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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CHARLES WILLIAMS
“One of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.” —Time
“[Williams has a] profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels.” —T. S. Eliot
“Reading Charles Williams is an unforgettable experience. It proves that one can write about the weird and fantastic in such a compelling manner as to appeal to any reader of modern novels.” —The Saturday Review of Literature
“Charles Williams took the form of the thriller and used it to create an extraordinary genre that has sometimes been called ‘spiritual shockers.’ His books are immensely worth reading, even if you consider yourself unspiritual and immune to shock.” —Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends
“With a powerful imagination fed by trinitarian and incarnational faith, Charles Williams used fiction to explore how people react when the supernatural enters their lives, and how then to find the path of peace. The fantasy novels that result make a riveting read.” —J. I. Packer, theologian and author of Knowing God
All Hallows’ Eve
“The work of a gifted man and obviously the expression of devoutly held convictions … No stranger novel has crossed my path in years.” —The New York Times
“A story that makes a real word of supernatural … A tale of horror surpassing even the works of the recognized masters.” —Chicago Sunday Tribune
“A strange story … poignant beauty such as prose fiction rarely achieves. The final impression is more as if the three books of the Divine Comedy had been compressed into one novel.” —The New York Times Book Review
Many Dimensions
“A great English believer unites the seen with the unseen in a glory and a terror that are unforgettable.” —New York Herald Tribune
“It is satire, romance, thriller, morality and glimpses of eternity all rolled into one.” —The New York Times
War in Heaven
A Novel
Charles Williams
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. THE PRELUDE
II. THE EVENING IN THREE HOMES
III. THE ARCHDEACON IN THE CITY
IV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
V. THE CHEMIST’S SHOP
VI. THE SABBATH
VII. ADRIAN
VIII. FARDLES
IX. THE FLIGHT OF THE DUKE OF THE NORTH RIDINGS
X. THE SECOND ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
XI. THE OINTMENT
XII. THE THIRD ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
XIII. CONVERSATIONS OF THE YOUNG MAN IN GREY
XIV. THE BIBLE OF MRS. HIPPY
XV. ‘TO-NIGHT THOU SHALT BE WITH ME IN PARADISE’
XVI. THE SEARCH FOR THE HOUSE
XVII. THE MARRIAGE OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
XVIII. CASTRA PARVULORUM
About the Author
Introduction
“Have you ever heard of Charles Williams?”
The question came up during dinner on a crisp, fall night in Columbus, Ohio. For the first part of the meal, my editor and I discussed plans for the publication of my upcoming weird fiction novel. I was feeling like a seasoned professional. But when she hit me with the question about Williams, I lost my authorial cool, became a fanboy, and blurted out, “He’s one of my favorite writers. I’ve reread his novels every year.”
All of us have “heroes” who have influenced us and our work. We often dream about meeting these people or participating in their lives in some way. Williams is my literary master and teacher. His novels opened up my imagination in ways that I’m still discovering as my writing career grows. I never dreamed I might be introducing one of his works to a new generation.
And it is not an easy task. What can I add to T. S. Eliot calling Williams a master storyteller who could illumine the human heart and open the doors to the unseen world? What could I say about a man Time magazine and the New York Times praised as one of the most gifted writers England produced in the twentieth century?
The answers, I realized, lay in the very question my editor posed to me: “Have you ever heard of Charles Williams”? How can the recipient of such high praise have become so obscure that it is often difficult to find his books in stores? Even more important, why should anyone read him now?
Williams’s obscurity is perplexing considering he was a vital part (some people say the heart) of the legendary Inklings, a gathering of writers that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Every week they met at an Oxford pub (usually the Eagle and Child) to discuss their literary work. The effect of this small group on generations of writers is remarkable.
It’s easy to say that Williams probably got buried in the subsequent years by the exploding popularity of Lewis and Tolkien. However, this explanation gives us only a partial reason why Williams fell into popular obscurity while becoming a symbol of literary hipsterism among highly educated Christians.
The only answer I can give is to tell my own story of how I discovered Charles Williams. I was in college when I finished reading C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, one of his most underappreciated works. The last in the series, That Hideous Strength, is a weird story full of scientific magicians, strange angelic beings, and even Merlin (yes, Merlin), who makes an appearance at the climax of the story.
This book grabbed me in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I wanted more. As I talked to a friend one day about my search for weird fiction similar to That Hideous Strength, he laughed and said, “You realize that book is Lewis imitating Charles Williams, don’t you?”
When I confessed my ignorance of the author, he smiled. I’m sure my friend meant to echo Eliot, who said of Williams’s books, “There is nothing else that is like them or could take their place.”
My friend’s recommendation drove me to our campus library, where I checked out the book you’re about to read, War in Heaven. The opening paragraph—a perfect example of how to hook a reader in the very first scene—grabbed me and I read the book in two days.
