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C. Williams

The Place of the Lion Paperback – February 14, 2003

by Charles Williams (Author)

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Print length

244 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Regent College Publishing
Publication date

February 14, 2003
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5 x 0.55 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1573831085
ISBN-13

978-1573831086
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Charles Williamsnovelist, poet, critic, dramatist and biographerdied in his native England in May, 1945. He had a lively and devoted following there and achieved a considerable reputation as a lecturer on the faculty of Oxford University. T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis were among his distinguished friends and literary sponsors. He was also a member of the Inklings, a group of Christian writers that included J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.

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Product details

Publisher : Regent College Publishing (February 14, 2003)
Language : English
Paperback : 244 pages
ISBN-10 : 1573831085
ISBN-13 : 978-1573831086
Item Weight : 9.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5 x 0.55 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,816,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #61,012 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #165,200 in Fantasy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
92 ratings

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5 star		43%
4 star		28%
3 star		16%
2 star		3%
1 star		10%

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Nathan Smith

Odd but Enjoyable

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019

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This is a review of the edition published by Benediction Classics 2010. Dark cover with inset realistic picture of lion's face on the front. Paperback.

Odd story. I think if I was more up on my platonic philosophy and the person of Abelard I would enjoy it more. Its somewhat difficult to grasp some of the concepts.

I enjoyed the writing, the style. Maybe a little verbose at times but overall enjoyable. It is set in a small English town and reminds me of other books set in the pre-WWII English towns - such as HG Wells Invisible Man or Food of the Gods. Great lines here and there: "Where they were going he could not tell, but they went with glory..." Very poetic. Enjoyable.

This particular edition has a lot of odd typos - spaces within words. They are on many, many pages. Example: "but neither would sh e avoid them." Sometimes two or three on a line. You can read through it pretty easily but if I were to buy it again I would certainly look for a different edition. The book is well put together and in good shape otherwise. A sturdy paperback that will withstand numerous reads.

Overall I marked off 1 star for the weirdness of the story/heavy reliance on Plato (which for some would be a benefit) and one star for the typos in this edition.

I read this because of Charles Williams' connection with CS Lewis, that (reportedly) Lewis was heavily influenced by Williams's novels. I've read Descent into Hell and War in Heaven previously. I did not find those to be major obvious influences on Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, but there are obvious parallels with Place of the Lion. Glad I read it.

5 people found this helpful

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J. Matthew Melton

Partial sunshine in overcast skies

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2019

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Given the high praise this work of Charles Williams received from CS Lewis and others, I expected to like it. Other offerings by Williams I have read (All Hallows Eve, The Figure of Beatrice) I have enjoyed. This one proved a chore. Williams tasked himself heavily with putting Plato’s Forms into the world and therefore into words, and though his flights of description and altered perception are sometimes achingly poetic, at other times they are simply laughably dense, more like an artificial forest on a 60s film set than the real thing. The plot is also spare and the characters intentionally confined in their range of choices and actions. It’s a fascinating thought experiment that tips toward the psychedelic. Some few brilliant passages almost, but not quite, redeem it.

3 people found this helpful

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Patricia D

Imaginative - depicts forces of good and evil

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2017

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Strange... I remember the story line, but not whether it was told in first, second or third person. I read this book because of my love of CS Lewis. This is one of the books that he read. It spoke to him spiritually, and he seemed to be quite affected by it. An unusual fantasy, depicting the forces of good and evil. Unusual twists and turns. Very imaginative writing and plot.

8 people found this helpful

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Middlebrow

Mystic but compelling

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2018

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The archetypes or Angelicals such as the Lion., pterodactyl which has a Vuture nature, and a Butterflyh have invaded the English Countryside and must be encouraged to leave. People respond to a particular archetype in accordance with the level of goodness in their nature. i don't understand a lot of what the author says but I found the book compelling.

5 people found this helpful

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Sveti

Full of mistakes!

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2020

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It's a lousy reprint. It has so many mistakes that sometimes it's difficult to read. I wish I had payed the regular price and got a nice, professional edition, rather than this cheap, amateurish reprint. Who ever put it out, didn't even bother to read through and correct the mistakes that OCR software made (I guess that's how they did it).

