by jo » March 25th, 2006, 4:50 pm
I finished it .. it was shorter than I expected :). I normally don't read unfinished books cos i hate not knowing what the author had in mind for something. That's the case here :(.
Generally though I enjoyed it. I found it creepy and I understand now why so many people refer to it as 'disturbing'.. there was an element of that about it. The combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the normal and the abnormal, was strangely unnerving in places. There were some genuinely unsettling scenes, for instance the one in which the reader first sees what the Stingingman does to his victims.
I didn't find this book especially 'un-Lewislike though.' I am not a Lewis scholar so I can't give academic reasons why it struck me as being 'like' his work, but it did. The style, sense of humour and odd turn of phrase all struck me as very similar. I do not think, either, that the book was anymore disturbing than THS was in parts. Incidentally, who was the homosexual character? One argument I always heard against it being written by Lewis was that Lewis would not write a homosexual character into his books. That seemed absurd to me anyway as Fairy was obviously a lesbian, but there was no overt homosexuality in TDT. Knellie, I suppose, was tacitly implied to have been a homosexual but it was hardly explicit.
Has anyone read 'From a Buick 8' by Stephen King? That is what I was immediately put in mind of by this excerpt. I wouldn't, in fact, be surprised if King hadn't read it (he wrote a series of books called 'The Dark Tower' himself, after all) and have decided to run with the idea. Both books involve a window into another time or 'dimension' in which some things are familiar and some grotesque and unsettling .. although in Lewis's work, unlike in King's, the world was reached deliberately and by the contrivance of men.
Some more thoughts: Ransom has changed from what he was in That Hideous Strength, and I neither like that or 'approve' of it. I PRESUME that the book was supposed to follow on from the Trilogy (or could it have been intended to be inserted somewhere in the middle?) so I don't understand at all why Ransom has gone from a sort of semi divine status in THS back to a rather ordinary college professor who, it is hinted, might have had some extraordinary experiences in the past. It seems to me that the book would have been much better employed had it come between OOTP and Perelandra. As it is, I can't understand why Lewis would have elevated the character only to lower him again.
I got rather lost in the descriptions of time that the character S - I can't remember his name and I've left the book downstairs :) - encountered in Othertime. I wonder if anyone with any knowledge of physics would like to comment on their accuracy? I doubt that Lewis knew much about physics and I wonder whether he was wise to attempt such a thing.
I'd love to know where he was going with this story. Hell, even if it was a forgery - and I am inclined to think it probably wasn't - I'd love to know where HOOPER had intended to go with it, if, indeed, he had attempted to go anywhere at all. Any thoughts? Why do you suppose it was abandoned? I've heard it described as badly written but I did not find it so.. a bit clumsy in the first chapter or two perhaps but it soon picked up the pace and became very readable.
"I saw it begin,” said the Lord Digory. “I did not think I would live to see it die"