October novel-reading

[garran]

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Comments

#2 (Part 1)

[garran.livejournal.com]

This got long, because apparently I wanted to complain.

I went into The Screwtape Letters expecting it to be an epistolary novel about a Christian devil, but it turns out to be a work of religious philosophy that uses a letter-writing devil as its conceit. Ultimately, I think I would have been better off either reading one of Lewis' explicitly nonfictional theological works, or one of his genuine novels; I didn't end up finding Screwtape quite satisfying on either front.

It wasn't satisfying as a novel, because the plot was so minimal, and the characters so vaguely drawn. The humans are archetypical cyphers, there to provoke or illustrate points about human nature; the other devils, individually, come off roughly like Power Rangers villains. Screwtape himself has personality, but unfortunately it feels like it's the author's, rather than his own; I mean, it does make a certain amount of character sense that Screwtape would be obsessed with God, and would go off on angry digressions about His motives and methods at the least opportunity, but in practise it usually felt to me like Lewis was just explaining his own opinions directly to the reader, with all of the dismayed adjectives swapped out for approving ones and vice versa.

This leads to one of the ways that it was problematic as a work of religious philosophy: his conceit is so conceited! That is, there are a lot of places where Screwtape chortles about how whatever state of affairs he has just finished explaining (usually to do with salvation) is perfectly obvious to him, since he is in a position to perceive spiritual truths directly, but fortunately is completely unclear to most humans, because they're so foolish and muddled and blinded by their mortality, and so they can be easily tricked away from it. But since what he's actually just explained is Lewis' own opinion, often on a matter of considerable religious controversy, this seems like a bit of a rhetorical cheat on Lewis' part; instead of saying, "I think this is so, and here are my reasons," he gets to say, "This is obviously so, and here is a voice from the afterworld, where there is no longer any doubt, to prove it, and call you an imbecile for doubting me." Actually, of course, this creature is just something that Lewis made up!

Similarly, there are a fair number of places where atheism, in its soft sense of 'failure to believe in God', is discussed, and Screwtape, from his smug position of supernatural insight into the weaknesses of the human psyche, is quite dismissive of it. Atheists, we're told, are people who refuse to actually sit down and consider the world rationally -- they are the sort who believe ideas because they are popular, or daring, or 'modern', rather than because they have investigated what's likely to be true, or else they love feeling superior to the amusing superstitions of those around them, or else they are so obsessed with the evidence of their senses that they cannot really credit anything that doesn't impose itself directly on their perceptions. In any case, they are on some level willfully ignorant, and are, it's implied, most certainly on their way to hell. This was probably the most personally annoying thing about the book; I felt like it was doing its level best to define me out of existence. (Actually, I suspect that Lewis was turning again to a bad habit I noticed in his semi-autobiography Surprised By Joy, where he seemed an awful lot to take his own personal idiosyncracies and assume a priori that they were universal truths of human nature. This suspicion actually makes me feel more charitable toward him; it's never as easy, after all, to consider someone to be a total classless and offensive buffoon as when one is secretly thinking of one's own former self.)

(Oh! I also think he's doing that same thing when he talks about what sorts of women men are attracted to, and what our motivations are in each case. Because yikes.)

[Continued in reply]

#2 (Part 2)

[garran.livejournal.com]

Another reason it was unsatisfying on this level was that the fictional elements made it difficult to be sure which parts he wanted me to seriously entertain. The devils are a good example of this -- they're basically a slightly sophisticated version of the shoulder-devils from comic strips, and I find it extremely difficult to imagine anyone really taking them to exist. Except, Lewis warns against this very thing in his text, saying that the way devils keep us from realizing they exist is to put pictures of men in red tights in our heads, and say that, since we cannot believe in something like that, we cannot believe in them. Okay, so I shouldn't dismiss Lewis' devils out of hand because of the ridiculous elements of their anthropomorphism; but which parts of Lewis' ridiculous portrayals (which in my view encompass most of the book) am I to take it that he wanted me to disregard, and which am I to take it that he really wants to argue for as things that exist? Since his only communication with me is from within a narrative that assumes all of it to be true, there is no way for him to make it plain, and indeed he doesn't.

Since the book didn't actually make me as unrelievingly cranky as it appears from this report so far, I should probably find something that isn't cranky to say, and in fact there were occasional things I did like. I thought that the quasi-libertarian philosophy on love that Screwtape explains as the underpinning of devil society was actually clever and well-conceived; unlike most of the devil things in the book, I found it both novel and believable. I think there were also a number of things I found insightful that I now forget; for instance (since I remember this one), I think that his points about getting caught up in hurtful patterns with the people we live with, and forgetting to apply our general moral principles or our abstract kind feelings for these people in our individual interactions with them, are well-taken. If I had come upon this book as a Christian who already agreed with it on all important points, and just took it as a colourful book of advice, I would probably have been a lot better-disposed toward it than I actually was.


-Andy H.