One of my favorite guides to good reading is Noel Perrin’s A Readers Delight (University Press of New England, 1988) www.upne.com/results.html, a collection of 40 brief, elegant essays on underappreciated classics. This quote comes from its review of All Hallows Eve, entitled “Taking Ghosts Seriously”:
“Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows Eve is one of the most powerful works of supernaturalism to appear in our century. It comes, appropriately enough, out of same nexus as many other such works: The Lord of the Rings, Perelandra, the Narnian chronicles. Williams was a friend and contemporary of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis – and when his work took him to Oxford during the Second World War, he promptly became the third great central figure in the informal literary group known as the Inklings ….
“All Hallows Eve has a complex and even thrilling plot. The action swirls around a great religious leader named Simon Leclerc: a prophet, a worker of miracles, the head of a world cult. He is something like the Reverend Mr. Moon raised to the fourth power – or he seems that way to outsiders at least. He is actually the most powerful magician who has lived in several hundred years, and he is a tall, god-like, ascetic, and wholly evil person, a negative of Jesus Christ, whose very distant cousin he in fact is. What he promises human beings is peace; what he actually seeks is to rule them, not only in life but even after their deaths.
“All the other characters meet Simon, and all in the end must choose between serving him and resisting him.”
Perrin says in the essay that he believes Williams en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Williams_(UK_writer)
is less famous than Tolkien or C. S. Lewis partly because he wrote fiction only for adults, not for adults and children: “All Hallows Eve will never be a TV special – or if it is, it will be so debased and vulgarized as to make most TV specials of great books seem works of astonishing fidelity.” Online and other booksellers have a 2002 edition of All Hallows’s Eve (Regent College Press, 296 pp., $19.95, paperback), introduced by T. S. Eliot, which uses in the title an apostrophe after “Hallows” that does not appear in A Reader’s Delight.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
One-Minute Book Reviews 
Oh joy…I’ve been thinking about finding my first Charles Williams book and this sounds like just the thing – seasonal yet enduring. I can read it and then my husband and all his brothers will likely read it after me, like with Chesterton’s “Thursday.”
Comment by AR — October 24, 2008 @ 10:48 am |
Williams sounds good, doesn’t he? I believe Amazon has enabled the “Search Inside” tool for A Reader’s Delight, and if so, you could learn more about All Hallows Eve by searching for the title of the essay about it, “Taking Ghosts Seriously.”
Comment by 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — October 24, 2008 @ 11:19 am |