Customer Reviews

DARK TOWER AND OTHER STORIES

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is one of those little treasures most people do not know about, and the story behind them is almost as fascinating as Lewis's characters and his life itself. Edited and compiled by Walter Hooper, who was secretary to Lewis in his later years. The story behind this collection is that one day Walter was walking by the cottage that Lewis and his brother Warnie Shared, and saw Warnie burning some `rubbish'. Hooper asked what he was up to and Warnie replied he was clearing out some of Jack's (C.S. Lewis's) things. Hooper enquired into the contents and found out that they were unpublished manuscripts, stories ... Hooper asked for them and Warnie replied if they were not taken then and there they were going into the fire. A fire which supposedly burned for 3 days. One will always wonder what was lost to us from such a purging.

So Hooper saved this collection and some of the other writings that were published posthumously by the late great C. S. Lewis. These six stories are of a science fiction or fantasy nature. The first story The Dark Tower is of particular interest because it is a partial fourth story in Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. This one being set between the first and second book. This story makes up more than half of this collection. Yet one could ask what is a partial story with middle sections and the end missing be worth? Or be worth reading? And to be honest it would be a very good question.

I would have to state an emphatic yes it would! I would declare so for many different reasons. The first is that this is the only time we see Ransom in his office's hanging out with a group of professors discussing life the universe and everything. Does that not indeed sound like Lewis, and Tolkien and the rest of the Inklings who did just that. There has been much debate by many scholars as to the questions of if Lewis inserted himself into his fiction, as `the professor' in the Narnia books, and many believe as Professor Ransom in this series. This gathering of friends is almost a scene out of Lewis's own weekly routine. The second reason is that we meet MacPhee here in this story, which chronologically takes place between book's 1 and 2 in the series. MacPhee does not show up in the trilogy till the 3rd book. This book gives us a tantalizing taste of a story that would give the published trilogy a fuller more rounded flavor and be amusing to read and debate the end of the story and the progression of Lewis's Thought.

Even if you only pick up this book for the first story it will be worth it. But the other 5 short pieces are worth a perusal as well.

In science fiction, Lewis is best known for his space trilogy ("Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra", and "That Hideous Strength"), and in fantasy, for his seven-volume "Narnia Chronicles" series. Less known is that Lewis also wrote a few genre short stories and a pair of unfinished novels.

The stories and the unfinished novels are the subject of this collection. It is worth nothing that all of them are available in other collections of Lewis's. To aid readers, in this review I've listed the works in this collection, with notes indicating other collections they have appeared in.

Table of Contents:

"After Ten Years" (1), (2)

"Forms of Things Unknown" (1), (2), (3)

"Ministering Angels" (1), (2)

"The Dark Tower" (2), (3)

"The Man Born Blind" (2)

"The Shoddy Lands" (1), (2)

Notes:

(1) also published in "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories"

(2) also published in "Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces"

(3) Lewis's authorship of these is disputed.

Recommendations:

In general, to anyone interested in Lewis's shorter works, my best advice is to get "Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces", which, as of the time of this writing, is available from Amazon UK but not Amazon US. That collection consists of about 130 short works by Lewis. The works in that collection are mostly Christian, but it also include all his short works on science fiction and fantasy.

If you are interested in Lewis's science fiction and fantasy, and your budget or enthusiasm does not run to "Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces", then you might well want to get this, and possibly "On Stories, and Other Essays" as well (the essays in that collection generally deal with science fiction and fantasy).

Fans really on a budget who are interested in both the essays and the stories might want to get "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories" instead of this - that includes most of the stories in this collection and most of the essays in "On Stories, and Other Essays".

I became a fan of C.S. Lewis in the 3rd grade when our home room teacher read the Chronicles of Narnia to our class. I recently re-read the books as an adult and enjoy them just as much as I did then. I really like Lewis's style of writing and I've read other works by him such as "The Screwtape Letters" and "The Great Divorce."

If you're looking for more stories by Lewis, be them in any form, this is a very interesting volume to have in your library, but it may leave you feeling a bit empty if you're longing for more soul-penetrating stories that teach you about yourself.

"The Dark Tower" is incomplete, but a vivid and highly interesting tale of the use of an imaginary device - a Chronoscope - that lets you view an other time the way you would view a star with a telescope. Lewis himself is in the story as one of a group of friends/scholars who meet to watch the happenings of the Dark Tower in the "Othertime."

The story is intense and riveting and I couldn't put it down, but there are pages missing in the middle of the manuscript supposedly discovered after Lewis's death as a newly discovered, previously unpublished work. The end of the short story is also absent... and there is no indication of how close to the end the reader is to the ending when the story is cut off literally in mid sentence. The positive thing is that the story is so well written, it will keep your mind reeling as to the outcome and fate of the characters involved. I've heard that the claims that this is an actual true work of C.S. Lewis is now being disputed, but if it is not of his hand, it sure reads like his style.

"The Man Born Blind" is an interesting account of a man born blind who gets his sight as an older adult and struggles with visual concepts such as "what is light." It's a very short story and if any of the stories in this volume are to be disputed, this one would be my pick... it doesn't read like Lewis and I think Lewis was far more observant of human nature and of his environment in general to have made some of the assumptions he did in this very short story.

