You could set the Great Divorce, Leaf by Niggle, and Descent Into Hell next to each other for a long conversation on the nature of judgement, purgation, and the bettering the soul.
Even the point where Lewis’s Professor dreams an eternity matches William’s dream stuck people. And there is a Hell entangled man with an invitation that becomes more and more unimportant the longer he has it only to find himself attending under compulsion what would have been delight much like Niggle. Like Lewis’s more real people in heaven, those at the dinner can’t reach him.
It makes me think a bit of the line from Dawn Treader, “This is the island where dreams come true.”
Charles Williams is intense still, but removing the Muslim mysticism and setting people in a small country town suits. They are still reacting, but I think Williams must have written himself in, so he can ask and prod and spur the rest on. Who else but the author could hold these character’s plights?
He dwells on the Dantean truth that our judgements are our judgements. A man eaten alive by lust will be a burnt out husk long before he dies. A woman selfish and seeking freedom from her own mundane responsibilities will be alone and unable to reflect the image of God in others. A girl who trusts her fears to the one who promised to take them, will be free to do good for those smaller than herself. It is in kindness that evil is destroyed like the Nicky Nicky Nye of Welsh fairytales.
“Peace had given her new judgment”
“A violent convulsion of the laws of the universe took place in her mind; if this was one of the laws, the universe might be better or worse, but it was certainly quite different from anything she had ever supposed it to be. It was a place whose very fundamentals she had suddenly discovered to be changed”
Worth a return read if only to see what more I have missed. As a Preface to Paradise Lost is dedicated to Williams , I’m looking forward to finding the insights Lewis saw. He wrote,
“But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your short Preface to Milton is what it seems to me to be-the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding. The ease with which the thing was done would have seemed inconsistent with the weight that had to be lifted. As things are, I feel entitled to trust my own eyes. Apparently, The door of the prison was really unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.”
That intelligence and understanding is in Descent, he managed things quite easily where others couldn’t budge it. He was less gnostic here, after all the real world and the spiritual world mingled, much like a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
“If we shadows have offended…”
Further Up and Further In