Shared Priorities

Connoisseurs of British peacekeeping talent will rejoice that a further nineteen potential economic migrants have been permanently prevented from claiming asylum, thanks to the latest benefits to accrue from the recent crusade for civilisation. A suicide attack inside an educational institute in Kabul drew forthright moral condemnation from the religious fundamentalists left in charge when Britain and her allies staunchly fled the scene with their glorious tails between their legs. Of course, the British government now has more pressing concerns; but patriots will doubtless show sufficient respect for fair play to commend the attackers for leaving animal shelters alone and concentrating their wrath upon the threat of refugees.

No Longer A Common Complaint

Mere weeks after the demise at ninety-six of Her late Madge Gawblesser, some rather expensive doctors have concluded astutely that she died of old age. If the inevitable mental fatigue and gastric upset from meeting Boris Johnson and Liz Truss within the space of a few hours had any aggravating effect, such factors have been tactfully omitted from the death certificate, doubtless in the nation's best interests. In fact, old age is a fairly frequent cause of death among people aged eighty or more, while among the nineties and centuries it is virtually an epidemic. Fortunately, as life expectancy continues to fall thanks to worsening healthcare, an increasingly hostile climate and ever larger percentages of raw sewage in the national diet, the disease seems likely to become steadily less prevalent, at least among the expendable classes.

Travelling Light

While roads melt, farms dry up and blow away, and the little people receive patronising little lectures on fighting the climate crisis by putting a pond in the back garden, Britain's airlines have been doing their bit by ensuring that only a few thousand among their annual millions of carbon-spewing passenger flights take place without any passengers. Five thousand empty flights, half within the UK, have occurred in the past three years; and a further thirty-five thousand commercial flights occurred with less than a tenth of the places filled, and fifty thousand with less than half. The practice of transporting non-existent passengers, even in numbers barely large enough to elect a British prime minister, is environmentally damaging to such an extent that even the Government has described it as such; and plans are allegedly in hand, if nobody has yet torn them up, to listen to excuses more efficiently and to monitor the process, though inevitably not to curtail it.

Good Sports

Plucky little Qatar, whose values are so British that over eighty-five per cent of the population is foreign, has ordered many of its citizens to report for mandatory military service in order to resolve the labour shortage caused by the approaching quadrennial balls-boots-and-blah-blah. Diplomats serving overseas have been yanked back to the homeland for compulsory training in positive body language, detection of contraband, and marching up and down the square. Like certain other nations one could mention, Qatar is noted for its deference to a royal family and its no-nonsense attitude towards human rights and migrant workers; but it remains as yet unclear whether Britain's hosting of the Eurovision camp-fest will result in a similar drive for national service.

From Mourning to Mooning

World figures and James Cleverly are to attend the state funeral for the deeply unpleasant Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated some little time before the death of Elizabeth II. Nevertheless, the decision to accord Abe the honour of a state funeral has provoked considerable annoyance among the Japanese, especially in light of recent revelations about his party's ties with the Moonies. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party - a misnomer almost as delightful as the surname of Britain's Minister for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets - was co-founded by Abe's grandfather, the war criminal and subsequent US sock-puppet Nobusuké Kishi, who encouraged the Moonies' presence in the land of the rising sun on the all-American grounds that religious lunacy is a healthier pastime for the masses than trade unionism. Abe appears to have maintained at least a sentimental connection, and other party members have done rather more. The present prime minister of Japan has made a token call for such disreputable associations to cease, but it remains as yet unclear whether his reputation will recover; especially as few Japanese voters are likely to be aware that one can no more brainwash Britain's current foreign secretary than one can tailgate a Manx cat.

Debit and Credit

or, The Ledger

Her Ministers were ill behaved;
She sat and smiled and squeaked and waved.
As poor and migrants were reviled,
She squeaked and sat and waved and smiled.
When poverty arose and peaked,
She smiled and waved and sat and squeaked.
Say what you will, but give her that:
She waved and squeaked and smiled and sat,
But when her bills would come around
She stood, spoke up, and fought, and frowned.