2 people found this helpful

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Rod Zinkel

Multiple Meanings in The Place of the Lion

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2009

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In The Place of the Lion Williams writes an elaborate Revelations kind of prophecy, blending realism with the supernatural and symbolic. The place of the lion is earth; the lion is both a Form for the supernatural beings medievalists called Intelligences, and the symbol for man, as the lion in the story is a hybrid of both. This is the opposite of what Williams' friend, C.S. Lewis, made of the lion in The Chronicles of Narnia, where it symbolized God. In Williams' book this is the eagle. The eagle is also the Form the protagonist, Anthony, identifies with, if not interchanges with. Other animals represent multiple meanings too, such as the snake is a literal threat to Anthony, as well as a Form, such as Aristotle called it, for the supernatural force to come into our world, and the symbol for Satan or evil.

The mixture of meanings reflects the theme of the other world opening up into, and destroying, this world. Williams portrays the chaos and confusion this could cause, and the various kinds of reactions by characters. The most substantial characters - Anthony, Damaris, his beloved, and his friend Quentin - all have some knowledge of the supernatural world as depicted in literature and the Bible, but they don't necessarily believe it until it impinges on their world. For instance, Damaris studies and writes her thesis on medieval literature, specifically Abelard. She is aware of the religious beliefs of the period, but she does not share them. They are only of academic interest. It is only after an encounter in which Abelard comes alive, and becomes death, that she realizes the truth - that Abelard was real, not just an historical figure or concept.

Williams integrates his interest in philosophy and literature without becoming overbearing or too obscure (a criticism made by friends of other works of his). Christianity is the true account to which the story conforms, but it also incorporates Plato's Ideas, Aristotle's Forms, and the argument between universals and specifics that Abelard became noted for, at least in his own autobiography.

8 people found this helpful

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Lex

The novel that grabbed CS Lewis's attention

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2019

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‘All music was the scattered echo of that voice; all poetry was the approach of the fallen understanding to that unfallen meaning.’
This was the novel that made such an impact on CS Lewis that he wrote to the author and that generated such a deep and respectful friendship between the two men. Lewis later said it was like reading George Macdonald for the first time. Williams and Lewis became firm friends and, having read this 1931 novel, it’s easy to see how Williams’ strange, supernatural mystery-thriller had a shaping influence on the Narnia stories - even if only to affirm the supernatural-natural cross-over as one continuous reality in a work of fiction. The difference is that in Williams’ story the foreground setting is the ordinary world of the 1930s, and the other world keeps breaking into it. In the Narnia stories the characters are taken out of this ordinary world and into the ‘supernatural’, as it were. Here, ‘Narnia’ both good and evil, keeps infiltrating, invading, infesting the regularity of our world, cutting telephone lines, morphing the landscape, producing strange ‘mighty’ beasts that either fight for or against redemptive processes.
I’ve never read a novel with so many ‘special effects’ that seem almost a century ahead of their time. Williams often imagines what we are now used to seeing in sci-fi and horror movies. Landscapes shift, electric fire outlines footsteps, rows of buildings collapse or burst into flames without burning out, terror is loosed upon the world and those who are on the side of good, protected by a supernatural eagle, under whose wings they need not fear, need to overcome, by resisting, the forces of evil, who destroy those who surrender to them.
It’s a classic story of Good v. Evil but with a definite mystical Christian emphasis (although highly fictionalised in a kind of fantasy-horror genre that I’ve never read before). How many novels have you read where a mysterious power of good sweeps into a little church gathering while they are breaking bread, and is followed by this exchange:
Richardson (passing by): ‘I hope you had a happy service?’
They both looked at him with delight. ‘Now that’s very kind,’ the old gentleman said. ‘Thank you sir, it was a very beautiful service.’
‘Beautiful.’ the old lady said. She hesitated, fumbling with her umbrella; then, taking sudden courage, she took a step towards Richardson and went on, ‘You’ll excuse me sir, I know it’s old-fashioned, and you being quite a stranger, but – are you saved?’
Downside: sometimes truly chronic sentence construction (odd for an OUP editor, which was his day job). Once or twice I got a bit lost in terms of where we were in the story, but flicking to and fro in the pages soon set me right side up. So you’ll need to read continuously rather than put it down for a few days and then hope to pick it up again. Also, the imagistic representation of Christian ideas might strike you as more classical (Greek) than evangelical but it’s a work of fiction aiming more for dramatic impact rather than theological precision (cf. The Great Divorce by CSL).

