Review: War in Heaven: A Novel

War in Heaven: A Novel by Charles Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Williams' first novel, and it shows.

The characters and plot seem to be there not to be the best version of themselves or to form a well-structured novel, but to carry the theology/cosmology, which they sometimes only do a mediocre job of. The archdeacon is one of Williams' saintly characters (like Sybil in The Greater Trumps ) who is so surrendered to God that he has no other desire, and it's difficult to write a novel (in the Western tradition, at least) where one of the central characters isn't driven by desire for something that their flaws hinder them from getting. He actually doesn't care that much who has the Graal (as the Holy Grail is always spelled), and since the entire plot is driven by it as a McGuffin, this is a bit of a problem.

The duke has clear desires, but is ineffectual in convincing others to go along with him in pursuing them; the publisher's clerk never really emerges as a fully realized character with any kind of agenda of his own, and I kept confusing him with his colleague. His colleague is paralyzed by his own psychological issues, and ineffectual in the face of the villain's attacks on his wife (who is mostly so conventional as to be without personality) and four-year-old son. Nobody seems to have more than the most basic concern about the son's wellbeing - not his parents, who consider him a nuisance; not the Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum (the Camp of the Children, so called because Caesar had supposedly handed captured British children back to their parents there, a bit of resonance that goes underutilized), who doesn't express any alarm when he hears that the villain, who he knows to be a villain, is spending so much time with the boy. (The villain's agenda is to abduct the child and raise him as a powerful occultist, for no obvious reason except, presumably, to wind up the novel's tension, but since nobody on the good side knows about this or seems to be all that attached to young Adrian, the threat is a lot weaker emotionally than it might be.)

The villain is literally a satanist, of the black-mass-and-seeking-for-power variety (not the real-life Church of Satan, which I don't think existed when this was written). His confederates are a Greek, who has reached such a pinnacle of occult involvement that he is indifferent to most outcomes, and a Jew, who only wants to destroy everything. I had the uncomfortable sense that their non-Englishness was definitely intended to be part of what made them sinister. The fact that the black-hearted, murderous villain is also a publisher raises questions about how much Williams enjoyed his job working for a publisher, though perhaps I'm reading too much in, and he was just writing what he knew.

This jumble might still have worked, because Williams is an excellent prose writer, but, faced with characters who are either unmotivated or ineffectual, he resorts to a deus ex machina (or, at least, an angelus ex machina) to resolve such plot as he has managed to create. The prose then goes into a mode that I think of as High Williams, becoming heavily poetic, theological, and other-worldly, a vision of spiritual realities filtered through human perception. Lewis does a decent job of it in his Space Trilogy, and other Williams books do it better than this early work.

Overall, then, this one shows more potential than it achieves. Sometimes, as writers, we have to do a thing badly in order to learn to do it well, and this seems to be that book for Williams. It's not without its charm and not without its strengths, but there are multiple ways in which it could have been better.

View all my reviews