Queenie Blackstone

Fiscally Emotive

Unsuccessful gamblers employ all sorts of strategems to gain more funding for their habit, from abject begging through pie-in-the-sky promises to threats, outright robbery and occasional violence. Some corporate gamblers, whose ability to mend roofs while the sun shines seems about equal to the current national average, have hit upon a new way of plumping up the stake: the owners of the Morrisons supermarket chain have "requested" their own workers to invest in the company. The blame, as usual, rests with "developments in the geopolitical environment" and "customer sentiment," neither of which any self-respecting entrepreneur would dream of guarding against. Nevertheless, such is the ingratitude of the wage-serf class that certain pluckless and pessimistic elements are unable to see the charm in gambling their increasingly shrivelled wherewithal on the assurance of people so competent that they can't persuade real investors to oblige.

Vessels of Mystery

The Christian state of Alabama has been forced to abort another execution after the justice dispensation team failed to find a vein in time. This is the second time in three months that the state's pious pastime has suffered an unfortunate hitch: in July, the Christian state of Alabama took three presumably improving hours to complete a lethal injection. The latest beneficiary claimed he had requested execution by gas, on the grounds of a phobia of needles and in accordance with his legal rights; but the Christian state of Alabama was in too much of a hurry to cater to his whims. A judge found it likely that the request had been duly made and issued a delaying order, which was overruled by the nation's Christian supreme court. Given the obvious trend of the Divine Will on the matter, the reason why no viable pathway to the prisoner's veins was clearly marked out by the holy light of righteousness remains as yet unclear.

A Slightly Smaller Send-off

Love is patient, love is kind; love is not puffed up, and if love happens to be gay it ought to rejoice in knowing its place. In accordance with the conclusion of the Lambeth blah-blah a few weeks ago, the Church of England has forbidden a married gay priest to officiate at her godfather's funeral. The godfather was an old friend of the late Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, and had recently demonstrated his own moral worth by not knowing who Piers Morgan was on live television. His wife accused the Church of homophobia: an obvious injustice to an institution which has strained so long and hard to face both ways at once; while the fact that his god-daughter happens to be Tutu's own daughter gives the Church's ruling an added zest which will doubtless prove pleasing to the nose of the Almighty.

Out of the Woods

Fulfillment of the National Johnson's echo of the Trumpster's long-ago pledge to plant seventeen trillion trees, or whatever, has been somewhat imperilled by the recent drought. The Johnson régime burbled about planting seven thousand hectares of woodland a year by May 2024, which presumably would have been scaled down to something more realistic, such as a bit of prime-ministerial posturing beside an embarrassed sapling in April. According to a journalist's scan of Wikipedia, British trees are prey to a number of hazards, including the stirringly-named oak processionary moth; and gardeners are using more Mediterranean plants which may soon invigorate the national landscape with the unfussy bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. Fortunately, with the ligneous Liz Truss and her cabinet of woodentops in charge, the Government is unlikely to see any immediate need for more trees.

Self-Bleaching Whitewash

Returning briefly to the minor matter of those hundred and seventy thousand excess deaths among the non-royal classes, the independent inquiry into the public's experience will naturally be carried out by a private company nominated by the government whose conduct is under investigation. The company which eventually runs the inquiry will be selected from a list of twelve bidders whose bids have been invited by the Government, since the companies have in many cases demonstrated their competence by being paid by the government whose conduct is under investigation, during the period under investigation. Although this procedure has been denounced as an instance of those in power marking their own homework, the independence of the inquiry will in fact be rigorously safeguarded, as the government under investigation will urge its potential investigators to declare any conflict of interest; so the homework will actually have been marked, with all the efficiency and honesty we have come to associate with private corporations, before anyone in power even sees it.

Death, Where is thy Sting?

Amid a black and crawling mess
Of headlines in the mourning Press,
Our grief by Church and State endorsed
And by the truncheon well enforced,
Ten days we mourned that constancy
Which, by not dying, made us free.

Our duty done, with hush profound,
The leftovers plonked in the ground,
Look forward now to day more fair
With jewelled hat plonked on the heir,
Amid a crawling, crowing mess
Of headlines in rejoicing Press.

Fern Irreal

Inching Towards Liberty

Patriotic Britons who imagined that a Brexit benefit had finally been found in the return of the Imperial measurement system may be in for yet further disappointment, as a survey on the subject by the Department for Profiteering, Pollution and Panic has been denounced for, of all things, bias. Mensuration consumers were asked to state their preference between Imperial measurements only or a combination of Imperial measurements and the system invented by bloodthirsty Euro-wog anti-monarchists and subsequently forced upon plucky little Britain by the Strasbrussels dictatorship with the collaboration of the socialist Edward Heath. No option was given for sticking to metric units alone, and those traitors and backsliders who would have chosen it are advised to write to the Government so that their names and addresses can be noted.

