Fully Illustrated.

"War in Heaven," much like the story of humanity, is all about the invasion of the supernatural--the divine and the demonic--into the mundane settings of everyday life.

Charles Williams has a keen sense of what Thoreau called the "lives of quiet desperation" that most people live. The characters in "War in Heaven" are plagued by everyday demons long before they encounter any exceptional ones...Williams takes these lives, and in a most un-quiet way...builds an entrancing story--one that shakes the reader to the core.

This is one of the scariest books I've read in a long while. The presence of evil is palpably felt in the antagonist of the book...a very creepy kind of evil...not your run of the mill stuff.

I don't want to spoil the plot (not to mention that the plot is a little hard to describe-owing to the fact that so much of what is import in this book has little to do with story line--so much of it is "in the moment.") So all I will say here is that the conclusion is well worth the "dry spots" one finds in the prose. It is one of the most beautifully written scenes I have ever come across in English Literature.

I recommend this book...but not to the faint of heart.

Just in case you overlooked the Amazon.com review (above), the opening paragraph of this book is well worth repeating as being one of the most outstanding introductions to a detective/mystery/horror novel you've ever come across:

"The telephone bell was rininging wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."

And that isn't just a fluke.
On the contrary, I'd suggest that this is probably one of Williams' most effective novels, in terms of plain story telling, especially in the case of the extremely powerful climax.

Like "Many Dimensions" (which is best read after "War in Heaven", because one character appears in both of those books, but doesn't survive the second), I've only given this book 4 stars because, as other reviewers have indicated, the British literary style of the 1930s is not to everyone's taste - and as far as his style of writing is concerned, Williams' work fits fairly comfortably into that general genre.

Having said that, I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys novels of the occult that invite the reader to go for something more than a mindless blood bath or demonfest.

Owen Barfield, also a member of the Inklings - the writing circle that included Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and Williams - is quoted on the back cover as saying:

"Charles Williams's firm conviction that the spiritual world is not simply a reality parallel with that of the material one, but is rather its source and its abiding infrastructure, is explicit in both the manner and matter of all he wrote."

Well, I haven't read *all* that Williams ever wrote, but I'd say it was most certainly true of this novel, where this interlacing and interaction is an integral part of the plot.

Indeed, far from being a mere examination of "the distinction between magic and religion" (back cover of the book), if you want to look for deeper meanings, the story line holds up well as an allegory of the state of all mankind - those who build, and those who destroy; those who believe, those who only *think* they believe, and those who believe they have no belief; and so on and so on.

As to the apparently antisemitic element in the story, two things are relevant:
Firstly, it was very common in the Britain of the 1930s for the middle and upper classes to regard Jews with a certain amount of disdain. But this was not 'antisemitism' as such. Rather there was a distrust of Levanters (Lebanese, Syrians, Jews/Palestinians and, to a lesser extent, Turks and Greeks) in general which persisted at least into the 1950s.
Secondly, in the passage referred to in a previous review:

"They build and we destroy....One day we shall destroy the world."

The speaker, a character called Manasseh, who is initially introduced into the story as simply "a Jew", is using the word "we" in relation to Satanists, not Jews.
So 'zenophobia', perhaps, but 'antisemitism', I think probably not.

Incidentally, if you haven't yet read the book, or you're planning to read it again, you might be interested in the significance of the name "John", as used in the novel:

1. "John", from the Hebrew "Jochanan" means "God is gracious"

2. The book "The Ascent of Mount Carmel", referred to in the story, on the face of it for no apparent reason, is a real book, a mystical work written by St. John of the Cross.

3. Prester John was, in legend, apparently immortal. In the 12th century he was referred to as the Christian Emperor of Asia. Marco Polo (13th-14th centuries) wrote about him as the lord of the Tartars. In the 14th century he had allegedly become the Emperor of Abyssinia and was still said to hold that office a century later.

After you finish reading this book get the MS help files on: WSH, vbscript, jscript, ADO, ADSI, other COM, and MS OLE/COM viewer and you'll be ready for scripting in the real world.

