife, Jane, whose visionary dreams they perceive, rightly, as a threat. And Jane is the subject of the second plot line. While Mark is being sucked in to the world of the baddies at their headquarters at Belbury, a former blood transfusion centre, Jane is falling in with the goodies, a disparate band of desperately nice people at the manor at St Anne's, under the leadership of the charismatic Director, the Ransom of "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra". The St Anne's parts of the story are the less impressive. Ransom has been turned by his experiences on Mars and Venus into an outrageously charismatic, ageless and near-superhuman religious leader who is really a lot less interesting than the very human Ransom of the earlier stories and who spends most of his time delivering rather dull and condescending anti-feminist lectures to Jane. (We are constantly told she would ordinarily have found such lectures insufferable but he is just so charismatic, you see...) Recently fashionable stuff about the wisdom of being a "surrendered wife" really just recapitulates Ransom's line here though Lewis surely writes far better than more recent advocates of such doubtful ideas and perhaps succeeds making them as attractive and compelling as it is humanly possible to make them. The Belbury-Mark story is a lot more fun and comprises a splendid and acute essay in political satire. The picture it paints of a grimly rotten beaurocratic institution guided by what pass for "progressive" social ideals is one of the nicest things Lewis ever wrote. (Lewis's intellectual agenda here echoes in a fictional context thoughts he develops in "The Abolition of Man", one of his most interesting non-fiction essays.) Particularly well done is Belbury's "Deputy Director" Wither, whose talks a wonderful and hilarious form of verbal anti-matter that is all too recognisable as only a slight exaggeration of the worst sort of British public sector Managementspeak. The news management techniques espoused by the NICE are again satirically telling and in a strikingly contemporary way: New Labour, one fears, would have loved the NICE with their fascination with spin and "modernization". Perhaps the best and most insightful thing about the book is the characterization of Mark Studdock, an extremely telling, frighteningly plausible portrait of a man drawn into collaboration with evil not by wickedness but by weakness, a desperation to belong, to feel himself accepted in the world of those who wield the power and pull the strings. It's enormously unlikely that Hitler's Germany or Mao's China contained enough simply wicked people to sustain such poisonous regimes. But it is also enormously likely that they contained many many people who were foolish and weak in just the ways Mark Studdock was, people whose collaboporation makes them appropriate objects more for pity than for hatred. The climax is inevitably rather over the top, involving as it does the resurrection of the Arthurian druid Merlin whose ancient powers are crucial to determining the outcome of the conflict. Obviously things get a bit bonkers at this point but Lewis is rare among thriller writers for his scholarship and has the erudition in matters Arthurian to carry it off as well as anyone ever could. A real curiosity then, strange and sometimes a bit nuts but also very well-written, satirically telling, often psychologically and politically insightful and very readable.
Rating:
Summary: Timeless cautionary tale.
Review: Many fans of Lewis' work rate this lowest in the Space Trilogy; it lacks "Out of the Silent Planet"'s wonder and "Perelandra" lyricism. However, for a look at where a situationally-moral, rationalist, humanist society is bound to wind up, it is priceless.
The main characters are a young couple who got married out of love and are finding it hard going in "the real world". The wife, Jane, has an unusual ability to 'dream true' and when her dreams start applying to her own life, she finds it unsettling. Her husband, Mark, a young don (or professor) is no help; he's too wound up in college politics and the possibility of a job with a new scientific foundation to pay much attention to her.
The story really begins moving when the foundation, called Belbury, begins moving in on everyday life. But, as always with Lewis, there is a moral opposite ready to stand against Belbury; in it, we find an old friend and several new ones.
This book is astonishingly accurate about where society is now -- as with some of Lewis' other observations (Screwtape's toast to the college comes to mind), it's hard to remember that Lewis wrote them nearly 50 years ago -- they're that close to current events and modern society
Rating:
Summary: A great end to the Space trilogy.
Review: Secular humanists will loathe it, but this is a great book. It was written in 1943, before George Orwell's 1984, but has many of the same themes. The theological landscape may be a little too fantastic for some tastes, but isn't that why they call this genre fantasy?
Rating:
Summary: A memorable tale.