Historical Straitjacket

Meanwhile, at the dark and devious heart of the vile Strasbrussels dictatorship, yet further mischief is brewing. Psychiatrists, those epitomes of élite metropolitan social-working wokeness, have decreed that Belgium has an actual history and, worse yet, that people might do themselves good by finding out about it. As might be expected, this process consists of economy-sabotaging free visits to cultural institutions, among which the only faint whiff of Britishness appears to be a sewer museum. There is no sign whatever that the beastly foreign opiates will include anything so healthy as the traditional British prescription for tincture of rah-rah and Churchill suppository.

Owning Glendower

The British Empire's oldest possession, whose status as a constituent country was so genocidally come by that it doesn't even have a symbol on the national flag, has reacted more or less grumpily to the investiture of its new national royal. The title Prince of Wales was first conferred by Edward I upon his son, the soon-to-be-disastrous Edward II, after a typically Christian colonial war featuring incendiary restructuring of peasant holiday homes and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Welsh tenants to make way for worthier ones. Now that the latest placeholder has formally undergone his Ruritanian transmogrification, certain mischievous elements are agitating for him to learn the Welsh language: a move with all the surreal Britishness of some woke National Johnson quoting Kipling in Hindustani.

Radical Measures

There still seems no end in sight for the discharge of fragrant revelations concerning denizens of the Trumpster swamp. John Kelly, a retired general who was promoted to chief of the White House staff after the Trumpster tweet-sacked his predecessor, apparently had such confidence in his employer that he sneaked out and bought a copy of a 2017 bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Besides being flawed by the lack of personal contact between the experts and their analysand, the book seemingly pays little or no attention to the role of the Trumpster's hydrophobic head-tribble, whose radioactive defecations exert such a salutary effect upon what pass for mental processes in the Tangerine Cranium. Nevertheless, Kelly managed to equip himself with concepts such as "inflated ego" and "pathological liar," which provided a useful guide to the head-tribble's more whimsical spurts and splatters. Given those levels of intellectual achievement for which his administration is justly revered, one of the more astounding allegations to emerge about the White House under the Trumpster régime must surely be the claim that at least one of the senior staff was capable of reading a book.

Markets Forced

In keeping with their usual attitude of gratuitous defiance towards the master race, the beastly Euro-wogs are plotting to impose a windfall tax upon the profits of energy companies, even in the very teeth of the National Johnsonette's pronunciamento that this is a Very Bad Thing. The worst idlers in the world have not even been informally ordered to cap their own consumption over the winter; by contrast, the Strasbrussels Politburo seeks to impose legally binding targets for reduction. As cowardly as it is brutish, the dictatorship has sought to avoid the term windfall tax because of political sensitivities, referring instead to a "solidarity contribution" from the plucky fossil-fuel Walesas to the ruthless Jaruzelskian maw of the average Euro-wog warmth consumer. Thanks to Global Britain's new-found independence, of course, the mainland's sovereign subjects will suffer no such oppression, and are at liberty to spend the whole winter coughing with mirth.

Dry Up and Carry On

Entrepreneurs of moisture provision continue concerned at the lack of water, which now seems unlikely to be mitigated until the next round of flooding; so the cartel has been in conference about how best to induce its captive market to compensate for the efficiency of private enterprise. Thanks to their plucky pragmatism and go-getting gumption, Britain's dampness distribution profiteers have been incentivised, enablified and indeed practically obligated to favour shareholder dividends and boardroom bonuses over Communistic fripperies like infrastructure. Figures released last month showed that the most efficient companies in this regard, as efficiency is reckoned these days, included Thames Water, Severn Trent Water and Yorkshire Water. Accordingly, few connoisseurs of Britishness will be surprised that the companies now considering how harshly to wag their greasy fingers at the little people include Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent Water and Thames Water.