If you are not familiar yet with the concepts of OOP and looking at object models, you might need a primer found in another book before looking into WSH. It is built purely on objects that your code will refence and it can be a bear to take on unprepared.

It will be interesting to see how the .Net framework will integrate the objects in WSH- there is a significant chance that little in this book will be completely valid after Windows XP and Visual Studio .Net have become standard. Nevertheless, this book is an invaluable tool to the Windows programmer who wants to simplify life by automating as many tasks as possible.

Charles Williams is less well known than his fellow Inklings, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but like them he wrote a series of novels which combine elements of fantasy and Christian symbolism. The action of Descent into Hell takes place in Battle Hill, outside London, amidst the townspeople's staging of a new play by Peter Stanhope. The hill seems to reside at the crux of time, as characters from the past appear, and perhaps at a doorway to the beyond, as characters are alternately summoned heavenwards or descend into hell.

Pauline Anstruther, the heroine of the novel, lives in fear of meeting her own doppelganger, which has appeared to her throughout her life. But Stanhope, in an action central to the author's own theology, takes the burden of her fears upon himself--Williams called this The Doctrine of Substituted Love--and enables Pauline, at long last, to face her true self. Williams drew this idea from the biblical verse, "Ye shall bear one another's burdens :"

She said, still perplexed at a strange language : 'But how can I cease to be troubled ? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you ? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street ?'

'It is not,' he said, 'and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet--never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens ?'

'But that means---' she began, and stopped.

'I know,' Stanhope said. 'It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there's no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It's a fact of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn't sound very difficult.'

And so Stanhope does take the weight, with no surreptitious motive, in the most affecting scene in the novel. And Pauline, liberated, is able to accept truth.

On the other hand, Lawrence Wentworth, a local historian, finding his desire for Adela Hunt to be unrequited, falls in love instead with a spirit form of Adela, which seems to represent a kind of extreme self love on his part.

The shape of Lawrence Wentworth's desire had emerged from the power of his body. He had assented to that making, and again, outside the garden of satisfied dreams, he had assented to the company of the shape which could not be except by his will and was imperceptibly to possess his will. Image without incarnation, it was the delight of his incarnation for it was without any of the things that troubled him in the incarnation of the beloved. He could exercise upon it all arts but one; he could not ever discover by it or practise towards it freedom of love. A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannize--without purpose. The great gift which the simple idolatry os self gives is lack of further purpose; it is, the saints tell us, a somewhat similar thing that exists in those wholly possessed by their End; it is, human experience shows, the most exquisite delight in the interchanges of romantic love. But in all loves but one there are counterpointing times of purpose; in this only there are none.

As he isolates himself more and more with this insubstantial figure, and dreams of descending a silver rope into a dark pit, Wentworth begins the descent into Hell.

Because of the way that time and space and the supernatural all converge upon Battle Hill, the book can be somewhat confusing. But it is rich in atmosphere and unusual ideas and it is unlike any other book I've ever read. It is challenging, but ultimately rewarding if you stick with it.

GRADE : B

Williams was by instinct a poet with more than a bit of Tennison among his influences. His books are fairly easy reading, even though he alternates between rather vivid literary allusion and an idiosyncratic stream of narrative consciousness. In this book, he personifies salvation and damnation in characters who, despite all the odd phrasing and high flown prose, seem eminently human. The passage in which a character meets a final damnation is extremely effective, neither preachy nor filled with that sort of "tacky Mr. Scratch and his horrid fire" sensibility that some writing about the afterlife can have. This, along with the other six novels in the series (the series is linked thematically and stylistically rather than by plot), is certainly worth a read.

In our time, we see a lot of Christian fiction which seeks to tell stories of salvation and damnation through the use of fantasy characters (Peretti and his imitators come to mind). Yet, Williams' work, consciously literary, willing to risk heterodoxy to make a point, and infused with a victorian poetic sensibility, consistently takes the reader to places that the modern works fail to glimpse.

In short, Charles Williams is the real thing, and well worth a read.

A gentle, relaxing dip into Shakespeare. I'll give two stars.