An Accidental Review of C. S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces"

In writing an introduction for a seminar paper on intentional literary ambiguity in Isaiah, I accidentally wrote this review of my favorite work by C. S. Lewis. If you have not read Till We Have Faces, I hope this encourages you to do so soon.

         There comes a time in the life of every serious reader of C. S. Lewis when he or she must, for the first time, draw Till We Have Faces from the bookshelf rather than the more well known Chronicles of Narnia or Out of the Silent Planet. To be sure, this should be a happy day for such readers, yet the world that awaits them in Glome is quite different from the glad worlds of Narnia and Malacandra. Till We Have Faces possesses an ability to fascinate which is equal to Lewis’s other works, yet it is unique among Lewis’s fiction for just at the moment the reader expects the narrative to be clarified it ends suddenly, failing to resolve like good jazz music.

The ambiguity of Till We Have Faces is not lost on the novel’s central character, Queen Orual of Glome, who laments of the use of metaphor by a pagan priest, “It’s very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear that such a notable secret should get out (why not hold their tongues?) wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling?”[1]

            The fact that Till We Have Faces is an exceptionally ambiguous novel is, in part, responsible for its diminished appreciation among casual C. S. Lewis readers. Those who are willing to be challenged by a great literary mind, however, embrace Lewis’s magisterial work. Such readers realize that Till We Have Faces does not lose the ability to convey meaning because it is ambiguous. On the contrary, much of the novel’s meaning is found in the fact that it is ambiguous.

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[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Novel of Cupid and Psyche, (Boston: Mariner Books, 1980), 271.