I hadn’t read anything by C. S. Lewis for many years; the last was probably [b:Perelandra|100924|Perelandra (The Space Trilogy, #2)|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388623162s/100924.jpg|3148586] when I was a teenager. That didn’t make much of an impression and I associated Lewis primarily with the Chronicles of Narnia, which were very important to my childhood (in a very similar fashion to Francis Spufford in [b:The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading|358803|The Child That Books Built A Life in Reading|Francis Spufford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388229409s/358803.jpg|1422235]). As a consequence, ‘Till We Have Faces’ caught me somewhat by surprise. It retells the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, which I had only the very vaguest notion of. A note sensibly placed at the end explains this story and makes clear that Lewis took the outline and reshaped it considerably. What gave the book its power and appeal to me was the wonderful narrative voice of Orual, older sister of Psyche. She is a marvellous, complicated, flawed character who I found deeply sympathetic and involving. The daughter of a king, she is abused and dismissed for not being beautiful. Her life story, set in a mythical ancient kingdom, examines gender roles with unexpected thoughtfulness. Orual observes that she is not treated like a woman because men dismiss her as unattractive, a situation she learns to use to her advantage while still finding it hurtful. Other female characters find that the beauty which gives them value as women also constrains their lives; this is especially well shown in the case of Ansit. Orual’s relationship with Psyche has a Sophoclean feeling of intensity, something made explicit in the text when Orual compares herself to Antigone.

I found the writing elegant and eloquent. It manages to be mythic without being pompous, lyrical without being obscure, and moving without being melodramatic. Orual’s voice is clear and distinctive throughout:

The thing on the bed which had been half-alive for so long was dead; had died (if he understood it) seeing a girl ransacking his armoury.

“Peace be upon him,” said Bardia. “We’ll be done here very shortly. Then the women can come and wash the body.” And we turned again at once to settle the matter of the hauberks.

And so the thing that I had thought of for so many years slipped by in a huddle of business which was, at that moment, of more consequence. An hour later, when I looked back, it astonished me. Yet I have often noticed since how much less stir nearly everyone’s death makes than you might expect. Men better loved and more worth loving than my father go down making only a small eddy.

I kept my old hauberk, but we told the armourer to scour it well, so that it might pass for silver.

The narrative is structured in two parts, the second much shorter. In the former, Orual tells her life story as a challenge and accusation to the gods of her world. In the second, she reconsiders elements of her past on the basis of other people’s perspectives. This was powerfully done until the very end, when it seemed that Lewis was trying to insert a Christian model of god into an ancient setting. I found that a little awkward, as it seemed not to fit with the previous nuance of Orual’s relationship with the gods and with morality. Ending on the note, ‘You yourself are the answer. Before your face questions die away’ jibed somewhat with what had come before. If the intent was to reduce Orual to perfect humility before an unknowable godlike presence, this final scene did not sweep away the previous critical examination of ancient gods nor undermine the empathy I felt for Orual. She was fierce and strong and hurt some people that she loved, but her relationships were complex and her decisions understandable.

I think it important that she was repeatedly told that she should have born a man: then her looks would not have mattered, her talents for war and statecraft would have been recognised and respected immediately, and her father wouldn’t have treated her like dirt. There is a sense that society or the gods, whichever way you want to put it, punish her for not fitting into the roles usual for a woman. Even when she is accorded the power and respect due to a man, she pays the price in loneliness. The only people close to her are her advisors, obliged to keep her company as it is their job. She veils her face, making literal her concealment of all vulnerability and femininity in order to rule the kingdom. The tragic loss of Psyche involves Orual's protectiveness of her younger sister in the face of seeming madness. The judgement that Orual ultimately receives would not have been heaped upon a man, as no man would be expected to constantly place the emotional well-being of others before their own. As a character Orual fascinated me and her tale was by turns tragic, disconcerting, and profound. I think it will linger in my mind for a long time. ( )

A brilliant compliment to "Screwtape."
Good narration. ( )

This is my all-time favorite book. -Rick Beyer

First alerted to the charm of this work after reading Apuleius' GOLDEN ASS in Theology School, and reading that Lewis was "haunted" for years by the the story of Psyche.

Lewis provides his version of the often retold story of Cupid and Psyche. The Narrator is Psyche's older uglier sister Orual, who begins by having bones to pick with the gods. She discovers that her first-hand accusations are tainted by her own shortcomings. It appears that Lewis echoes Book of Job, in which the God of Levins and Wind asks those who challenge him, by questioning them, "Who are you to ask me?"

In this work, Orual herself explains: "it’s a story belonging to a different world, a world in which the gods show themselves clearly and don’t torment men with glimpses, nor unveil to one what they hide from another, nor ask you to believe what contradicts your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingers. In such a world (is there such? it’s not ours, for certain) I would have walked aright. The gods themselves would have been able to find no fault in me. And now to tell my story as if I had had the very sight they had denied me . . . is it not as if you told a cripple’s story and never said he was lame, or told how a man betrayed a secret but never said it was after twenty hours of torture? And I saw all in a moment how the false story would grow and spread and be told all over the earth; and I wondered how many of the other sacred stories are just such twisted falsities as this."

Once Orual realizes that the gods have lied to her--the sacred stories that spread through worlds are no better than the tales invented by commoners--she resolved to write out her accusations: "I could never be at peace again till I had written my charge against the gods. It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child."

Why must holy places be dark places? The gods set Orual up for torture. Orual loved her dear little sister Psyche and then separated them, and then drove jealousy between them. Orual realizes, far too late, and so perduring and sharply, that "there is no creature (toad, scorpion, or serpent) so noxious to man as the gods." And they never have to answer.

After the death of the man she loved, at trial, Orual reads her complaint aloud. "Perhaps a dozen times", each time certain it was her own, in experience and voice. Then the judge stopped her, and in the silence asked "Are you answered?" Yes.

The complaint was the answer. "To have heard myself making it was to be answered." And "When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

In the second process of the trial--all trials and all Greek myths are process theology--a grandfather Fox shows her the pictures of what she just endured, but as Psyche, beautiful beloved Psyche, is enduring it. How? "That was one of the true things I used to say to you. Don't you remember? We're all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence of each other. And "Another bore nearly all the anguish".

Through all the enemies and wailing Psyche endures, and we say we love her, "She had no more dangerous enemies than us." And in that old terrible time when she appears cruel, perhaps she suffers. "This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form." Clearly, our Author is a Process Theologian. We are silenced with joy.

In a kind of postscript, CS Lewis writes: "This re-interpretation of an old story has lived in the author’s mind, thickening and hardening with the years, ever since he was an undergraduate. That way, he could be said to have worked at it most of his life. Recently, what seemed to be the right form presented itself and themes suddenly interlocked: the straight tale of barbarism, the mind of an ugly woman, dark idolatry and pale enlightenment at war with each other and with vision, and the havoc which a vocation, or even a faith, works on human life." ( )

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.