disappointment

CS Lewis has become my newest enemy. Shame really, I’ve always had him in my top-five-most-personally-inlfuential-authors-of-all-time list. How could this about-turn – come – about? you scream hysterically. Well calm down my friends, and open up the wonder of short stories published post-mortem entitled The Dark Tower.

Some of them, it’s got to be said, are inoffensive. It’s been suggested too by Kathryn Lindskoog (Lewis scholar) that they might be forgeries, and I hope to God that they are, because two of these stories have tarnished my memory of Lewis forever. Now, while he had always betrayed mild misogynistic tendencies (that’s woman-hating to you and me), he had never demonstrated such profound disgust for women as in “The Shoddy Lands” and “Ministering Angels”. If I am kind, I might theorise that perhaps he wrote them during a week when he was feeling the grief that comes with being sent to Dumpsville – Population: Him. It is possible that there are further similar tales, and worse, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to read on. Well, “read on” is not quite accurate, as I have a habit not of reading collections of short stories from start to finish, but rather based on the most interesting title down to the least.

Short summary:

“The Shoddy Lands” is an inexplicable and poorly constructed science fiction fantasy tale where a woman-hating dolt finds himself inside the mind of the woman opposite him (his friend Durward’s fiancée), and discovers that there, she is a fifty-foot tall poster girl in a bikini, and where all things surrounding her are vague and insubstantial except, of course, for the clothes shops, bath crystals and cut flowers which signify her true passions. The story attempts a vague stab at self-justification in the closing paragraph:

…I am sorry for poor Durward. Suppose this sort of thing were to become common? And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?

Wow, imagine.

“Ministering Angels” is a pathetic attempt at a critical narrative satirising the “logical conclusion” of the moral decline of our culture. This is manifested in the sending of two women – one a thin, ugly (her gender at first impossible to decipher), educated, dull, narrow-minded psychologist, and a seventy-something obese prostitute – to a crew who are on a mission to Mars for three years, to provide sexual relief for them. This was a plan devised naturally by women back on earth, wot with the New Ethics an’ all, but the men on board were too repulsed to engage in any shenanigans with them. Presumably because it offended their sense of decency and not because they were mingers.

In more cheerful news, I am beginning to develop callouses on the fingers of my left hand, thus making my very body an impenetrable fortress against the attacks of my guitar strings.