Into the Wardrobe

Maybe having seen it as unfinished one only gets a partial picture of the story itself and therefore it's easier to spot light and shade within that particular piece of work, well in this case shade!

Although That Hideous Strength is fairly dark, I've always thought the whole idea of the "Head of the Institute" was a hysterically funny pun at the same time that it was very sinister. "You need to have an interview with the Head of the Institute". Yes, indeed. There's other clever things like that scattered through THS as well - even Wither's Pentagonian meanderings are so maddeningly meaningless, that they're funny at the same time that Lewis is painting a personality type we've probably all met who is not funny at all.


I said earlier in this particular forum that one evidence that The Dark Tower might be a real Lewis MS, albeit dropped by him, is its similarity to the novels of his friend Charles Williams. IMO, one contrary evidence - that TDT is not a real Lewis MS - is the lack of humor. Lewis seemed to slip ironies and funny little anachronisms and odd characters as seasoning in most of his stories, but TDT seemed, to me, unrelentingly an academic sub-culture and very, very serious, not much fun.

My problem with it is that, just as I started to find it riveting it came to it's unfinished end! :/

As a matter of interest, this is the ‘Dark Tower’ being built—Cambridge University Library, completed in the mid 1930s!



This is what it looks like completed.



:shocked:

I don’t know, it is at least brick and therefore ‘warmer’ than London University’s Senate House—which I remember well as a student—and which was used as the Ministry of Truth building in a version of 1984, I believe.