The War in Heaven, by Charles Williams

Charles Williams wrote novels so deeply steeped in Christian theology and myth that on the human level his characters seem not to make decisions and instead follow preordained steps.  In The War in Heaven (1930) an Anglican archdeacon reads a deleted paragraph in a soon to be published book about religious relics and realizes that a nondescript chalice in his small country church may in fact be the Holy Grail, the Graal, as it is called throughout this novel.  The Graal becomes the object of intrigue and struggle as contending forces attempt to possess it.  Williams was one of the Inklings, along with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.  Lewis cloaked his Christianity in the form of children’s allegories (in The Chronicles of Narnia novels) while Tolkien created an elaborate history and mythology of Middle Earth built around Christian virtues and concepts.  Williams was a literalist.  In The War in Heaven a supernatural and human battle of good vs. evil is underway. the forces of evil are thinly veiled agents of Satan.  A nondescript man in a grey suit who appears at various points to help out humans in trouble is no less than Christ (at least that is how I understand him). Once we understand what various characters represent, we are in small doubt as to the outcome of the struggle the novel describes. 

The Graal at the novel’s center can be used for good and for ill, apparently, depending on who possesses it.  Once the man in the grey suit appears, it’s fairly easy to figure out who will end up holding it.  Satanic ritual and various forms of black magic figure into this novel, as do forms of “white magic.” But human agency, the ability to make decisions, is absent.  The literalism in Williams’ approach is most evident in the final scene of the novel, where the man in the grey suit, Christ, performs as priest in the church service which leads the courageous, pious, and virtuous archdeacon out of his earthly existence. It’s also evident in a scene where the characters associated with “good” are about to be killed, and supernatural intervention saves them. This is deus ex machina in a most literal sense.

Williams writes in a rambling, shambling, sometimes obtuse British style that I am tempted to describe as “dithering.” I had to reread several passages, and even after re-reading things were not always clear.  Overall, however, one maintains general understanding of what is going on. The novel gains in momentum as the plot develops. Major characters are well drawn, and there’s no doubt that the evil characters are truly evil. The novel’s style is conducive to comedy, and it’s surprising to find in a novel concerned with such dark subjects—the world’s fate is at issue—so much humor, beginning in the first paragraphs where a book editor discovers a dead body under his desk. An archdeacon, a duke, and the book editor are seriously committed to recovering the Graal, but their efforts to do so are often carried out in slapstick fashion.

The novel is set in London and the English countryside, but this is not the “real” England.  It is a fantasy world where strange occurrences are not unexpected

A point of unfortunate interest: Williams sometimes associates people with so-called non-white ethnicity—Jews, Greeks, Indians, Chinese—with evil.  Several characters apply the term “Jew” in a negative way.