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space-travel tale, "Forms of Things Unknown", concerns a mysterious menace on the moon; Lewis apparently left it unpublished because he thought readers would be too ignorant of Greek mythology to understand it.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.