Book Review: That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

The final book of C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy oddly enough never gets off the Earth. A struggling married couple, Mark and Jane, start down opposite paths. He's an academic at a small English college. Mark wants to climb the social ladder at the school, which turns more and more into a bureaucratic nightmare. The progressives at the school want to welcome N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. They are a scientific initiative trying to improve humanity, which sounds good on paper but in reality is far from helping actual people besides themselves. N.I.C.E. wants some land that belongs to the college and a few of the progressives are more than happy to sell, anticipating the social influence that will come with a close connection to the institute. Mark is offered an opportunity at N.I.C.E. and goes to find out more, only to get sucked into an even great and more sinister hierarchy than that at the school. He's not really sure what he is supposed to do and is not even certain that he has a job or salary.

Jane has plenty of progressive leanings and has started having nightmares that turn out to be prophetic dreams. She has an ability to see the future and hidden events, an ability that the N.I.C.E. people would like to exploit. She falls in with a different group with no acronym and no substantive hierarchy. But they genuinely want to help her and have more respect for her as a person than she would ever experience at the Institute. The actually nice group is led by Ransom, the main character in the previous two novels.

He's not the main character here. Mark and Jane are the focus as they struggle to understand the situation around them. Mark's ambition for gain overrides his better judgment, though he struggles quite a few times to do the right thing. Jane is disturbed by her ability and also by the Ransom group's laid back and old-fashioned ways. She can't quite commit in part due to many misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The tension is brilliantly conceived and portrayed by Lewis. Mark and Jane are real people caught up in fantastic circumstances.

The situation does become more epic and more fantastic after the long set-up. Ransom has been in touch with eldils, who are spiritual beings virtually the same as angels. The eldils have let him known that a big conflict is about to break out with the governing eldil of Earth, who is clearly Satan. N.I.C.E. is under the influence of the evil eldils, though they give the eldils the scientific-sounding name of "Macrobes." The N.I.C.E. contingent recognizes the superiority of the macrobes and are perfectly willing to go along with the macrobes' destructively anti-human program in the name of science.

The story is packed with a lot of philosophical and theological discussion. The range of topics is fairly wide, though the central problem of Mark and Jane's estrangement and attempts to get back together keeps the narrative moving forward. Even though they are a bit distant from each other at the beginning, the worsening situation gradually makes them more receptive to new ideas, especially after rejecting clearly bad ideas. Lewis keeps the story from turning into a lecture, which isn't the easiest thing to do. It's engaging as well as being informative.

Highly recommended. One caveat as a parent: the first two books are fine for middle-school and high-school aged kids to read but this one is much more challenging and much darker. As they say, there's a lot of Shawshank before you get to the redemption.

The book is discussed on Episode 206 of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast.