Descent into Hell

Descent into Hell is a novel by Charles Williams, published in 1937 and the sixth of the seven supernatural thrillers he wrote between 1930 and 1945. Williams was an editor at Oxford University Press, a poet, a critic, and a lay Anglican, and a member of the Inklings circle around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The book is set in Battle Hill, a suburb of London, where a company of amateurs is rehearsing a verse play by the poet Peter Stanhope, and where a historian named Lawrence Wentworth, a young woman named Pauline Anstruther, and a dead man who walked the hill centuries before are drawn into a pattern none of them has chosen to see.

Williams's argument is carried by the plot rather than stated outright. Pauline is haunted by her own doppelgänger and cannot bear to meet it. Stanhope, the playwright, offers her the doctrine at the center of the book: that we are commanded to carry one another's burdens, and that this exchange is meant literally. He proposes to take her fear into himself, and she learns to let another carry what she cannot. Wentworth moves the opposite way. Jealous of a rival scholar and obsessed with a phantom of a woman he desires, he makes a series of small refusals of other people and of reality, each one a choice to prefer a private image to a real person, until the self closes around nothing. Williams treats heaven and hell as the working out of ordinary acts of love and self-regard, not as distant places, and he gives the Dantean idea of substitution, the exchange of burdens, a practical and almost domestic form. The book's weight falls on the mundane: a rehearsal, a quarrel over a promotion, a girl afraid to turn around on a stair.

The novel has lasted because it makes theology felt in the way most theologians cannot. It sits inside a larger body of Williams's work on coinherence, the idea that Christians live in and for one another as the Persons of the Trinity do, and it stands as one of the most concrete treatments of that idea in modern fiction. T. S. Eliot praised Williams and wrote an introduction to a later Williams novel, All Hallows' Eve, and Lewis wrote about Williams with great admiration. The book is strange, dense, and sometimes obscure, and it rewards slow reading.

Who should read this: readers who already enjoy Lewis, Tolkien, or Dorothy Sayers and want to meet the most theologically ambitious member of their circle, and anyone seeking a serious imaginative treatment of bearing one another's burdens or of how small choices form the soul. It is not for readers who want a fast thriller or a straightforward allegory, and it is a poor first introduction to Williams for anyone unwilling to tolerate ambiguity and an elliptical style.