"The Shoddy Lands" is pure Lewis... almost like "The Great Divorce," but in miniature. Very interesting explaination at the end that wasn't exactly what I was reading into it at first... a very good story.

"Ministering Angels" is not at all what you think it's about... but nonetheless an interesting futuristic tale of life on a human-colonized Mars. Also a very short story, but it's amazing how Lewis can depict a character so richly and vividly in just a few lines.

The main story contains two chapters by Lewis and the rest by Walter Hooper who tried to make a novel out of the two Lewis chapters many years after the death of Lewis. You can really tell the difference between the two authors. Hooper's chapters contain Americanisms, theological statements opposite to that of the beliefs of Lewis, and a writing style emphasizing physical actions and not thought processes.

The dead giveaway is that 20% of the novel contains detailed descriptions of apparatus and their use. Lewis hated with a purple peeve such items in literature.

Hooper has also rewritten much of the poetry of Lewis to exclude the allusions to classical Greek and Roman literature.

For more information read "Light in the Shadowlands" and "The C. S. Lewis Hoax". Both books are written by a friend of Lewis.

C.S. Lewis is read for his wit, insight, scholarship, freshness, and discernment. His writings lift the heart and sharpen the mind.. In the late 1970s I was introduced to Lewis through Sheldon Vanauken's book, A Severe Mercy. Lewis's Mere Christianity, Narnian chronicles, Problem of Pain, Till We Have Faces, Screwtape Letters, and other works followed. Then I borrowed the Dark Tower and Other Stories, read it, and ran it past another Lewis reader, a biblical scholar. We expressed our mutual disappointment. The Lewis we had expected was not in its sophomoric, squalid, resolutionless, puling pages, disjointed development, and commonplace obscenity. It was a marsh with no fruit. This same sense of being cheated was expressed by Ursula Le Guin in her 1977 review, and a year later by Lewis reader and sci-fi expert Richard Hodgens. Hodgens concluded that the title story, The Dark Tower, was a tangle of unoriginal fragments. Only the seventh chapter of this tale, Hodgens thought, was to some degree equal to Lewis's previously published stories. The Dark Tower has a strange history, including alleged rescue from a bonfire on an unknown date after Lewis's death. (The alleged witness to the fire wrote that it never happened). Neither Lewis's friends nor his surviving brother had ever heard of it. Supposedly written in 1938, the story echoes sci-fi plots of the 1950s and '60s. The story includes other anachronisms, as well as a blatant Americanism, and some ink on the manuscript did not exist before 1950. There has been no authoritative handwriting or chemical analysis of the manuscript, now in Oxford's Bodleian Library, but the language has been subjected to computerized analysis. In 1986, graduate student C.F. Jones, using the Literary Detective program of letter and letter-pair frequencies, showed that the story did not match Lewis's other adult fiction. Five years later, A. Q. Morton, co-originator of the Cusum program--which analyses sentence patterns--applied his statistical system to The Dark Tower. (Cusum is used in the British courts to validate authorship, and by Interpol and forensic experts elsewhere.) Except for the first 25 sentences of chapter seven, Morton concluded, the story was not by Lewis. Publishers of The Dark Tower and Other Stories have refused to investigate the evidence of forgery, or to subject the Dark Tower manuscript to objective forensic testing. (Some of the other tales in the book--as well as other posthumously-published "Lewis works"--are also disputed.) Many academics and people involved in C.S. Lewis endeavours disregard the evidence provided by Jones, Morton, critic Kathryn Lindskoog, and others (including this writer) that the title story, at least, is not the work of Lewis. Why is this? Possibly because reputations, grants, access to Lewis archives, critical works based on the posthumous "Lewis canon," and--especially--profits from book sales are at stake. Lewis has pointed out that while evil can never come from good, good may come from evil. Reading the suppositious Lewis tale, The Dark Tower, will persuade the discerning reader that it is not a genuine C.S. Lewis work.

More well known for the controvesy as to whether 'The Dark Tower' was written by C.S. Lewis, it is nethereless an interesting read, although sadly unfinished. The tale about Ransom and some of his friends, including MacPhee, who observe an alternative universe through a chronoscope. It's highlight is when one of the friends, Scudamour, jumps into the chronoscope and thereby swaps places with his double in that 'othertime'. The novel also contains Christian themes such as self-sacrifice and the problems of addictive sin, i.e. Scudamour wanting to 'sting' his fiancee in 'othertime'. Admittedly not as good as any of the Space Trilogy novels (which is probably why it was not finished), just a glimpse gives us an idea what a completed canonical fourth Ransom novel would have been like. And how different it is to the others.

I recently discovered "The Dark Tower" and several other collections of Lewis' short stories and essays. Having read most of his non-fiction and all of his fiction (or so I thought), I was quick to buy and read this collection (and several others). The stories are...unexpected. They're not whimsy like Narnia, nor philosophy like the Space Trilogy, although they all have aspects of both. I would definitely recommend this book for Lewis fans.

