All the books on my blog are books I recommend. This novel was truly the most horrific and deeply moving book I have read in a good way. It is not horror, so when I mean horrific I mean that the way I related to the story horrified me. You will have to read more to understand my full meaning.
Till We Have Faces was C.S. Lewis’s last novel and far darker than any of them. The public response to this novel disappointed Lewis since he considered it his greatest work. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of Psyche’s oldest sister Orual. Lewis wanted to write this novel from the time he graduated college, but abandoned his attempts until the end of his life. To say this is only a retelling of a myth gives a false impression of the novel even though it is true.
I had heard much about this novel before reading it and was still not prepared for it. I kept looking for the allegory people had implied was in it or the complex theology, but I discourage you from doing so until after you have read it and digested it some. What I would encourage the reader to do is to already be very familiar with the original myth of Cupid and Psyche first. I feel that in contrast, one can more clearly see what C.S.Lewis has accomplished.
The story of Cupid and Psyche from the time of ancient Greece was immediately interpreted as allegory for the soul and divine love. Throughout history, many retellings and interpretations have been given of the myth. Yet, central to the myth is the concept of what real love is.
Till We Have Faces is set in the pre-Christian historical world of Hellenistic Greek times. It is in a made-up kingdom of Glome, north of the Greeks and has a realistic pagan setting. This is not meant to be a mythic world of fantasy creatures and gods, but a fake historical setting that has the same rules as our own. Do not expect the characters to suddenly become monotheistic and spout monotheistic ideals. Instead, we have superstition and atheistic beliefs at home in the poly-theistic culture of our past. The spiritual is as unbelievable to the characters of this novel as it would be had they lived today.
The myth of Cupid and Psyche is faithfully retold with a few important differences, one being that the main characters cannot see the gods or Phyche’s palace. They must wrestle with the unexplainable and the mysterious. There are glimpses of divine things and a god, but very little more until the second part of the book which is less than a quarter of the total novel.
The novel is written in first person as the complaint of aged Queen Orual to the gods and then as an addendum in a second part. The anger and bitterness of the main character is consistent throughout the entire first part of the book. I recommended the reader to be familiar with the myth before reading this because the end of the myth is almost assumed, and it is imposed symbolically on Orual when she receives the judgment, “You too will be Psyche” by Cupid for her crime of coercing Psyche to look on his face. The symbolism, though is not obvious. There is redemption at the end for both Psyche and Orual, but, again, I feel like the reader needs to be very familiar with the original myth for the ending to make sense.
Till We Have Faces is a character-centered novel focusing entirely on Orual’s internal development. Out of all of C.S. Lewis’s novels, there is no character as complex as Orual. It is common for new writes to say that it is hard for a man to write a woman as a main character and for a woman to write a man. C.S. Lewis writes Orual in a way that is shocking perceptive. She is neither a hero nor a villain. Instead, she is very very human.
Orual and her sisters loose their mothers and have an abusive father. She practically raise her half-sister Psyche and has motherly feelings. So many reviews focus on the unhealthy, controlling nature of Orual’s love for Psyche, which is true, but they miss the intensity of the pure love she had in raising her to begin with. Being surrounded by physical and emotional abuse, Orusl sees Psyche as the most beautiful thing in her life. It is a child who loves her without question. Orual is not the symbol of our sinful nature, but of our true complex self. She is a very well-rounded character we are supposed to relate to in all her good virtues such as love, loyalty, courage, and intellenge, as well as in her vices of selfishness, foolish assumption, anger, and bitterness. What separates Orual and Psyche is not that Psyche is beautiful and Orual is ugly, but that Orual loves selfishly while Psyche loves selflessly. Orual is never jealous of Psyche. She does not see nor feel any desire for what Psyche wants. Instead, Orual is jealous of the gods for taking Psyche’s love from her, just like Aphrodite is jealous of Psyche for taking Cupid’s love from her. What Orual must learn is that when we love selfishly, we are worshiping the faceless god of ourselves and devouring those around us. Divine love is the only thing that can fill that emptiness. Until we see ourselves in all our ugliness, removing the veil of our shame, guilt, anger, hurt, and self-justification, we cannot clearly define what we want and therefore never get that need met. We instead wander in aimless pain and sorrow, full of anxiety and remorse.
The main thing I wish C.S. Lewis had done was delve farther into redemption of the main character at the end, but this would have been impossible. Since the story is written by Orual, she couldn’t write it after she dies. To be with the gods, as Psyche does, one cannot also be among mankind. So however a reconciliation happens, it would be like death. This novel does not leave room for any part of the myth to be just an allegory or just a symbol of a relationship with the gods. So, this then actually cuts the myth of Psyche and Cupid short.
Still, there is redemption, after all, this is still C.S. Lewis. Some find peace and happiness at the ending, I, though, wept.
Perhaps this review is full of spoilers, but I don’t think so. As I have said before, Orual is a very complex character. This novel is not easily summarized into a single moral or theological point as I have tried to do. I almost never read other people’s reviews before writing my own, but I did this time to help me process the novel. Every review I have read of this book took something different from it. I have been surprised that it did not affect most others the way it affected me. Perhaps it is my own experiences as a woman who never felt beautiful and as a mother who has lost children that I felt this so deeply. I don’t know. To be honest, I really just don’t know how so many reviews could differ so much on a single book.
So what is the horror that I saw in this novel? The grief of losing someone that you love so deeply, the pain of loneliness, the shame of foolishness, the guilt of hurting those you love, and the struggles of depression. I saw so many ugly things in myself as I looked at Orual. This is the power of Christian writing. I needed no sermon. If you read this novel and saw the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in allegory, that’s a fine traditional allegory of the Cupid and Psyche myth from as far back as the Middle Ages. Still, I did not see that. For me, this was a story about love and finding a love that fills the gaping holes in our souls that we try to fill with the lives of people around us. It’s about learning to see divinity when all we have seen is ugliness and pain. It’s about being given beauty for the sake of destroying the ugly goddess inside of us. It’s about the mystery of holiness and divinity. It is about speaking to God face-to-face and getting an answer.
Because I am doing a devotional on the book of Job, I saw much of Job in Orual, but Orual waited so long in her life to bring her complaint to the gods. This too is why I wept.
I recommend this for adult Christians. It is a book that one will wrestle with for a long time. At least for me, I will be contemplating this for years to come.
Check out my young adult fantasy fiction novels HERE for something optimistic and fun.
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What do you think?