Descent into Hell, a Novel | Charles Williams

Descent into Hell, a Novel | Charles Williams | The End of Psychology

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Descent into Hell,...

	Descent into Hell, a Novel Charles Williams Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1999 - 222 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The key to William's mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably William's greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves up in their own narcissicstic projections, so that they are no longer able to love, to "co-inhere". The result is a veritable hell.

Imaginative tour-de-force!

W. H. Auden and T. S. Elliot admired this eccentric author and found his novels great reading. My small voice echoes "Darn Right!" Gently invite anyone still laboring under the illusion that you "make your own reality" or that "by following your heart you'll never go astray" to a good slow read of this mystical horror. Laurence Whitworth is as good a cautionary protagonist for which one could hope. Two parallel themes, the lightness of love's burden and the burdened suicide's call to light are both deeply moving. After my third reading I'm glimpsing what Williams' tried to reveal, but hope subsequent rereads will take me even deeper. Don't give up! this book's worth every minute you spend in it.

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The End of Psychology

"If a man seems to himself to endure the horrors of shipwreck,though he walks on dry land and breathes clear air, the business of his friend is more likely to be to accept those horrors as he feels them,carrying the burden, than to explain that the burden cannot,as a matter of fact, exist." (P. 101)

This is the new standard of friendship and spiritual aid that Williams laid down in his novel, DESCENT INTO HELL.... whether the book is read at all now, or not, or ever was, the standard remains. All bogus New Age psychotherapies, not to mention Freud, were from this point of view, and from this time forth, rendered simply less than acceptable, and I say be damned with them ...don't tell your friend his problems are all a product of his mind, just help him....even at the cost of your own sanity or even your life. And, by the way, Williams WOULD have damned them. For the real spiritual McCoy, read this book.

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A Time Bending Tale of Innocence and Metaphor for Complicit Madness

I finally decided to check out `the other guy' from The Inkling and picked up a copy of Charles Williams' Descent into Hell in which he seems to explore the idea of `the terrible good' a relatively fruitful line of thought. The characters are layered and the descriptions rich with subtle observations about connection, human nature, art and scholarship. Williams is poetic without seeming self important. His dream and fantasy sequences however, can be ponderous and difficult.

Descent into Hell's protagonist Pauline, is a poetic soul haunted by apparitions. I was engaged in her story as it interwove with that of an eccentric poet and the dead of generations past on her way to apprehending the vaguely name omnipotent. It is the secondary (counterpoint) narrative of Wentworth, however, that makes this little novel truly memorable. A historical scholar's objectification of a woman takes a mystical and corporeal turn providing a jarring metaphor for the costs of maintaining an alternate reality. William's description of Wentworth's complicit delusion was horrifying in its familiarity. Wentworth's preference for a controlled unreality to an uncertain actuality and its associated madness was a creative and memorable centerpiece for a generally pleasant and intriguing story.

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It was well worth it in the end!

Certainly one of the strangest books I've read in quite sometime, I can agree wholeheartedly with the reviewer who felt rather underwhelmed by the book in general. This was my first read of Williams, and while I was delighted early on by certain aspects of his style, I soon became equally irritated and frustrated by how difficult it was to get through long passages of his book. A lot of what he was trying to get at remained rather vague to me, but the one thing that did get through was his insight into those things that draw us to God (Pauline's experience) and those things that move us to reject His grace (Wentworth's experience). Ultimately, all of the time I put into the reading of this novel was worth it when it came down to the last few pages. Williams' rendering of his Wentworth character's descent into hell was pure brilliance. The meaninglesness of our lives apart from God and the slipping away into eternal separation are described with such vividness that at the close of the curtain I was left feeling wonderfully horrible, and I suspect that's exactly what the author wanted.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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