Catholic Fiction

reviewed by Rachel Murphy

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis’ retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, is the story of the sisters Psyche and Orual, Psyche being the beautiful and innocent (taken by many for a goddess) and Orual being the ugly one, though thoroughly devoted to her sister.

Told in Orual’s voice, the novel is written as her complaint against the gods, as if before a judge. The injustice of her life, as she sees it, primarily revolves around the fact that Psyche was the chosen one for the gods’ favors. Rather than being devoured by the mysterious “Shadowbrute” when she is made an offering of on the Grey Mountain, Psyche is taken by a god to his palace, there to live a happy life and enjoy his love as he comes to her in the darkness. Psyche, however, is forbidden to see the god’s face, or to bring any light into the room.

Envy drives Orual to convince others—and herself—that it must be something dark and horrible that comes to Psyche in the night. “What kind of a lover must this be who forbids his bride to see his face?” Orual, threatening to do an injury to herself, convinces Psyche to bring a lamp that night into the chamber. Having disobeyed the god’s warning, Psyche’s palace is shattered for her, and Psyche is left wandering in the wilderness to weep for the rest of her days. Orual, meanwhile, must now bear the duties of a queen—and her own guilt—and becomes an enigma to all behind the veil which she wears continually over her face.

Lewis’ tale differs from the original (as known from the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius Platonicus) in that the palace of Psyche was invisible to the eyes of her sister, Orual. “This change,” Lewis writes in his Note at the conclusion of the novel, “brings with it a more ambivalent motive and a different character for my herione and finally modifies the whole quality of the tale.” It becomes not only a tale of jealousy and revenge from a human standpoint, but in relation to the gods—to God. 

Lewis, always more devoted to allegory than his friend and fellow author, J.R.R. Tolkien, shows a strong penchant towards it in this tale especially, which he wrote late in life and which he himself considered to be his finest work. The conception of reworking the ancient myth sprung from his agnostic days, and this is easy to see and understand from any human perspective: the anger expressed by Orual at the silence of the gods, or rather the envy of one who is deaf to their voice; the love and the hate one feels towards the more privileged, the pure, the good and beautiful one who is drawn to their beauty; the loss of loved ones, “stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods.” 

Despite some wonderful passages, however, Till We Have Faces fails to hold together, and to provide a living, breathing story. One cannot help but feel that the message came first in Lewis’ mind, and the story after. After becoming finally engaged by the section where Orual visits Psyche’s palace—we are in St. John of the Cross territory here, and it is wholly intriguing—the story never concludes satisfactorily. Psyche is left hanging to a degree; the final visions of Orual in the book’s second part are choppy and appear to be a hasty denouement to the story, as though Lewis were in a rush to wrap it up. The message itself came to a lyrical climax, but imperfectly; because the story failed to do so.

Orual herself is to a degree an interesting character, and I detachedly wished her the best, but never to the extent that I truly cared for her, or for any of the characters. There is a tendency in Lewis (which others may be able to appreciate more than myself), which he shares with the Romantic poets, notably Keats and Shelley, and which are for me two of their less attractive qualities: their borderline idolatrous worship of physical beauty, and their fascination with classical mythology. And perhaps the two go hand-in-hand, and such symbolism (e.g. beauty = innocence/goodness/faith; ugliness = shrewdness/selfishness/skepticism) is unavoidable in the retelling of such a myth. For my part, however, it would have been far more engaging if Lewis had done something wholly surprising with the tale; perhaps introduced some of that Christian topsy-turviness which turns the surface-beauty perception on its head; which echoes however distantly, the One whose image must be close to Lewis’ thought and heart continually, whose “form, disfigured, lost all the likeness of a man, his beauty changed beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 53:2).

All that being said, there are passages of extreme beauty, which, taken on their own, are masterful, and which make it worth the reading. Lewis is clearly reaching for something which is large and encompassing: reaching for the mystery of faith itself, and of love, but which he might have more nearly grasped by reaching even a little lower: towards the telling of an engaging, fresh story with breathing characters, and with a touch of that beauty which catches one off-guard.