"Torrey is based on the image of Saint Anne's in this book. This is the truest account of the state of the West written in the last one hundred years."
- John Mark Reynolds

"The literary version of Lewis' Abolition of Man—a great look at scientism, arrogance and academia institutions run amok."
- Paul Spears

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Product Description

Written during the dark hours immediately before and during World War II, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, of which That Hideous Strength is the third and final volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus's The Plague and George Orwell's 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of its moral concerns.

The final book in C. S. Lewis's acclaimed Space Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, That Hideous Strength concludes the adventures of the matchless Dr. Ransom. The dark forces that were repulsed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are massed for an assault on the planet Earth itself. Word is on the wind that the mighty wizard Merlin has come back to the land of the living after many centuries, holding the key to ultimate power for that force which can find him and bend him to its will. A sinister technocratic organization is gaining power throughout Europe with a plan to "recondition" society, and it is up to Ransom and his friends to squelch this threat by applying age-old wisdom to a new universe dominated by science. The two groups struggle to a climactic resolution that brings the Space Trilogy to a magnificent, crashing close.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13276 in Books
• Brand: Lewis, C. S.
• Published on: 2003-05-13
• Released on: 2003-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.25" l, .66 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
The New Yorker In his usual polished prose, the author creates an elaborate satiric picture of a war between morality and devilry.

The New Yorker If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.

Los Angeles Times Lewis, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century writer, forced those who listened to him and read his works to come to terms with their own philosophical presuppositions.

From the Publisher
11 1.5-hour cassettes

About the Author
C.S. Lewis was a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge universities who wrote more than thirty books in his lifetime, including The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Mere Christianity. He died in 1963.

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Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

102 of 113 people found the following review helpful.
Powers, principalities, and gnostics
By Paul Emmons
Having enjoyed this novel again and again for a generation, I believe that it is prophetic and even more relevant today than when it was written. Now that recent filmings of Lord of the Ring and the first Narnia book have delighted critics and the public alike, is it too much to hope for a high-quality cinematic version someday of _That Hideous Strength_? Lewis would be most pleased, I daresay, if any such adaptation were set in our own time, because we need its messsage now.

By the time Mark Studdock arrives at Belbury, he is a confirmed brown-nose with considerable experience in pursuing his life's ambition: joining the esoteric Inner Circle of whatever. It is striking, then, how much difficulty he has in the NICE even determining who is in this group. Feverstone, Filostrato, Hardcastle, and Straik, for instance, all confide to him that their own respective purviews are of the institute's essence, while various other departments are peripheral or merely for public consumption. By the end of the book, the chaos proclaims that none of these figures, nor anyone else, is effectively in charge.

In this respect, Lewis brilliantly anticipated insights that the late William Stringfellow would articulate in the 1960s and 70s: that institutions are among the contemporary world's most characteristic manifestations of the demonic "powers and principalities" mentioned in the Bible. They inevitably take on lives of their own and go off the rails. Eventually they justify any and all means towards the end of their own survival and hegemony. They enslave and "deplete the personhood of" every human being involved with them-- even (and perhaps especially) those who imagine that they are in control.

Of course, the church as an institution being hardly exempt from these problems, clergy would react to Stringfellow's analysis with hostility proportionate to their power. Ironically, the works of this theologian long lay in unread obscurity in seminary: while students in, of all places, law school continued to turn to them when they wanted to learn how corporate structures really operate. As we 21st-century Americans find ourselves steeped in the waking nightmare of an unfolding vindication of Stringfellow's prophetic thought, it is heartening at least to see a growing interest in it-- books lately republished and his ideas taken up and further developed e.g. by Walter Wink. For an illustrative novel, however, _That Hideous Strength_, written by C.S. Lewis some 25 years earlier, may yet be unsurpasssed.

