When you’re writing fiction, you want to do more than “tell a story.” You want to tell a good story, a powerful story. You want to write something people can’t put down. C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces provides an example of how you can write such a book even without using all the conventional devices.
In other words, Lewis manages to get a lot of fiction-writing tips wrong and still write an interesting book.
A Word About Genre
When we think of “page turners,” we often think of genre fiction—you know, spy thrillers, horror, adventure, mystery, etc. When we write genre fiction, we center the plot and rely on raising the question, “What’s going to happen next?”
Some of my favorite genre novels are Fahrenheit 451, The Long Goodbye, Red Harvest, The Lord of the Rings, The Pendragon Cycle, and The Dark Knight Returns.
Most of us have at least a few examples of realistic fiction that fulfill this criterion, too. When writing realistic fiction, though, character tends to be central. The compelling question is more like, “What will she do next?” or “Can you forgive her?”
(For the record, we listened to Trollope’s novel of that title on audiobook and concluded that no, we could not forgive her; it was a tedious story told in a tedious way. Anthony, you’re better than that!).
My favorites of realism are too numerous to list but include Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Gilead, and War and Peace.
In the old days (as in, only 100 years ago or so), we called genre fiction romance, which meant “an adventure story featuring sensational subject matter or events.” Ancient and medieval romance tended to have gods and spirits showing up to move things along. Modern romance might have pirates, aliens, evil corporations, terrorists, and so on.
Or hot guys who can’t keep their shirts buttoned and babes who hold their fingers on their lips seductively. But that’s a different kind of romance.
Classifying Till We Have Faces
Though Lewis published Till We Have Faces in 1956, it’s best classed with the ancient romances. Much of the real action is initiated by a god rather than the human protagonist. The transformation comes after completing arbitrary tasks rather than through inner work, or rather, for Lewis, the inner work is instigated not by the protagonist confronting a problem but by a god confronting the protagonist.
It’s modern both in its re-imagining of its source material and in that it’s also a novel of ideas. To write a novel of ideas, of course, means to orient the action around some question that is often explicitly debated by characters in the story. It makes the reader ask, “Who is right about this?” or “What’s the answer to this problem?”
Lewis’s question is, “Why does God remain silent when we appeal to him with our problems?”
For a writer of fiction, Till We Have Faces is an interesting case study in the relationship between dramatic action and theme because he “breaks” several rules.
The Dramatic Action
The book is a retelling/reimagining of the myth of Psyche and Eros which appears in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. Basically, Aphrodite wants to kill Psyche over jealousy of her beauty, but Eros falls in love with her and protects her under condition that she never try to look upon him when he visits her at night. Psyche’s sisters, however, trick her into sneaking a peak.
This causes her to lose Eros’s favor and her nice new palace. Eventually, she overcomes a series of impossible trials before she is turned into a goddess and reunited with her lover.
Depending how you read it, it’s a love story between a god and a human or an allegory for the relationship between the mind and the heart or the soul and god.
In Lewis’s Hands
In Lewis’s version, Psyche’s sister Orual tells the tale from the first-person POV. This allows Lewis to make his main character a kind of stand-in for a modern, 20th-century reader, i.e., someone who doesn’t believe in the ancient gods, or more aptly, someone who doubts their goodness. The theme concerns Orual’s efforts to free herself from superstition and to become more “Greek” like her tutor, the Fox.
Most of the action plays out as a familiar tale of feudal politics and family life: a capricious, temperamental king, concern for producing an heir, negotiating alliances and peace with neighboring kingdoms, and so on. Orual takes an interest in swordplay and trains secretly, which becomes useful for her later on.
The central event, as in the myth, is when the people demand the sacrifice of Psyche to dispel the problems besetting the kingdom (including lions!). Orual later discovers Psyche alive and claiming to live in a palace with a husband who only visits her at night. The only problem? As far as Orual can see, Psyche lives under a tree dressed in rags. This “husband” most probably is a bandit hiding out in the mountains.
Well, things go as in the source tale. Orual convinces Psyche to test her husband, which leads to the destruction of Psyche’s new life and her exile to unknown lands. Orual is told that she, too, is now Psyche.
