War In Heaven: A Novel

By Charles Williams

In War in Heaven Williams gives a contemporary setting to the traditional story of the Search for the Holy Grail. Examining the distinction between magic and religion, this eerily disturbing book graphically portrays a metaphysical journey through the shadowy crevices of the human mind.

“Reading Charles Williams is an unforgettable experience.”—SATURDAY REVIEW

“...one of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.”—TIME

“Charles Williams’s firm conviction that the spiritual world is not simply a reality parallel with that of the material one, but is rather its source and its abiding infrastructure, is explicit in both the manner and matter of all he wrote. Hence the unique contribution offered by his novels to the materialistic age in which these characters live and behave and their plots unfold.”—OWEN BARFIELD

“Charles Williams took the form of the thriller and used it to create an extraordinary genre that has sometimes been called ‘spiritual shockers.’ His books are immensely worth reading, even if you consider yourself unspiritual and immune to shock.”—HUMPHREY CARPENTER

“...satire, romance, thriller, morality, and glimpses of eternity all rolled into one.”—THE NEW YORK TIMES

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787200463

Charles Williams

Charles Williams (1909–1975) was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years before leaving to work in the electronics industry. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime. Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay. Williams died in California in 1975. 

Reviews for War In Heaven

[ganeshaka · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This "supernatural thriller" (according to the blurb on the cover) concerns a sort of a hapless Monty Python-esque rugby scrimmage over the possession of the Holy Grail. Two opposing teams of dry and bloodless English types (a minor Lord, a publishing clerk, an archdeacon, a retired business magnate, etc.) flail away in an attempt to obtain and employ the sacred chalice as they see fit, whether for beneficence or black magic.The story opens, in the offices of a publishing house, with an unlikely and unsolved murder, and its mystery spreads and darkens, like blood on a shag carpet, to include all sorts of cranks and true believers - eventually, even, the spirit of Prester John - in a gray cape. The unedited proof of a book in the office/murder scene contains a paragraph which purports to locate the Holy Grail. The murder mystery then morphs into weird sport as the story centers on the Grail which is apparently as difficult to retain as a greased pig.Williams, I'll concede, is a masterful writer, and can create a scene, spin a tale, and describe a mood. But I can't imagine who would be interested in the spiritual objectives and theological pondering of the novel's characters except for a few nerdy seminary students. For me, the experience was a combination Yawn in Heaven, Dan Brown dressed up in a stylish tuxedo, and a flashback to mandatory religious education classes. Frankly, I couldn't give a damn.

[ashleytylerjohn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Maybe I was too young for it? But it never really grabbed me (and I was reading Dickens and Eliot in grade school!)

[poquette_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charles Williams, who died in 1945 and who is associated in memory with J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the Inklings, wrote a group of novels — dubbed "supernatural thrillers" by T.S. Eliot — but which were in fact much more than that. If War in Heaven is typical of Williams' output, it is hard not to throw in satire and morality tale as descriptors as well.The story begins in a publishing firm's offices where a body has been found after lunch under the desk of one of the clerks. No one seems to know the victim, and amidst general befuddlement the police are called and an investigation ensues. The reader is given a broad hint early on about the identity of the killer, who turns out to be a very mean-spirited individual, who meddles in the black arts and wouldn't care if he destroyed everyone in his nefarious pursuits. Who the criminal is becomes less interesting than wondering whether in the long run he is going to get away with murder and his evil intentions. It happens that a book is about to be published by the firm which indicates that the Holy Grail is actually in the possession of a small country church. A few days after the murder, the clergyman attached to said church happens to be visiting the offices to deliver a manuscript. Almost in passing, the editor suggests the clergyman might find a chapter concerning the Grail to be of interest. He hands him the proofs and the clergyman, upon learning that it is his church that possesses the Grail, is interested indeed.From there, the Grail immediately becomes the focal point of the novel. Solution to the murder takes second place. Several people seem to have a vested interest in the Grail, and some for pernicious reasons. The Grail is stolen, recovered, lost and found, and all the while it is used for both black magic and righteous purposes.Whether you call this a fantasy or a supernatural thriller or a send-up of the genre, it is an entertaining read. I was mildly amused for the most part, and even envisioned a dark comedy in which all the parts are played by Alec Guinness. But at the end the story takes a dark turn and at that point it seemed not to be quite so satirical as it seemed at the beginning.

