Godless heathenry

The next issue of Being Edit­ors will be about C.S.Lewis and Phil­lip Pull­man. As a sneak preview, and to give contrib­ut­ors an idea of what my own reli­gious (or more to the point, non-reli­gious) back­ground  is, here is the article I wrote which leads in to anoth­er about why That Hideous Strength is a guilty pleas­ure- if you’d like to contrib­ute, find out more here

That Hideous Strength has always been a weird guilty pleas­ure. I’m not a Chris­ti­an, never have been, and didn’t grow up in a reli­gious envir­on­ment. People enjoy the Narnia books because they’re good children’s books and writ­ten with charm and wit, and they don’t Jesus you too hard (except for the last one). That Hideous Strength is noth­ing like that, the plot is weirdly cobbled togeth­er, and it’s full of rail­ing against every single one of C.S.Lewis’ person­al bugbears as a sexist old Chris­ti­an univer­sity don of the 1950s, and he doesn’t both­er to hide it. The relent­less sexism, homo­pho­bia and evan­gel­ising makes me want to throw the book against the wall as the godless hell-bound pinko lefty I am, but it’s just so glee­fully bizarre that I actu­ally quite enjoy it and have re-read it count­less times.

Published
Categorised as Books, Zines
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