Lilith, a romance by George MacDonaldMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A good many years ago now - I forget exactly how many - I went through a period of reading the books that C.S. Lewis mentioned as influences on his writing. It took me to strange and wonderful places, this being one of them. This review is from my 2024 reread.
There's a strong line of fantastic fiction that runs through the canon of English literature from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo , The Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, The Pilgrim's Progress , Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained , Gulliver’s Travels , William Blake, William Morris, our present author George Macdonald, Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, E. R. Eddison, A Voyage to Arcturus , and on to the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others) and beyond; I count Susan Cooper as being in the tradition, and I'm sure there are others I'm not aware of. Many, though certainly not all, of these authors and works include a good deal of Christian theology and/or allegory in their fantastic fiction, and George MacDonald is definitely one. He was a clergyman, unorthodox but devout, and this and several of his other works feature both Christian and fantastic elements side by side and entangled with one another. He also wrote realistic fiction, which is less well known.
It's a portal fantasy, with a mirror (often associated with Lilith, who would possess women by entering them through mirrors) as the door, or one of the doors; there's also a cupboard in a library, disguised with fake books, and a fountain. The British portal fantasy tradition, in my opinion at least, probably originates from Celtic legends of trips into the Otherworld through ancient burial mounds or "fairy forts," but Macdonald has a key role in bringing it into the English-language fantastical tradition, especially through his influence on C.S. Lewis, who regarded him as his "Master". He wasn't the first to use a mirror as a portal, though; Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was published more than two decades earlier. MacDonald was a mentor to Carroll, and encouraged him to publish Alice in Wonderland, which MacDonald's children enjoyed.
Nearly 40 years before Lilith, MacDonald had published Phantastes, which I consider in part a dry-run for Lilith; it also features a young man pulled into a dream-like world and a quest involving a woman. It took inspiration from the German author Novalis, just as the character of Lilith, mentioned in Goethe's Faust, was imported via Goethe into English romanticism and the school of the Pre-Raphaelites; German and Scandinavian folklore is a strong influence on the British fantastical tradition too.
Lilith, in Jewish and Mesopotamian legend, was the first wife of Adam, and is regarded as a demon. She is, among other things, a symbol of a particular kind of feared femininity: seductive, lacking in submission, hating children, obsessed with her appearance. Lewis mentions her as an ancestor of Jadis, the White Witch, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . In MacDonald's version, she is offered a chance at redemption. MacDonald's main unorthodox belief, which hindered his career as a minister, was that everyone could be redeemed by a universally loving God.
Before we even meet Lilith, though, we meet a series of other allegorical and instructive characters in a series of weird landscapes which the narrator, Mr Vane, travels through. There's Mr Raven, the sexton (sometimes a talking bird, sometimes a man dressed in black), who tells him about how the people under his care are dying so that they may live, and sleeping so that they may wake. There are the Lovers: happy, generous, wise, tiny children, a kind of noble savage, who, if they mature too much and give way to greed, become dull and ill-tempered giants who forget their origins and cease to even notice the existence of the remaining Lovers. Unfortunately, some of the younger children speak the overly cutesy baby-talk dialect that makes Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno such hard going, though at least there isn't much of it. There are the inhabitants of a run-down city where everyone is rich (or thinks they are) and strangers are despised; the inhabitants also think they are free, even though they live in terror of their ruler Lilith, who destroys their children if she can. On the same page we're told that they do no work apart from digging up gems out of their cellars, but buy everything they need from other cities, and also that they've inherited their wealth and never spend it. A lot of things in this book are supposed to not make sense, but there are some things that don't make sense that I suspect the author didn't intend to not make sense, as well. There are two female leopards which are sometimes shapeshifted women and sometimes have an existence independent of those women.
Mr Vane, the narrator, is given to making bad decisions through not listening to his wise guides. As Mr Raven warns him, though, doing so means that he brings about evil which turns out for good, and he does eventually manage to do something positive, if not much. He's at a very low stage of spiritual development and has a lot of work to do, which probably makes him exactly the right audience proxy for most of us.
The whole book is visionary, and frequently alludes to both the Bible and Dante, as well as medieval legend. The influence on Lewis's The Last Battle is particularly marked (there's even a version of the "further up and further in" phrase), though it also reminds me of some passages in Lewis's Space Trilogy and of pretty much all of Charles Williams. Like Williams' best work, it gripped my attention and occasionally moved me. The depth in it is in the ideas, rather than in the characters (who are mostly allegories or symbols of one kind or another) or the plot (which is episodic, and contends with a protagonist who won't do as he's told). It's very much a working out, in mystical and symbolic form, of the author's beliefs, so it will work less for you the less you share those beliefs, though I think it does stand on its own merits to a degree; the description is vivid, and the conflicts are powerfully conveyed.
It's a great enough work that I'm leaving it at my original rating of five stars, despite some minor caveats. There's more in it than I saw, for certain.
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