Review: Shall I throw this book across the room because its plot hinges on forcing its heroine to accept her "proper role" as a woman in the mainstream Christianity of the era in which Lewis wrote it? Or shall I enjoy it on its own terms? I had to make up my mind about that as soon as I realized where the author was taking me, and at that point I put it aside overnight. With bookmark removed, because I intended to return it whence it was borrowed without reading further. I found my place again the next evening, and I kept on. I'm glad I did. While certainly I didn't wind up persuaded that birth control is an evil that prevents "preordained" conceptions from taking place, nor did I buy for a minute the notion that Jane Studdock could only gain both salvation and happiness by abandoning her doctoral thesis for a life of childbearing, I found the rest of the book thoroughly entertaining as a dark science fantasy. Lewis's wit more than redeems the rather heavy-handed allegory that the plot doesn't pretend to cloak. He takes myth and Christian doctrine, and settings and characters from his own time and place, and weaves it all together into a fast-moving and memorable tale. If he had only known the first thing about women, instead of sounding always like a bachelor uncle...or if only, as in "Out of the Silent Planet," he'd had the good sense not to attempt writing them as major characters.
Rating:
Summary: Eldils and Merlin and bears oh my!
Review: Silly heading, but nobody reads them anyway. I think. The third and last book in the trilogy (you did read the others, right?) and about as far from science fiction as you can possibly get . . . there's a definite shift, Lewis seems to be bringing in more fantasy and religious allegorical elements as the series continued, with the end result here. The tale is subtitled "A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups" and that's what it boils down to. If you're like me, you'll have read this right after reading the other two books (which were great, by the way) and you'll be immediately confused. Instead of focusing on the nifty Dr Ransom, you get a young couple Mark and Jane. Jane's having weird dreams that keep coming true and Mark isn't really paying attention because he's trying to get into the political "circles" as the local university where he works. However, little does he know that evil is lurking there and the folks are plotting some very dark things. Herein comes the good guys and after being introduced to lots o' supporting characters, some of which are interesting, some less so, you finally meet the man himself: Ransom. The problem I have, and this has been said elsewhere, is that he's apparently the "Pendragon" (but also the Fisher King . . . weren't they two different people?) but there's absolutely no explanation as to how that happened. Lewis probably figured it wasn't important and not relevant to the story itself, heck, Ransom's discussion of how he inherited the mantle of the Pendragon is basically tossed off in one sentence. The first half of the book mostly focuses on the college and the dread blokes there, but when Ransom and company shows up finally, things get very trippy indeed. Perelandra was a strange novel because of setting but I could deal with that, Lewis piles so much allegory on the plot that it gets almost ridiculous. And then Merlin shows up. That's right. Merlin. He's kinda fun actually but much like Ransom becomes, he's little more than a voice, you don't get any indication of his motivations. All that said though, this is a nifty way to end the series, the climax left me a little flat, especially after the buildup in the first two books (Merlin makes some stuff happen and the gods blow some stuff up) but Lewis' mastery of the English language saves this completely, this guy was passionate about this novel and you can tell, it crackles from every page and you can really feel it toward the end in almost every word. There's a nice "Britishness" about the book as well, a sense of the sheer age of Britain and its history. The ending is kind and gentle and you're left with a good feeling when you finish the book. If you don't like Lewis for his "preachiness" then stay far away if you don't like thinking, because he's using this more to illustrate a point more than anything else, but it's fine writing and a fine cap to an interesting series. And for those of you who started reading this series because it was science fictional, don't stop now, y'all could stand to read something different every once in a while. It won't hurt. Really.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't Fit With The Rest Of The Trilogy
Review: Taken by itself - which can be done without much issue - this is a good book. However, when positioned as the third installment of the Space Trilogy, it is a square peg being placed in a round hole. There are a number of things about this book that break the harmony with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.
1. Dr. Ransom is not the central figure of the story. There are vague references to him earlier in the book, but it is at almost the halfway point that we see Ransom interact with the rest of the characters. Some may find this similar to the way The Two Towers is written, but the big difference between the two is that all but one of the characters in The Hideous Strength are brand new. Even Devine is going by a different name. At least in The Two Towers, you were reading about familiar characters for the first half.
2. The number of characters in this story is significantly large in comparison to the other two books in the trilogy. You meet as many characters in Bracton alone as you see in the entire length of Perelandra. That doesn't even take into consideration the characters at Logres and the N.I.C.E. This seems to take away from the cohesiveness of the Trilogy and almost detaches it from the other two stories.
3. The role of the Oyarsa is quite different. Given that the story is set on Earth, this is somewhat expected. However, never having them speak just doesn't seem fair after their involvement in the other two stories. Lewis should have let the Oyarsa from Mercury and Saturn impart wisdom as Mars and Venus did.
Again, this *is* a good book if you take it by itself. There are even some things related about the differences between men and women that are quite funny but true. Look for MacPhee's comparison of how the two sexes use nouns. Married people will get a chuckle. However, given that this is supposed to conclude a trilogy, it really fails in that regard. If you are expecting something that performs like Return of the King, you will be quite disappointed.
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