jo wrote:I found BOTH Jane and Mark to be surprisingly colourless characters...
Have you read Screwtape Proposes a Toast by chance? If not try to find it. It is very connected to THS in this respect. I think Mark and Jane were meant to be characters of exactly the type that Screwtape in his speech lauds Hell's effort at creating in abundance in the 20th century -- "Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that is was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible...Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them." One of the prime themes of the book is the redeeming of Mark and Jane from that colourless decline into bland nothingness.
(Of course the whole Screwtape speech needs to be read in order to get the full effect, but the quotes above give some of the flavour of it.)
--Stanley
