Till We Have Faces

"These fantasy books all seem to fit together in my mind around this theme. Along with others I’ve included a book by Australian fantasy writer Patricia Wrightson, called A Little Fear , and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. They also demonstrate the structural approach that I was talking about, where you confront fear. In the CS Lewis book, Till We Have Faces, there’s a striking line which reads, “How can we meet the Gods face to face till we have faces?” But I think you can also invert that and ask, ‘how can we meet the Gods face to face till they have faces?’ Because it’s the facelessness that is so terrifying. This was a complex pattern that I kept seeing over and over in various ways and tried to thread my way through."

"Everybody knows of C. S. Lewis because of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Space Trilogy . My controversial take is that the Narnia series is the point at which C. S. Lewis begins to get good. Till We Have Faces was C. S. Lewis’s last book. He considered it his best —we’re in agreement there. It’s his retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Many people might not know that C. S. Lewis also wrote a lot of religious nonfiction. In this book, not only do we see his love for Greek myth, we see him working out theology questions that he’s been pondering in his life, throughout his studies, and in his fiction. I absolutely love it because, first of all, it features one of the best female protagonists I’ve ever read. And that’s saying something, because when he started out in The Space Trilogy , he did not write women well at all. Till We Have Faces follows the character’s arc and her relationships from when she is a young girl to when she becomes an old woman. It’s especially about her relationship with her sister, who’s the one chosen by the gods. “Some have the gods being very present and meddling, and some have them more off to one side” Lewis has managed to ground it in a world that feels real: this quasi-Mediterranean ancient society in which the Cupid character and the Venus character are more like these older gods, but the idea there again is that you have the religion, the god, the structure, and everybody telling you this is the way it is. Then, when the actual manifestation of the real deity turns everything on its head, what do you do? Here the protagonist makes a really interesting choice: she denies it. Her sister is trying to say to her, ‘Look, I know all these things are true because I’ve experienced them.’ The protagonist can’t accept it because she can’t see things from her sister’s perspective. Then, for a moment, she’s shown everything that her sister sees, and she effectively says, “I can’t handle this,” and she backs away from it. And that’s where her story begins. That, to me, is fascinating. The whole change of her character, everything she has to deal with as a leader, the disappointments in her life and her achievements—all are done in a way that is incredibly thoughtful and incredibly profound, and shows that you can’t separate your relationship with the numinous from the things that are mundane in your life. They are always intertwined."