Foreign Olives, Crooked Branch

There are times when the beastly Euro-wogs appear genuinely to have no conception of why the United Kingdom fought so heroically to free itself from the toils of Strasbrussels bureaucracy; as witness the latest proposals by the dictatorship's chief negotiator, which are focused almost entirely on reducing bureaucracy. Not only does the Euro-wog position fall considerably short of the unconditional surrender that is the birthright of Mr Churchill's master race; but its attitude of grubby pragmatism takes no account of the high and noble ideals which motivated the racists and tax-dodgers of the Farage Falange to launch their great crusade. Additionally, of course, the idea of checking goods when there is "reasonable suspicion" of nefarious activity implies that the Continent is fully in line with the mainland as to what constitutes reason. As yet it remains unclear, to say the least, whether the filthy Euro-wogs would tolerate checks on lorries whose drivers looked a bit republican.

From New Amsterdam to New Kigali

Enforcers from New York City's charmingly-named Department of Homeless Services have taken forthright British measures against the local swarming hordes. The unfortunate influx had reached New York via Texas as a beneficiary of the Republican campaign for the mid-term elections, which involves deporting immigrants from non-traitor states and foisting them on the liberal metropolitan élites. Like many a carefree lawman before them, the officers were indiscreet enough to allow the incident to be recorded on video, and one of them has been suspended from duty as a result. Whether the Government of Global Britain will be congratulating the city of New York, either upon the Britishness of its policing or upon its new and shining status as a Rwanda for states made great again, remains as yet unclear.

Heated Words

Readers of the present weblog, who are ipso facto connoisseurs of all that is rational, temperate and urbane, will be disturbed to discover that online communication these days is not universally characterised by moderation in language and civility of discourse. Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have found that aggressive online behaviour tends to increase by more than twenty per cent when temperatures rise to heat-wave levels, and by up to twelve per cent when they fall below freezing point. While it hardly seems surprising that people should become more hateful when forced to stay in with their families, the researchers' conclusions may also indicate yet another good reason why the more zealous purveyors of traditional patriotic values view our increasingly extreme climate conditions with such insouciant unconcern.

St Bartholomew's Denialism

One might think that an Irish politician would know better than to stab his nation's historical benefactors in the back; yet a formr taoiseach of the Irish Free State has not only taken sides in favour of the filthy Euro-wogs, but has sought to deny Northern Ireland its long-festered historical birthright as part of an international blame game. Bertie Ahern, of course, was among those enemies of the people who collaborated in imposing the Good Friday agreement, which has since done so much to sabotage British independence from the Strasbrussels dictatorship. Clearly intimidated by Britain's plucky entrepreneurship in forging new links with world powers such as Rwanda and Outer Mongolia, Ahern was tactless enough to imply that the British government has some sort of obligation to be respectful and reasonable, if you please, towards foreign interests, even when it has signed a treaty with them. "This isn't rocket science," proclaimed the Beast of Belfast, advocating a lazy reliance on technology and echoing that arrogant rationalism of faithless and backsliding persons which has resounded through the ages since the advent of Jesus Christ, Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage. From his obsessive concern with the mechanics of mere trade, one would almost think Ahern didn't even recognise a religious war when he saw one.

Elegy

Though few command our nation's love
So well as relics of the past,
There's one law you were not above:
The tax-man's come to call at last.

Roy L. Croke

A Hopeful Sign

Healthy levels of Britishness are apparent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, despite that nation's unfortunate colonial heritage from the imperfectly civilising influence of the wrong master race. A new footbridge in Kinshasa disintegrated under the weight of the dignity at its opening ceremony and fell into the stream it was meant to be spanning. While hardly so glamorous as the National Johnson's attempt to bridge the Irish Sea, the incident does clearly demonstrate a certain shared instinct for quality of material and care in design; although regrettably not for the elimination of uncouth elements among the spectators. Doubtless thanks to the dubious influence of Francophone culture, those watching the ceremony greeted the collapse with a distinct lack of deference.

Let Them Eat Meat

Although the vegetable content of Her Majesty's Government seems likely to remain more or less constant for the next couple of years, the same cannot be said for the worst idlers in the world. Native growers are suffering severely thanks in part to a brilliant scheme whereby seasonal workers are booted out of the country after six months, while the season lasts for ten or eleven. Despite the axiomatic advantages of racial purity in the work-place, this means that twice the number of workers have to be recruited and trained, with a complete change of staff across a single season, and no guarantee that the full crop will be harvested at the end. The energy crisis has exacerbated the problem because of the need to heat greenhouses, so that the great British salad is now being superseded by subsidy-tainted imports from the less temperate among the beastly Euro-wogs. As a result, many growers are selling their land for development into small factories which can produce nothing because of the labour shortage; warehouses where the nothing that is produced can be stored; and housing estates where few besides the nobody who produces and consumes the nothing can possibly afford to live.