This collection will surprise many readers. According to academic urban legend, the title story, an incomplete novel recovered from C. S. Lewis's papers and first published nearly 15 years after his death, is shoddily written, bereft of moral or theological significance, imbued with obscene and homoerotic imagery, and quite likely a crude forgery. That evaluation has been propagated so energetically and successfully that it is hard to remember that the book received generally favorable initial reviews and once upon a time bid fair to become the Lewis counterpart to "The Mystery of Edward Drood".

Having last picked up "The Dark Tower" two decades ago, I thought that I remembered a rather crude, incoherent adventure story, from which it would be pleasant to dissociate the purported author's reputation. It turned out, however, that I was remembering the image formed by the critics, not what was actually there.

Taking into account the fact that it is an unfinished draft, the prose of "The Dark Tower" is comparable to "Out of the Silent Planet". Both are in the vein of pulp science fiction, of which Lewis was an avid reader, and both suffer noticeably from the author's inability to weave convincing pseudo-scientific patter. In "Perelandra", Lewis solved that problem by substituting the openly supernatural for the scientific. Perhaps he would have hit upon the same device if "The Dark Tower" had reached a second draft.

The novel's central concept is movement among parallel universes, then a new idea in science fiction (first popularized by Murray Leinster, whose classic "Sidewise in Time" appeared in 1934). Lewis explains it by drawing on the relationship of lines to planes, an analogy long employed by theologians to illustrate how infinitely prolonged time differs from eternity.

In the opening chapters, a scientific team initiates contact between our time line and an "Othertime" that is, judging by broad hints in the surviving text, in thrall to one of the fallen eldils introduced in "Out of the Silent Planet". The central element of the plot, already in motion before the fragment breaks off, was evidently to have been an Othertime invasion of our world via the eponymous Dark Tower. A young scientist is prematurely caught up in the struggle by being switched with his double in Othertime, finding himself in the role of a loathsome tyrant torn between the habits of his assumed body and the moral impulses of his this-earthly mind.

The involuntary visitor to Othertime suffers a physical deformity that is the ground for accusing the work of obscenity. A small, wasp-like sting grows out of his forehead, containing venom that, when injected into the spine, converts humans into vacant automatons. The Freudian implications are obvious (and are pointed out by the narrator), but that is the extent of overt or covert sexuality. Readers who can find pervasive erotic imagery here probably spend their time covering up naked chair legs. The presence of any homosexual interest is sheer fantasy.

One cannot know, of course, simply on the basis of reading it, whether "The Dark Tower" comes from Lewis's pen or that of a skillful forger, but it presents Lewis-like concepts and cannot be relegated to pseudepigraphical status on the basis of any deficiency in literary merit.

Two of the "Other Stories" printed with "The Dark Tower" are also disputed. One, "The Man Born Blind", is an artfully fashioned parable, telling of a man who, given sight for the first time, grows suspicious because no one will tell him what light looks like. The editor dates the tale to the 1920's on tenuous evidence. Forensic tests have reportedly shown that the ink of the manuscript was manufactured after 1950, which is consistent with the high quality of the narrative and its implicit theological themes.

The second challenged story, "Forms of Things Unknown", relies on a surprise ending that becomes too obvious too quickly. It is akin in quality to the two other (unquestionably authentic) short stories printed here. "The Shoddy Lands" is an unsubtle message story, while "Ministering Angels", Lewis's lone attempt at comedy, is better in concept than execution. Rounding off the volume is "After Ten Years", comprising the shards of what was to have been a retelling of the aftermath of the Trojan War. Lewis was seriously ill when he started it, and his death left it too fragmentary to evaluate.

"The Dark Tower" and "The Man Born Blind" are the scorned stepdaughters of the Lewis literary family. It is time for readers and critics to look at them first hand, rather than uncritically accept some stepmother's assurance that, yes, Cinderella is really, really ugly and a changeling to boot.

After his death in November of 1963, many of Lewis's original drafts and notes were burned as efficient means of disposal. Major W.H. Lewis, while clearing out his brother's study, stumbled across an unfinished short that was later titled, 'The Dark Tower.' I am an avid reader and collector of Lewis's literature and am familiar with almost every one of his published (as well as non-published) works. The untenable rumours surrounding this book, (along with several other stories included in the compilation),are completley ludicrous. It contains some of the most vivid imagery ever produced by Lewis and is a frightening (and thouroughly entertaining) journey into the mind of Lewis himself. Although it is sadly unfinished, it is ubiquitious with Lewis's fascination with the unknown realms of science. It is a wonderful work of literature, as well as the other shorts contained in 'The Dark Tower.' If you are familiar with Lewis's epic Space Trilogy, I would strongly recommend reading the amasing sequel, 'The Dark Tower.'

The published, undisputed evidence that C.S. Lewis did not write "The Dark Tower", "The Man Boorn Blind", and, "Forms of Things Unkown" (all included in this collection) is overwhelming. Not to mention that anyone who has read Lewis can easily come to the obvious conclusion that the above "Lewis" collection is some sort of spin-off of the real Lewis. On the otherhand, "Shoddy Lords", "Ministering Angels", and "After Ten Years", are obviously genuine.