Many Dimensions

Many Dimensions is a supernatural novel by Charles Williams, published in 1931 though its composition belongs to the years around 1930, when Williams was working as an editor at Oxford University Press in London. It is one of the seven novels he wrote between 1930 and 1945, a body of work that Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis both admired and that he called, in effect, spiritual thrillers: stories in which the ordinary modern world is suddenly invaded by something from the order of the sacred. In this case the invading object is the Stone of Suleiman, said to be the stone from the crown of Solomon, which has come into the possession of the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Giles Tumulty's collector's cabinet, and the intrigues of the British and the East.

The Stone has the power to move through space, to heal, and to cross time, and each of its capacities can be turned to good or to ruin. The book's central question is what human beings do when handed enormous power that is not theirs by right. Government officials want to exploit it, a scientist wants to study it, a financier wants to monetize it, and Tumulty himself wants to dominate with it. Against them Williams sets Chloe Burnett, whose capacity for what he elsewhere calls the practice of exchange, bearing another's burden and letting one's own be borne, proves the only right relation to the Stone. The novel works out in plot a conviction Williams held throughout his writing: that power is safe only where it is subordinated to love, and that love is not sentiment but a discipline of substitution and coinherence, one person's life placed within another's. Williams treats the Stone as a kind of image of the divine will itself, which has no single face to those who handle it wrongly and a single intention to those who submit to it.

The book has endured chiefly among readers who have come to Williams through Lewis and Tolkien's circle, the Inklings, and for the way it dramatizes theology without lecturing. It is an early and relatively accessible entry into Williams's thought, anticipating the fuller treatment of coinherence and exchange in Descent into Hell and The Figure of Beatrice. Its pacing is brisk, though its prose can be elliptical, and its moral seriousness never slackens.

Who should read this: readers who enjoy metaphysical fiction and want to see how a theologian-novelist makes spiritual claims concrete through story, especially those curious about Williams's doctrine of exchange before tackling his heavier prose. It is not for those who want a straightforward thriller, nor for anyone who expects Williams to explain his ideas rather than stage them.