|
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book of profound relevance to the human condition, 17 Jan 2005
The language of this book is dated, but if you can overcome this distraction, it will introduce you to a perspective on the place and significance of human life that is awesome in its scope. This is a life changing book.Charles Williams writes in a clear and cogent style. He was a poet as well as novelist, critic and theologian, and the respect for words and language that this implies gives his writing a refreshing lightness and directness. For Charles Williams, human beings are of crucial and real significance in the Order of the whole of Existence, though there is a necessary development for each of us from ignorant and 'fallen' state to the redeemed and fully human condition. In a way all his books are about this transformational journey. In this novel, on entering into a kind of trance, a 'spiritualist' of some kind (not described in the book - and as a character he is of little importance in the novel) becomes the unconscious channel by which the archetypal Meanings and Forms that underlie and summarise material existence start to manifest into the material realm, gathering their different and multiple expressions into their own cohesive singularities. The hero of the book is required in his turn to become the original Adam, the first human, and essential mankind in all of us, and re-enact our common forefather's original balancing of the emergent creation by naming each material thing and thus re-endowing it with its particular and unique existence. Man, as the focus of creation, thus has a single but one function of summarising and unifying the manifestation of exoistence, and at the same time distinguishing it into its myriad vaied forms. The hero has a beloved, a female academic who sees no further than the arid re-creation of metaphysical reality in her own mind, and is therefore sceptical and limited in her understanding of the great events unfolding before her. The reality if the love between her and her beloved focuses the energy for him to achieve his 'Adam function' of restoring order to the manifest universe, and also saves her from annihilation in intellectual dryness. This is one of a series of the most extraordinary novels whose value goes far beyond their literary merits (which are many).
|
by Charles Williams
by Charles Williams
by Charles Williams
by Charles Williams
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
Amazon Home