Support Your Local Truss

Rah rah for our Dear Leader Truss!
How jolly for lucky old us,
For soon we shall see
Who gets by tax-free
And who gets thrown under the bus!

Rah rah for our Dear Leader Liz,
Who's quite the political whiz:
Against foes and shirkers
Like France and the workers,
She's already got down to biz!

Rah rah for our Dear Leader Truss,
Elected without fear or fuss
In poll fair and free
By zero point three
Of one whole percentile of us!

Rah rah for our Dear Leader Liz!
Such fine British filly she is,
With Union Jack
At sides, front and back
Of vacuous patriot phiz!

Rah rah for our Dear Leader Truss,
Who certainly will be a plus
Both local and global
While wielding her noble,
Refined culture-war blunderbuss!

Johnson Holder

Dam Busters

Just as Her Majesty's Government's one-size-fits-all solution to economic problems is to sack people, so its solution to ecological problems is to kill animals; the main point of contention being how many of Her Majesty's less deserving subjects fall into the second category rather than the first. Since the presence of beavers tends to enhance biodiversity and conserve water, the Government has declared open season after previously declaring the animals a native and therefore protected species. The National Farmers' Union which, being a union, the Government did not trouble to consult over the matter, raised concerns about control and demanded, of all things, a clear management plan, as if successful farming required anything more than graft, gumption and good British soil. Whether Her Majesty's Government intends allowing beavers to be hunted in a civilised British way, with hounds and horses and commercial export of their pelts along with all that cheese, remains as yet unclear.

Filthy Foreign Tricks

If there is one thing calculated to ignite the flames of righteous wrath in the heart of plucky little Britain, it's an olive branch in time of war. Far from offering the unconditional surrender that has been the nation's birthright since Mr Churchill saved the world, the beastly Euro-wogs persist in treating the master race as a friend, an ally and, if you please, an equal. The latest provocation, aimed largely at formalising the EU's structures for poking Russia with a sharp stick, arrogantly implies that Britain's security might be enhanced by working with, rather than against, the foul Strasbrussels foe. Even should the festival spirit surrounding the appointment of yet another prime minister lead us magnanimously to ignore that libel, surely Her Majesty's Government cannot leave unavenged the villainous imputation that one or more of the candidates for the Conservative Party leadership might have some idea where Prague is.

Flush With Freedom

Now that Britain's independence from the filthy Euro-wogs has liberated Her Majesty's Government to impose ever more rigorous rules for the protection of sewage-dumping moisture provision profiteers, it is of course necessary to take measures ensuring that mere evidence knows its place and falls into line with ministers' boasting about world-beating environmental standards and the supreme cleanliness of the master race. The last set of tests to be forced upon us by the Strasbrussels dictatorship gave a characteristically unpatriotic showing, and even a parliamentary committee was moved to mention the damage caused by plastic and agricultural pollution. Hence, in a nearly unprecedented instance of joined-up thinking, the Conservatives and their little orange accomplices have systematically de-funded the Environment Agency over the past decade: a policy which has conveniently coincided with river-water tests declining from a hundred thousand samples in 2012 to forty-one thousand in 2021. In keeping with the Government's faith in hard work and individual responsibility, systematic testing has increasingly been replaced with more informal schemes, such as letting plebs drink the water at market prices and seeing if any real people come down with polio.

The Dark Tower and Other Stories

Most of the half-dozen pieces in The Dark Tower and Other Stories were rescued after the death of C S Lewis by the editor, Walter Hooper, who obtained the manuscripts from the late author's bonfire-happy brother; and the sole previously published story, "Ministering Angels", might better have been consigned to the flames. A Christian academic's musty idea of an off-colour joke (complete with stage Scotsman), its premise is that the only women desperate enough to endure the hardships of space travel would be dried-up brainy types and shop-worn street-walkers, and that the only conceivable reason for sending women into space at all would be to keep the male astronauts from going mad with sexual frustration. Although the attempt at erotic relief does not turn out well, by the grace of God a Christian is available on Mars to ensure that the softer of the ladies gets her chance at the imitation of Magdalene. Almost as profound is "The Man Born Blind", in which the protagonist is cured of his affliction but gets into fatal trouble by focusing on the concept of light rather than on what he can see by it. Had time been allowed him, Lewis might one day have favoured us with an equally valuable tale of cleansed lepers who broke their necks tripping over their various anatomical restorations.

