With all the fuss and furore surrounding Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, Charles Williams remains the poor relation among the Inklings, that group of Oxford intellectuals who regularly met over a pint at the pub to discuss their latest writings. Where Tolkien and Lewis both invented entire fantasy universes in which to set their epics, Williams works on a smaller scale, setting his books firmly in between-the-wars Middle England. For all that, he concerns himself just as much with the great archetypal myths as either of the other two: it's just that he puts them in an everyday context. Spiritual Thrillers, he liked to call them.
War in Heaven starts out as an Agatha Christie-type Murder Mystery among book publishers but rapidly turns out to be concerned with much bigger and darker forces - nothing less than the pursuit of the Grail, in fact (or, rather the Graal as Williams prefers to call it). This novel is, in many ways, a cousin of the roughly contemporaneous Dennis Wheatley Black Magic books. It has to be said that Williams is not quite as good at winding up the thrills and the tension as that master of plots and cliffhangers. Nevertheless, he takes us on an exciting enough ride through country-house gardens, rural churches, dubious London herbal retailers and peoples his tale with a varied collection of publishers, minor ecclesiastics, scheming villains and darkly evil Levantines. Only the appearance of the prester John, the slightly wimpish deus ex machina towards the end, rather lets the side down.
This is probably the best of the Charles Williams novels and makes for a good read. Many of the set-pieces come off particularly well. His ambitions are humbler than his Inkling contemporaries, but his books are none the worse for that - indeed, they lack a lot of the pretentiousness that often invades the others. And, if you enjoy War in Heaven, there is quite a collection of Williams' Spritual Thrillers to explore.