[atimco-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On this, my second foray into the labyrinth of Charles Williams's mind, I find myself still wondering what to make of the man. His work has always been described to me vaguely as "dark" (though he has the saving grace, literarily speaking, of being known as one of the Inklings and that is the principal reason I read him). In The Greater Trumps I noticed an oddly opaque quality to his spirituality, which he of course uses to great effect, building the tension to create a thriller of unusual depth. There is something unpredictable and almost occultic about Williams's imagination; it gives me a sense of ominous dread. The gates of Hell might just prevail against us.War in Heaven, arguably Williams's best-known novel, is a combination of orthodoxy and bold upsets. It almost convinces you at the beginning that it's going to be a murder mystery, until Williams shifts gears abruptly and we have the murderer talking about his crime in the calmest manner imaginable in the next chapter. This is going to be much darker than mere murder, the reader intuits, and so it is. I think Williams is about as far as I'll go in the literature of horror.This is Williams's contribution to the mythology of the Holy Grail (or, as he calls it, the Graal). In his version, the Graal is an object that has accidentally absorbed a great amount of mystical energy by being in the right place at the right time; in itself it is nothing, but it contains incredible power. The action is centered around it, and part of the tension comes from our lack of knowledge regarding what it can really do.Fascinating, too, are the attempts to unmake the Graal (and the idea that the opposite of God is non-being). Some of the villains want to possess it and use its spiritual power in their Satanic rites, while the more farseeing wish only for its utter and complete obliteration. There is an intense scene in which, under attack from dark forces, the physical matter of the Graal actually starts shimmering away—until prayer shores it up again and it "defends itself." Destruction and annihilation negate Creation and are thus the final goals of the enemies of God.And yes, God. He is here, of course, but then again He isn't. His Graal is very much present, and there are some words of Scripture that the Archdeacon repeats throughout the book, but on the whole Heaven seems oddly silent against the roar of Hell. This adds, of course, to the unsettling tone of the story. If God isn't there to fight for us in the face of this monstrous evil, we are most certainly doomed. Glancing through the short bio on Williams in this copy, I see that he wrote other works, including a theological treatise on the Holy Spirit. Somehow I'm not surprised. He has a fascination—some, like J. R. R. Tolkien, would say an over-fascination—with spiritual warfare and the powers and principalities of the unseen realm. I wonder if his treatise is biblically sound? I can deduce some things about his beliefs from his fiction, but how much is his sense of dramatic mood coloring his real beliefs? I would like to read more of his work.In the midst of the element of horror and spiritual warfare, there are tiny pinpricks of humor. And yet they have a profundity behind them too—like when one of the villains is told, in quite an offhand manner by an apparently ignorant person, that Satanists are just about on the level of the clerk at a brothel. Or when the Archdeacon comments, "I should never dream of relying on people who made a practice of defying God—in any real sense. They'd be almost bound to lose all sense of proportion" (235–6). Indeed!I haven't read The Da Vinci Code so I can't venture any comparisons, though from seeing the film I can pick out some similarities. But I think they are superficial at most; based on the samples of Dan' Brown's writing that I've read and the various reviews that have picked him apart, I'd say the main difference between Brown and Williams is that Williams can actually write and there is actually some theological intelligence undergirding his action scenes. I get the sense that there are very real foundations to his thought that I am just not astute enough to really unearth.I plan to read more of Williams books, but spaced out from one another and over a long period of time. I don't know if I will ever really understand him completely, but he certainly knows the secrets of suspense, and the theological elements give his stories an added interest. An unusual book.