Summary: That Hideous Strength

The GIST

That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, is the third and final novel of his theological science fiction Space Trilogy, published in 1945 and subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. Its two predecessors, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, sent the philologist Elwin Ransom to Mars and Venus. This time the cosmic war comes home. The setting is a sleepy English university town where a slick new organization, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., is buying up land, recruiting academics and promising a scientifically planned future. Behind the reassuring acronym lies something far older and darker. The novel is part campus satire, part dystopian thriller, part Arthurian romance and part Christian allegory, and it weaves all of them around a young married couple who are drifting apart.

Lewis wrote it during the last years of the Second World War, while teaching at Oxford, and said in his foreword that its point is the same as his nonfiction book The Abolition of Man: that there are natural laws and objective values, and that a civilization which educates them away is courting disaster. The title comes from a 1555 poem by David Lyndsay describing the Tower of Babel: "The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length." That image of human pride building toward heaven hangs over the whole book. George Orwell reviewed it shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some two years before he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he warned that plenty of people really did harbor the monstrous dreams of power Lewis gave his villains. Decades later the novel still reads as a prophetic look at technocracy, propaganda and the hunger to belong.

The Story

The tale opens in an unspecified year "after the end of the war," roughly 1948 by the trilogy's own timeline, in the fictional town of Edgestow and its Bracton College. Mark Studdock has just been made a Senior Fellow in sociology, and he is giddy with it. He is clever but insecure, and above all he aches to be on the inside of things. At Bracton the inside belongs to the "Progressive Element," a well-drilled faction led by the shallow, easily flattered Sub-Warden Curry and the former clergyman and bursar James Busby. The college is debating whether to sell Bragdon Wood, an ancient stretch of woodland, to the N.I.C.E. The sale is controversial because local legend holds that Merlin is buried there. The Progressives push it through. Afterwards the charming, amoral Lord Feverstone dangles a post at the Institute in front of Mark. Readers of the first book will gradually realize that Feverstone is the newly ennobled Dick Devine, who once helped kidnap Ransom to Mars.

Mark's wife, Jane Studdock, is meant to be writing a PhD thesis on John Donne, but since the wedding she has slid into a lonely, resentful domesticity. Then the nightmares begin. One involves a severed head, and the dreams have an odd, documentary sharpness. Jane meets Margaret "Mother" Dimble, the warm wife of one of her old tutors, who is being evicted because of the N.I.C.E. land deal. When Jane mentions her dreams, Mrs. Dimble steers her toward a Miss Ironwood at the Manor in nearby St Anne's. A bitter quarrel between Jane and Mark shows how far their marriage has frayed. Each feels unseen by the other, and each is about to be pulled into opposite camps of a hidden war.

Mark goes to Belbury, the N.I.C.E. headquarters, and finds himself in a bureaucratic fog. He has no office and no duties, and he cannot work out what his job is. He seems to swing in and out of favor without knowing why. The cast he meets there is one of Lewis's great rogues' galleries. John Wither, the Deputy Director and real power, speaks in endless, vague, jargon-clogged sentences that never commit to anything. Professor Augustus Frost is a psychologist of icy precision. Miss Hardcastle, nicknamed "the Fairy," chews cigars and runs the Institute's private police and its female auxiliary, the "Waips," with sadistic relish. Dr Filostrato is an Italian physiologist who longs to free humanity from organic life altogether. Reverend Straik, the "Mad Parson," was once a good man, but grief over his daughter's death has warped him into believing that any power is God's will. Over them all sits the nominal Director, Horace Jules, a Cockney tabloid journalist and figurehead who knows almost nothing. A respected chemist named Bill Hingest is resigning, and he quietly warns Mark to get out. That same night Hingest is murdered.

Jane, meanwhile, gathers the courage to visit St Anne's. Grace Ironwood, a doctor and psychologist who seems stern but proves kind, is dressed in black exactly as Jane had dreamed her. She tells Jane that the dreams are visions of real events. Jane is gently drawn into a strange, homely community. It includes the skeptical Ulster rationalist Andrew MacPhee, Mark's old student friend Arthur Denniston and his wife Camilla, the Arthurian scholar Cecil Dimble, the displaced charwoman Ivy Maggs, and a large brown bear called Mr Bultitude. At its center is the Director, who turns out to be Ransom himself. He now goes by the name Fisher-King and carries a wound in his foot from Venus that will not heal. He is also the Pendragon, heir of King Arthur and ruler of Logres, the hidden, good Britain that lives inside the visible one. Ransom alone speaks with the eldila, the angelic Oyéresu who govern the planets. He explains that Earth has long been under quarantine. Its rebellious Oyarsa, the Devil, has been confined within the Moon's orbit, and the good powers have been unable to come here.

Mark at last gets work, and it is ugly. He is to write anonymous newspaper articles praising the N.I.C.E., including two prepared in advance to describe a riot the Institute plans to provoke in Edgestow. The riot happens on schedule and gives the Institute's police an excuse to seize the town. Jane is arrested, and Hardcastle begins to torture her. Only a surge of rioters forces the Fairy to let her go, and Jane is rescued half-conscious and carried to St Anne's. Back at Belbury, a conversation with Filostrato finally brings Mark before the Head of the Institute. It is a literal head, that of a recently guillotined French scientist, just as Jane dreamed. Filostrato believes he has revived it by his own skill.

