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What it argues
Till We Have Faces is C.S. Lewis's retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, narrated by Orual — Psyche's older, plain-faced sister — who opens the novel with a formal complaint against the gods. Orual's account is her indictment: she loved Psyche faithfully and without limit, she did everything she could to protect her, and the gods repaid that love with cruelty and silence. It is a compelling and seemingly airtight case. Lewis spends the rest of the novel slowly, carefully dismantling it.
The book works in a register unusual for Lewis, who is better known for allegory and argument than for psychological realism. Here the central subject is self-deception — specifically, the way love can become a form of ownership, and how thoroughly the self can construct an honest-seeming account of its own motives that omits the ones it cannot bear to see. Orual is not a villain. She is worse: a woman who genuinely believes her own story, and whose suffering is real, but whose suffering has been inflicted on others as much as on herself.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel argues that love and possession can be psychologically identical from the inside — Orual's devotion to Psyche is real, and it is also a form of smothering ownership.
- 2.
Self-deception in the book is not lying but a genuine inability to see; Orual constructs a coherent, sympathetic narrative that excludes the evidence that would indict her.
- 3.
Lewis uses the Cupid and Psyche myth to investigate the problem of divine silence — the gods don't explain themselves, which can be indifference or can be something more demanding.
What it covers
Who wrote it
C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a British author and Oxford and Cambridge professor whose work spans literary criticism, Christian apologetics, fiction, and children's literature. He is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity, but considered Till We Have Faces — published in 1956, his last novel — his most mature and accomplished work. He and J.R.R. Tolkien were central members of the Inklings, an Oxford literary discussion group. Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, an experience he described in Surprised by Joy, and his faith is central to his fiction and nonfiction alike, though it operates differently in each.