Some commentators have incomprehensibly indicated that the NICE people were materialists. Pas du tout. They are probably ex-materialists, but by the time we meet them are devotees of the occult. The reader grasps the inevitability of this progression. As Muggeridge (and perhaps Chesterton earlier) observed, those who cease to believe in God don't believe in nothing. Rather, before long they'll believe in anything. Lewis must have been aware of the occult dabbling practiced by high-level Nazi figures. While there are always atheistic individuals, it is unlikely, despite their best efforts, that their grandchildren will inherit a trait that requires so much mental assiduity to maintain. There have been no viable large atheistic societies. The Belburians, however, present themselves as materialists and are not prepared, and would probably never be prepared, to publicize their real allegiance: it is esoteric, elite, and exclusive by its very nature, not to be shared by the likes of you and me.

Sitting in the garden, one of them exclaims, "Bloody racket those birds make!" Such a sentiment is revealing and chacteristic of one who, as the novel describes in detail, far from being a materialist, has cultivated a disgust for all things physical and who dreams of transcending it. Add this trait to a quest for esoteric knowledge and we have the two most classic marks of the gnostic.

I have no doubt that Lewis intended the book partly as a warning against this mode of thought, which Christian orthodoxy has found profoundly and decisively incompatible. He illustrates what kind of people are tempted to take it up, why they do so, and to what bad ends it will lead. Since Lewis's death, it has become fashionable among post-modernists and certain feminists to express their pique and scorn for Christianity by affecting a sympathetic reconsideration of gnosticism, suggesting that its eclipse was only an historical accident or the effect of a political power play. We could do with this book as an antidote.

96 of 113 people found the following review helpful.
Pugnacious ending to a fine trilogy
By Florentius
C. S. Lewis wraps up his "Space Trilogy" right back on planet Earth where it is up to a cadre of ordinary folks, mythical beings, and brute beasts to thwart the forces of supreme wickedness. With the assistance of the Director--a man familiar to readers of the previous two books in the trilogy--this strange collection of characters is pitted against a vaguely-familiar, propaganda-driven totalitarian regime ironically called by the acronym NICE.
This book is Lewis at his satirical best--an uppercut landed to the jaw of secular, anti-family, "post-christian" society.
What is particularly striking about this book is who Lewis fingers as the advance-guard for the evil that sadly dominates on Earth, ever trying to extend its power: a bunch of place-seeking, ethics-free, jive-talking academics who have long left any pretense to reason and science behind. Instead, they are driven by a misguided altruism that manifests itself, ultimately, as complete misanthropy.
In this regard, Lewis must be regarded as prescient. Anyone who has spent any time in American academia will immediately sympathize with the plight of the characters in the book who *dare* to stand up to the censorial, elitist, marxist/leninist, anti-religion, pro-death agenda so prevalent among the "progressive" leadership of the university. Lewis had these people's number fifty years ago.
In short, this book is a fun read and though couched in humorous terms, is deadly serious at its core.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Timeless cautionary tale.
By Janet Aldrich
Many fans of Lewis' work rate this least of the Space Trilogy books; it lacks "Out of the Silent Planet"'s wonder and "Perelandra"'s lyricism. However, for a look at where a situationally-moral, rationalist, humanist society is bound to wind up, it is priceless.

The main characters are a young couple who got married out of love and are finding it hard going in "the real world". The wife, Jane, has an unusual ability to 'dream true' and when her dreams start applying to her own life, she finds it unsettling. Her husband, Mark, a young don (or professor) is no help; he's too wound up in college politics (and some very loathesome friends) and the possibility of a job with a new scientific foundation to pay much attention to her.

The story really begins moving when the foundation, called Belbury, begins moving in on everyday life. But, as always with Lewis, there is a moral opposite ready to stand against Belbury; in it, we find an old friend and several new ones.

This book is astonishingly accurate about where society is now -- as with some of Lewis' other observations (Screwtape's toast to the college comes to mind), it's hard to remember that Lewis wrote them nearly 50 years ago -- they're that close to current events and modern society.

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