“Celibacy, Self-Acceptance, And the Extra Inkling”: I’m at First Things

readin’:

I’ve just finished Charles Williams’s 1937 novel Descent into Hell, which was recommended to me by a couple of Catholic friends. Williams might be called “the extra Inkling.” Everybody knows J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but far fewer people remember the other, less aggressively punctuated members of the club, including the philosopher Owen Barfield and Tolkien’s son Christopher.

Williams is the best-known of these auxiliary Inklings, and his writing is indeed what the youth of today call “extra.” It’s dense, clotted with time-bending clauses, full of switchbacks. Motives are interrogated and re-interrogated. The plot of Descent into Hell concerns a mysterious play being performed in a London suburb, on a hill with a bloody history of war and martyrdom.

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