Then comes dozens of pages in which relatively little happens outside of some affairs in which Orual takes over as queen and sorts out some things her father never could. Only in Part II, which is about 1/4 the length of all of Part I, does something really change. And this is where Lewis is being most ancient.
Deus ex Machina: A Fiction-Writing Sin
Orual begins to receive visions that force her to reinterpret her whole life and her understanding of who Psyche was, who the gods are, and what truth is.
In other words, the climax is instigated not by the protagonist but by a literal deity. This is a fiction-writing no-no.
Way back in the Poetics, even Aristotle expressed a preference for endings that were precipitated by the action of the beginning and middle (actually, he stated it as a precept, but it’s obviously a preference). He called the other kind of ending a deus ex machina, meaning “god in the machine,” referring to a literal machine that could lower a god character onto the stage from above.
(Okay, he called it apò mēkhanês theós because he was Greek, but nowadays we use the Latin word-for-word form, called a calque.)
Aristotle objected that this was an artificial way to resolve your plot problems, and for most of literary history writers and readers have largely agreed. It’s a little like finding out the whole story was a dream. It’s unsatisfying because it means the author can do whatever she wants to wrap up her story rather than have to deal with the implications of the world, characters, events, and themes she set up.
Think of it like setting up 1,000 dominoes in an elaborate pattern and then, rather than knocking over the first one to see if they all fall as they should, you sweep them up with a push broom and declare, “Look, all the dominoes have fallen.”
Orual’s Visions
Orual’s visions come upon her from without in a very deus ex machina manner. She has mostly ordered her kingdom and her life, but she is still unhappy. The only action she really takes is to go on a short vacation. On her journey, she meets some people who begin to poke holes in her self-concept.
From then on, it’s the gods that initiate the action. Orual’s role is to respond. The last 60 pages are like an elaborate dream in which she receives the answer she demanded of the gods. Or at least she learns why the gods had not answered her.
Why It Still Works
Let me caveat this by saying I would understand that a reader uninterested in philosophy, Greek mythology, or Christianity/spirituality might struggle with this book. It depends upon a certain kind of reader, for sure.
If you know the source tale, then you have likely been reading at least partly with the questions “How will he change it?” and “Where will x detail show up?” in mind, and that can propel you forward pretty well.
Even not knowing the source, you’re waiting for Psyche to show up again. You know she can’t be out of the picture for good.
But probably the people most into this book will be the thinkers, the ones who can enjoy a good novel of ideas. We want to see what Lewis has to say about philosophy, mythology, and religion. We want to see if Orual’s question, which is a very serious question, ever gets an answer.
That’s because the strength of Lewis’s novel is not in the quality of the writing (which is above average but not brilliant) or the interest of the plot or the depth of the characters. It is in the depth of the question at its heart: Why doesn’t God give us answers to our questions?
As I said in a previous post, Lewis is interested in matters of the soul.
Not only this, but Lewis avoids easy answers. He actually introduces a character—Orual’s tutor, the Fox—whom we assume for most of the story is the voice of reason and, thus, “right.” As events unfold, however, even the Fox has his moment of insight.
One of the most interesting aspects of Till We Have Faces is how nobody gets it right. In fact, that’s why the gods have to initiate the climactic action; no one could do it on their own.
The Lesson for Writing Fiction
The lesson for writing fiction, then, is that a good strength covers many sins. Readers will forgive all manner of faults if there’s something strong enough to keep them reading.
You need to be strong in style or character or plot or theme or somewhere. But you don’t need to be strong everywhere.
You do need to know yourself (there’s another good Greek idea). You have to know where you’re strong and where you’re weak. How to get everything out of your strengths. How to minimize your weaknesses while knowing they’ll never totally disappear.
Another lesson is that you need to know your audience. This book will not engage all readers alike, but that’s okay. It has found its audience. I still hear people mention it in some circles. Your book doesn’t need to be a bestseller to be valuable to the right readers.
For help playing to your strengths and mitigating your faults in your fiction writing, let’s talk about a developmental review.
