Читать книгу The Place of the Lion - Charles Williams - Страница 3

Mr. Gollanz does well to reprint The Place of the Lion, first published sixteen years ago, in his Connoisseur's Library of Strange Fiction. A scholar, a poet and a novelist, the late Charles Williams was one of the most remarkable men of letters of our times. As a novelist he was entirely original, and in his novels he found place not only for his fantastic imagination but also for his scholarship and his poetry, besides wit and serenity of mood, the rarest quality in contemporary writing. His novels were always thrillers, but intellectual, philosophical, theological thrillers in which the super-natural agents of good and evil fight out their eternal battle for the soul of man.

In The Place of the Lion, the action of which takes place in a small town in the Home Counties, it is as though the Platonic Forms of the animal—lions, serpents, eagles, horses, unicorns—have come out of Heaven to draw into themselves all the earthly manifestations of their species and with them the souls of those men and women who seek the qualities symbolised by them. The painted veil that is life in Hertfordshire is being torn asunder by the reality behind it. Mr. Williams secures that "willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith" in the reader not by a careful attention to naturalistic detail such as Kafka, for example, used in his symbolical novels, but by a Blake-like hallucinatory quality of vision; he sees—and makes the reader see—with an almost overpowering intensity the Form of the lion, the serpent, the eagle and so on. So that to read Mr. Williams is not only to be excited; it is to be moved in a quite unusual way, to be made aware, momentarily at any rate, of the transitoriness and arbitrariness of the painted veil, to be convinced of realities that lie behind it. It is like living in a gallery of Blake's paintings. Mr. Williams was not interested in human nature for its own sake, but, as in this novel, he could create heroes and heroines of sufficient life and charm to carry his supernatural story. One day a serious estimate of Mr. Williams's work in fiction must be made. Meanwhile, one is grateful for the chance to read again this dazzlingly brilliant book.