Williams begins War in Heaven by telling us, “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no one in the room but the corpse.” We, the readers, think we are getting drawn into an ordinary murder mystery set in a London publishing company. Instead, Williams leads us into a story about the cosmic battle between good and evil and the struggle over the Holy Grail, the supposed cup that Christ used at the Last Supper. He uses this story to shine a light, as all great writers do, on the hidden depths and motivations of the human soul.
The evil in War in Heaven is not the kingdom-building Sauron of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings nor the control-obsessed Lord Voldemort of Harry Potter fame. Instead, we see an evil that wants the utter negation of all things. It wants to destroy, not to build. Williams shows us his view of evil through the characters of Gregory Persimmons, the owner of the publishing company; Sir Giles, a warped noble who writes about the location of the Holy Grail in his soon-to-be-published book; and a pair of mysterious dark magicians (referred to as the Greek and Manasseh) who seek to “negate” the Grail from the world. In doing so, they are following their Dark Master, who desires that, in the blunt words of Manasseh, “all destruction is the destroying of himself.”
In other words, evil isn’t the opposite of good, as many suppose. Rather, it’s a parasite that only seeks to negate the good.
Accordi
ng to Williams, only good and beauty can actually create. He gives us the character of the Archdeacon, who seems, at first, like an unlikely hero. When we first meet the good priest, he is rambling about a book that he wrote about the United Nations. The desire to have this book published leads him to our mysterious publishing house, and he is shown a manuscript passage about the Holy Grail.
The Archdeacon suspects that its location is in his own parish and returns home to find it in an obscure cabinet at the church. He realizes that the beauty of divine love and the deep power of the Grail come only through sacrifice. Goodness doesn’t try to possess or control people. It doesn’t seek to destroy all things. Real goodness, grounded in love, seeks out growth and freedom. If we want to be good, Williams believes, we must not grasp. The more we grasp, the more we try to possess. The more we possess, the more we destroy. True freedom comes when we hold all things with an open hand. In the story, the Archdeacon realizes this ideal applies to all of life, even if it means sacrificing the Grail itself to the enemy.
As the priest begins to grasp this understanding of good, a ragtag team of people join his side. He fights not to protect the Grail, but to defend the souls of the people around him. This desire brings the mysterious real protector of the Grail to him in an unforgettable climax. It is a fantastic story, with elements that would appeal to any reader of what Eliot called supernatural thrillers.
So why did Williams fade into obscurity? It’s my belief that his time had not yet come. His time, the modern era, usually scoffed at explorations of the supernatural. Now, in a postmodern world, interest in the supernatural and the paranormal are at an all-time high. Pop culture can’t seem to get enough of anything that hints at the unseen world around us.
No one wrote about these worlds like Charles Williams. His work deserves to be discussed alongside the best novels of Bradbury, Lovecraft, and King. His zeal to tell a story with deep spiritual meaning puts him at the table with his famous friends, Lewis and Tolkien. Further, he ought to be read by all who love a good story that will keep them reading well into the night.
When you finish War in Heaven, go deeper into Williams’s world of scientific magicians, animals from other dimensions, and mystical objects that open doors to other realms. Let his stories guide you into the seen and the unseen worlds. Allow his work to walk you through some of the deep questions that plague humans in the middle of the night.
Above all, find a quiet pub, get a beer, and sit by the fire. As Eliot said about Williams’s novels, they can be read by either the intellectual or the casual reader looking for a good supernatural thriller. Here’s hoping Open Road’s ebook edition leads a massive audience to discover a master storyteller.
Jonathan Ryan
All Hallows’ Eve, 2014
Notre Dame, Indiana
Chapter One
THE PRELUDE
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
A few moments later there was. Lionel Rackstraw, strolling back from lunch, heard in the corridor the sound of the bell in his room, and, entering at a run, took up the receiver. He remarked, as he did so, the boots and trousered legs sticking out from the large knee-hole table at which he worked, but the telephone had established the first claim on his attention.
“Yes,” he said, “yes.… No, not before the 17th.… No, who cares what he wants?… No, who wants to know?… Oh, Mr. Persimmons. Oh, tell him the 17th.… Yes.… Yes, I’ll send a set down.”
He put the receiver down and looked back at the boots. It occurred to him that someone was probably doing something to the telephone; people did, he knew, at various times drift in on him for such purposes. But they usually looked round or said something; and this fellow must have heard him talking. He bent down towards the boots.
“Shall you be long?” he said into the space between the legs and the central top drawer; and then, as there was no answer, he walked away, dropped hat and gloves and book on to their shelf, strolled back to his desk, picked up some papers and read them, put them back, and, peering again into the dark hole, said more impatiently, “Shall you be long?”
No voice replied; not even when, touching the extended foot with his own, he repeated the question. Rather reluctantly he went round to the other side of the table, which was still darker, and, trying to make out the head of the intruder, said almost loudly: “Hallo! hallo! What’s the idea?” Then, as nothing happened, he stood up and went on to himself: “Damn it all, is he dead?” and thought at once that he might be.