3 people found this helpful

R. Bradford

How serious is your metaphysics?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 13, 2013

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I can't claim to be an expert on The Inklings, of which Charles Williams was one - the more famous members being C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien, of course. This certainly is no usual book. As a novel it does not stand up at all, but then it was clearly not supposed to. The novel structure is merely an artifice for the presentation of metaphysical/religious ideas. From my limited knowledge it seems consistent with The Inklings perspective in that the theme is essentially a challenge regarding how seriously you can take metaphysical ideas. Very seriously indeed, is, I suspect, The Inklings' answer, and certain this is so here. In the book, Platonic ideals, or Angelic Powers, actually become physically manifest. That they also create havoc in the world is rather a strained notion but, I guess, it is the only way of inserting the dramatic element essential for the novel structure. The great Naming denouement very much reminded me of Aslan's naming of the animals in Narnia. I wonder if this was conscious or unconscious on C.S.Lewis's part (the Narnia books being later). The book is easy enough to read - as long as you do not attempt to make sense of every sentence.

7 people found this helpful

Leonard Beckett

A Poor Reproduction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2020

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A poor reproduction of the original text. The book itself is of poor quality - appears to have been published at home - and there seems to be several spelling mistakes and grammatical errors inside.

Katherine Austin

... found myself being led on an enjoyable if somewhat easy paced encounter

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2016

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Once I adapted my brain to the language I found myself being led on an enjoyable if somewhat easy paced encounter.

3 people found this helpful

D Glover

Things and Thoughts

Reviewed in Canada on July 6, 2009

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As others have noted before, this book is hard to classify. It is part thriller, part romance, part science fiction (or more appropriately, theological/philosophical science fiction), part social commentary, part mystery, a little horror, and that doesn't really cover it. The premise of the book is that a brilliant and perhaps somewhat mad man finds a medieval manuscript through which he discovers a way to use his body as a portal to the realm of archetypes, the great ideas behind the experienced realities of our world (or the realities behind the shadows and forms of our world) and in so doing, the archetypes enter our world through the conduit of his conscience and the vortex of his house and begin swallowing up its forms and thereby destroying reality as we experience it. Some welcome and aid this hoping to further their own personal (and petty evil) agendas for power or revenge but are essentially dupes used by the archetypes and then discarded. Others welcome it seeing it as some sort of salvation from the physical world. Most people are oblivious to what is really going on, explaining away supernatural phenomena in terms of oddities of what they perceive as the purely physical world. A very few come to see it for the evil that it is and work against it.

One of the charms of this story is that such a cosmically catastrophic event unfolds itself in a quaint little English village and the process does not advance much beyond the bounds of that little corner of the world before the very ordinary protagonist begins to fight back (or be used by the archetypes of goodness and wisdom to combat this assault of the natural world by hostile archetypes like power and subtlety). Salvation for the village, and by extension the world, is found when the protagonist and his previously self-absorbed scholastic girlfriend step into their roles as a type of Adam and Eve and he exercises dominion over the creation with her help (not unlike C.S. Lewis's space trilogy). The idea that the power to resist the undoing of this world comes through such mundane and ordinary means as human love and friendship (for example, modern mass-market housing projects crumble for having had no one living and relating in them but an old flat is protected for having had two close friends living, conversing, relating together there over the years) is written beautifully. The people, things and spaces of the world are saved only as they have associations with and "memories" of genuine human relationship which is itself a reflection of the nature of God.

This is an intriguing book and I quite enjoyed it, though at times I found myself thinking I would likely get more out of it if I had more background in medieval Roman Catholic theology and the philosophical schools which influenced it. I found some of the dialogue a bit more airy and theoretical than seemed plausible at such active and cataclysmic moments of the story in which it was placed. However, the author's ability to describe epiphany or repentance/conversion moments with a mix of human thought and emotion, dawning spiritual awareness and underlying spiritual realities is nearly unparalleled in anything I've read.

As with other Inklings, the author's love for simple, ordinary, physical life and the profound spiritual goodness, joy and grace to be found in the midst of it comes through clearly. This has made me want to read more of Charles Williams. However, if you still want to be able to read contemporary Christian fiction, avoid books like this as it will only serve to emphasize just how trite and trashy most of what passes as Christian fiction today really is.

For some more excellent fiction with similar themes, try The C. S. Lewis Space Trilogy-3-Copy Boxed Set .

2 people found this helpful

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