From Jane's dreams of men digging up a long-buried figure who then leaves his grave, Ransom deduces what the N.I.C.E. is really after. Merlin truly lies beneath Bragdon Wood, not dead but suspended outside time, and the Institute means to wake him and win his ancient power. Jane must lead the St Anne's company to the place she has seen. At Belbury, the bosses try to tighten their grip on Mark with faked evidence that he murdered Hingest, but the threat backfires and finally gives him the nerve to run. He finds Edgestow occupied and his flat empty. Dimble, despite his misgivings, offers him a way out, but Mark dithers too long and is arrested for the murder.

That night, in a howling storm, both sides go hunting for Merlin, who seems to have risen. He has hypnotically taken a tramp's clothes and seized a wild horse. He meets the St Anne's party and rides off into the dark, while the N.I.C.E. men triumphantly capture the bewildered tramp, convinced they have the great magician. Reviewer Leonard Bacon compared this double chase, real Merlin and false, to a passage from Stevenson. From here the threads tighten toward a reckoning that brings Arthurian legend, planetary angels and the deepest rot of Belbury face to face. What happens to Mark, to Jane and to their marriage is best discovered on the page.

What It's Really About

The lure of the Inner Ring. Lewis rated this theme "second in importance" in the book, and it drives Mark's story. Mark is not a monster. He is a man who would do almost anything to be let in, and Belbury feeds on that hunger. It keeps him uncertain, flatters him, snubs him and flatters him again, until he is writing propaganda he would once have despised. Bacon found Mark dull for exactly this reason, a young academic desperate for any inner circle. Many readers find him painfully recognizable, a portrait of how ordinary vanity is led one small compromise at a time toward real evil.

The abolition of man. The N.I.C.E. villains despise the body and all organic life as frail and disgusting. Like early Gnostics or modern transhumanists, they dream of perfecting humanity by escaping flesh altogether. Filostrato's sterile ideal and Frost's cult of pure objectivity, which reduces emotion to mere chemistry, are Lewis dramatizing The Abolition of Man. Once objective values are dismissed as feelings, nothing stands between the planners and the planned. Lewis insisted his target was not science or planning as such. It was the totalitarian dream shared by Nazism and Bolshevism, the disciplined cruelty of an ideological oligarchy. In The Screwtape Letters a demon had hoped for the "Materialist Magician," a man who worships vague "Forces" while denying spirits. Belbury, which thinks it has discovered mysterious beings it calls "Macrobes," is that dream come true.

Propaganda and the gullible educated class. One of the book's sharpest lines turns the usual snobbery upside down. Hardcastle says the workman is the Institute's real problem, because he assumes the papers are propaganda and reads them only for the football results. Of the educated readers of highbrow weeklies she says: "They're all right already. They'll believe anything." The novel is unnervingly alert to how institutions manufacture consent, stage crises and dress control in the language of progress.

Ordinary goodness against cold power. Against Belbury's sterile corridors Lewis sets St Anne's, a household of shared chores, fog-loving friends and a bear, where people relish ordinary things. Denniston explains that he and Camilla married partly because they both like "Weather," not one kind but weather itself. The contrast is the point. Lewis celebrates the goodness of the physical, created world, the body, animals and seasons, even while the novel holds that humanity is fallen and cannot perfect itself apart from God.

Marriage, myth and the Inklings. At its heart the book is also a story about a marriage, and about whether two proud, wounded people can learn to see each other. Lewis wraps it in a rich mythic weave. He draws on his friend Charles Williams, whose idea of Logres, whose doctrines of co-inherence and substitution, and whose treatise The Descent of the Dove he credited openly. He borrows "Numinor and the True West" from the then-unpublished work of J.R.R. Tolkien, misspelled because Lewis had only heard Tolkien read the name aloud. He also tips his hat to Olaf Stapledon, admiring his invention though not his philosophy. Christian, Roman and British mythology blend into one cosmic picture.

Why readers love it, and argue about it. Orwell thought the book would be stronger without the supernatural. Once God and the Devil enter, he argued, you know who will win. Yet he still called it worth reading. Bacon called it a ghastly but often magnificent nightmare, Floyd C. Gale praised the stamp of Lewis's awesome imagination, and Alister McGrath calls Lewis a prophetic voice who radically challenged the accepted wisdom of his generation. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane was provoked enough to publish attacks on its view of science. That mix of admiration and fierce argument is itself a sign of how much the book has to say.

Who Should Read It

This is for readers who like their dystopias with ideas and their fantasy with teeth. It suits fans of Lewis's theological writing who want to see it played out in a gripping story, and lovers of Arthurian legend and the Inklings. It will also reward anyone uneasy about technocracy, propaganda or the quiet pull of wanting to belong. Having read the first two Space Trilogy books helps but isn't required. Expect a slower, satirical first half that builds into a strange and unforgettable storm.

This has been a summary of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.