200 Books

I had never read the Lewis story fragment called The Dark Tower. It was supposedly intended to be a companion novel to the Space Trilogy and features Lewis as the narrator and Ransom as a player. I know there is some suspicion afloat in Lewisonian circles that Walter Hooper tried to pass off a bit of his own writing in this guise. While I’m not particularly conspiracy minded, I’m inclined to believe that there is some monkey business going on. The Dark Tower has pretty much zero resonance in my mind as a Lewis piece. The images are weird but not mythic, the overtones seem to be deliberately sexual in a Freudian (not a feature of Lewis’s writing!) and the narrative is very clunky with none of his usual subtle suggestion and gentle foreshadowing. It may well be Lewis, it may not have any mystery about it, but if it is his, it was one of his worst productions and I’m glad he didn’t finish it. Of course all of his books may have started out this rough and only became their gorgeous, balanced, ineffable selves after much rewriting and editing but I have my doubts because the entire vision of The Dark Tower is so contrived and so shabby.

I had previously read all the other stories in the collection and the novel I wish he had finished was After Ten Years. It deals with Menelaus and Helen after the fall of Troy. The opening scenes are rich with suggestion, allusion and insight and if I’m not too distracted by Paradise, I intend to talk to him about it in Heaven.

Oh, and the short story “Ministering Angels” is a scream. It is difficult to write spare, serious prose and still be laugh-out-loud hilarious, but Lewis managed it in this one.

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