Another and more interesting space-travel tale, "Forms of Things Unknown", concerns a mysterious menace on the moon; Lewis apparently left it unpublished because he thought readers would be too ignorant of Greek mythology to understand it. In fact, the solution works all the better for not being spelled out, and the superb choice of a vital atmospheric detail at the end provides some compensation for the basic silliness of the premise. The unfinished "After Ten Years" is set around the fall of Troy, where Lewis is clearly much more comfortable than in either the future or the present. The opening scene finds Menelaus waiting nervously with his comrades inside the wooden horse, and the story depicts his attempt to come to terms with his confused emotions towards the faded Helen and his dawning suspicion that his more calculating elder brother has used him as a politico-economic pawn. It's an intriguing set-up nicely told, and it is unfortunate that Lewis never got beyond the first few chapters.

The narrator of "The Shoddy Lands", an Oxford don, is happy when a former pupil comes to visit, but miffed when the younger man has the temerity to arrive accompanied by his wife. Since she is too dim and shallow to appreciate interesting conversation, let alone participate, the two men are stuck with exchanging banalities until the narrator finds himself projected into a nightmare world of vague, unformed shapes and colours where any sign of life or definition is confined to a few seemingly arbitrary objects. As it turns out, "The Shoddy Lands" is another anti-female piece; indeed, with the possible exception of "After Ten Years" the volume as a whole might easily have pre-empted Patricia Highsmith's title Little Tales of Misogyny. Even so, "The Shoddy Lands" is nowhere near as crude as "Ministering Angels", especially as the narrator has the good grace to admit that others may have grounds for perceiving him in the same uncharitable light as he perceives the young lady; and the bland horror of his vision is neatly conveyed.

Best of all is the title piece, which comprises the opening seven chapters (the last incomplete) of a brilliantly conceived fantasy-horror novel. A scientist has constructed a "chronoscope" through which he discovers a ghastly parallel Oxford apparently under the dominion of a man with a scorpion-like sting protruding from his brow. Certain inhabitants of this other world also physically resemble characters in our own, and eventually Scudamour, the inventor's young assistant, becomes stranded in the Stingingman's world while his counterpart is projected into this one.

Among the characters is Ransom, the pious voyager from Lewis' trilogy of interplanetary sermons; but mercifully he has little to do except drop an occasional muscular-Christian apophthegm. The author's pious hatred of women who don't know their place displays itself in the brief characterisaton of Scudamour's "liberated" fiancée, at whose likely punishment the narrator hints by referring to her consistently in the past tense. These and other annoyances pale beside the depiction of the parallel world, at first confined to the Stingingman's chamber and subsequently broadened with ever less pleasant revelations as the transposed Scudamour starts exploring. Both the chronoscope and the means of travelling through it are about as scientifically thought out as the back of a magic wardrobe; on the other hand, the doubling of the characters means that a sceptic's objection to the possibility of time travel is cleverly defused. Eventually Scudamour makes a fascinating discovery about the science of the Stingingman's world: in keeping with the mirror-image relationship between that world and ours, it has remained primitive in its understanding of space while advancing far beyond our own science in its analysis of time.

At about this point the manuscript breaks off, to the understandable frustration of many; but I think there is a case for appreciating The Dark Tower just as it stands. Had Lewis completed the story, there is room for doubt as to whether he would have forsaken his proselytising vocation in favour of further exploring the parallel world's science of time. Instead, we would likely have seen all too much more of the irritating Ransom as his character was built up to save the situation; while Scudamour's obnoxiously modern girlfriend would doubtless have been conveniently sacrificed to the advantage of her more pliable counterpart. In an age more tolerant than Lewis of textual openness and indeterminacy (according to Hooper, Lewis couldn't even tolerate stream-of-consciousness), what we have of The Dark Tower might perhaps be read as the chronicle of an experiment abruptly broken off for reasons as secret as they are sinister; or, more abstractly, as an example of logical philosophy keeping silent whereof it cannot speak. Seen in this light (and Lewis would no doubt be gratifyingly ungrateful for the compliment), The Dark Tower outshines any number of well-wrought tendentious tales in defence of a nasty little god.