The Place of the Lion
In my August 31st review of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, I started by saying, “I’m going to be saying this a lot over the next week or two as I review a handful of singular works: this is fascinating simply because of what it is.”
Well, it took me closer to three weeks, but I’m finally getting to the last of the works I was thinking of when I wrote that sentence. (The others were All That Jazz, Death by Hanging, and Ted Lasso.) At the time, I had not yet finished the Charles Williams novel, The Place of the Lion, but I was already wondering how to provide any sense of the book in a review.
The Charles Williams oeuvre (what some call his Aspects of Power series) is already a hard-to-explain beast. In my last attempt, I wrote, “He is not an author who can be rushed through. Chesterton, for example, always remains buoyant enough to feel like a caper; Williams is writing for keeps and not pulling his punches.” I went on to explore his “singular take on spiritual power,” where “both God and Satan can wield power, but all of that power was created by God. If there is none present to worship the true God, Satan can hold sway, but if there is…things only turn out one way.”
While that last book (War in Heaven) is about the clash to wield such power, The Place of the Lion is more interested in the power itself. No one in Lion can wield the powers unleashed on England, but those powers can wield humans to horrifying effect. Likewise, none of those powers may be inherently Good or Evil, but when men interfere and throw off their balance, nothing short of annihilation is possible. (Even this annihilation is neither Divine nor Satanic but simply the erasure of the human world.)
But what is it that threatens to annihilate us, exactly? That is not given for fleshly minds to know—even after finishing the novel. What we can work out is that they are elemental essences which have been described by Plato as Forms and medieval Christians as the varying ranks of angels, and that they are building blocks of the natural world, each most fully represented in a specific creature, whose combination accounts for the infinite natures of individual men.
Yes, this is a “spiritual thriller” in which Creation is threatened by the concepts of which it is made. I would call it a “philosophical thriller” except that philosophy partakes of the Eagle, who is simply one of the so-called Angelicals (albeit a sort of binding presence among them). And so it goes: first we see the Lion, then the Snake, the Butterfly, the Horse, the Fire, and the Unicorn… And the only way these primal spiritual givens are turned back is in the surrender/possession/consumption of those humans whose natures balance most heavily toward one of the Angelicals and their attributes (strength, speed, subtlety, purity…). So, our hero emerges not of his own volition but through his willingness to be a clean vessel for that which he can only understand through such sacrifice.
Yep, it’s heavy stuff. But you needn’t understand it all. (Believe me: you can’t.) Just as the humans in the novel are swept up in the affairs of beings beyond themselves, the reader is propelled through encounters both inspiring and harrowing, all the while riding the inscrutable wave. And isn’t this how it might be for creatures to engage directly with even the ideas of God? All they/we can do is will to be used for the Good, follow their instincts, and hang on with the hope of finding their physical and mental forms intact by the end.
This is truly a strange and wonderful book.