All Hallows' Eve

All Hallows' Eve is the last of Charles Williams's seven supernatural novels, published in 1945, the year of his death. Williams was an editor at Oxford University Press and a member of the Inklings, and he wrote the book in wartime London. It opens with a woman named Lester Furnival, newly dead, standing on Westminster Bridge in a city that has been emptied of its living, slowly understanding that she has died in an air crash. The war and the bombing are the book's quiet background; its subject is the question of what happens to a person who meets death without having yet become herself.

The novel follows Lester and her friend Evelyn, also dead, as they wander the ghostly London of the afterlife, while the living characters Richard and Betty Furnival and the painter Jonathan Drayton are drawn into the orbit of Simon the Clerk. Simon is a charismatic false prophet who has taken power over the living and the dead, and he is determined to turn Betty into a spirit-servant. Williams builds the story on the theme he called coinherence, the Christian conviction that human beings are bound together in mutual exchange, bearing one another's burdens and living from one another's love. Lester must learn, after death, what she failed to learn in life: that she was loved, that she loved poorly, and that her freedom lies in giving and receiving rather than in possessing. Simon represents the opposite principle, the refusal of exchange and the desire to dominate and consume. The book treats damnation not as arbitrary punishment but as the final hardening of such a refusal, and it treats redemption as the opening of the self to others.

Williams wrote the book in the manner that distinguished all his fiction, treating the supernatural as an ordinary and intelligible part of the created order and drawing out its moral weight without sensation. T. S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction for the first edition, singled out its achievement in making the unseen world credible and doctrinally serious, and the novel has been valued since as the clearest narrative statement of Williams's theology of substitution and love.

Who should read this: Readers of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings who want to see the thought of the most theologically demanding member of the circle in its fullest imaginative form, and anyone drawn to Christian reflection on death, judgment, and the self. It is not for readers who want a fast-moving thriller or a plainly explained doctrine. The prose is compressed and often elliptical, the pace is contemplative, and the book rewards patience and rereading rather than a single quick pass.