That dead bodies did not usually lie round in one of the rooms of a publisher’s offices in London about half-past two in the afternoon was a certainty that formed now an enormous and cynical background to the fantastic possibility. He half looked at the door which he had closed behind him, and then attempted the same sort of interior recovery with which he had often thrown off the knowledge that at any moment during his absence his wife might be involved in some street accident, some skidding bus or swerving lorry. These things happened—a small and unpleasant, if invisible, deity who lived in a corner of his top shelves had reminded him—these things happened, and even now perhaps.… People had been crushed against their own front doors; there had been a doctor in Gower Street. Of course, it was all untrue. But this time, as he moved to touch the protruding feet, he wondered if it were.
The foot he touched apparently conveyed no information to the stranger’s mind, and Lionel gave up the attempt. He went out and crossed the corridor to another office, whose occupant, spread over a table, was marking sentences in newspaper cuttings.
“Mornington,” Lionel said, “there’s a man in my room under the table, and I can’t get him to take any notice. Will you come across? He looks,” he added in a rush of realism, “for all the world as if he was dead.”
“How fortunate!” Mornington said, gathering himself off the table. “If he were alive and had got under your table and wouldn’t take any notice I should be afraid you’d annoyed him somehow. I think that’s rather a pleasant notion,” he went on as they crossed the corridor, “a sort of modern King’s Threshold—get under the table of the man who’s insulted you and simply sulk there. Not, I think, starve—that’s for more romantic ages than ours—but take a case filled with sandwiches and a thermos.… What’s the plural of thermos?…” He stared at the feet, and then, going up to the desk, went down on one knee and put a hand over the disappearing leg. Then he looked up at Lionel.
“Something wrong,” he said sharply. “Go and ask Dalling to come here.” He dropped to both knees and peered under the table.
Lionel ran down the corridor in the other direction, and returned in a few minutes with a short man of about forty-five, whose face showed more curiosity than anxiety. Mornington was already making efforts to get the body from under the table.
“He must be dead,” he said abruptly to the others as they came in. “What an incredible business! Go round the other side, Dalling; the buttons have caught in the table or something; see if you can get them loose.”
“Hadn’t we better leave it for the police?” Dalling asked. “I thought you weren’t supposed to move bodies.”
“How the devil do I know whether it is a body?” Mornington asked. “Not but what you may be right.” He made investigations between the trouser-leg and the boot, and then stood up rather suddenly. “It’s a body right enough,” he said. “Is Persimmons in?”
“No,” said Dalling; “he won’t be back till four.”
“Well, we shall have to get busy ourselves, then. Will you get on to the police-station? And, Rackstraw, you’d better drift about in the corridor and stop people coming in, or Plumpton will be earning half a guinea by telling the Evening News.”
Plumpton, however, had no opportunity of learning what was concealed behind the door against which Lionel for the next quarter of an hour or so leant, his eyes fixed on a long letter which he had caught up from his desk as a pretext for silenc
e if anyone passed him. Dalling went downstairs and out to the front door, a complicated glass arrangement which reflected every part of itself so many times that many arrivals were necessary before visitors could discover which panels swung back to the retail sales-room, which to a waiting-room for authors and others desiring interviews with the remoter staff, and which to a corridor leading direct to the stairs. It was here that he welcomed the police and the doctor, who arrived simultaneously, and going up the stairs to the first floor he explained the situation.
At the top of these stairs was a broad and deep landing, from which another flight ran backwards on the left-hand to the second floor. Opposite the stairs, across the landing, was the private room of Mr. Stephen Persimmons, the head of the business since his father’s retirement some seven years before. On either side the landing narrowed to a corridor which ran for some distance left and right and gave access to various rooms occupied by Rackstraw, Mornington, Dalling, and others. On the right this corridor ended in a door which gave entrance to Plumpton’s room. On the left the other section, in which Lionel’s room was the last on the right hand, led to a staircase to the basement. On its way, however, this staircase passed and issued on a side door through which the visitor came out into a short, covered court, having a blank wall opposite, which connected the streets at the front and the back of the building. It would therefore have been easy for anyone to obtain access to Lionel’s room in order, as the inspector in charge remarked pleasantly to Mornington, “to be strangled.”
For the dead man had, as was evident when the police got the body clear, been murdered so. Lionel, in obedience to the official request to see if he could recognize the corpse, took one glance at the purple face and starting eyes, and with a choked negative retreated. Mornington, with a more contemplative, and Dalling with a more curious, interest, both in turn considered and denied any knowledge of the stranger. He was a little man, in the usual not very fresh clothes of the lower middle class; his bowler hat had been crushed in under the desk; his pockets contained nothing but a cheap watch, a few coppers, and some silver—papers he appeared to have none. Around his neck was a piece of stout cord, deeply embedded in the flesh.
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