C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is his last and his best novel, my favorite of his more than 40 books. (I have read all the books published in his lifetime and many of the posthumous publications.)
It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche transformed into a meditation on love, faith, and the blindness induced by our beliefs. It is a book that resists easy categorization: part myth, part psychological drama, part spiritual journey. More than any of his earlier fiction, it exposes how perception shapes reality and how love, when mixed with possessiveness, can turn divine beauty into human pain.
The novel’s narrator, Orual, is the older sister of Psyche, the princess whose beauty captivates their small, barbaric kingdom of Glome. Orual is plain, intelligent, brave, and fiercely loyal. She raises Psyche after their mother’s death and comes to love her with an intensity that borders on worship. When plague and famine strike the kingdom, the priest of Ungit declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to appease the goddess Ungit. Psyche is left on the Grey Mountain as a bride for the god of the West Wind. Orual’s world shatters.
From this point, the novel divides into two overlapping realities. Psyche, when Orual finds her again on the mountain, claims she is living in joy — rescued by a god who has taken her to a beautiful palace invisible to mortal eyes. She is radiant, serene, and transformed. Orual, however, sees only a desolate hillside and Psyche standing among the rocks and rain. To her, Psyche’s vision is madness born of trauma and loneliness.
The mountain scene is the central confrontation of the book and one of the most haunting moments in twentieth-century fiction. Two sisters stand side by side, both utterly sincere, both certain of what they see — and both right in a sense. Lewis captures the agony of divided perception: one person living in a reality of faith, the other trapped in the limits of sight.
When Psyche refuses to leave her invisible palace, Orual demands proof. She begs Psyche to disobey the god’s command and look upon him with a lamp while he sleeps. It is an act born of love but twisted by pride and fear. When Psyche does as her sister insists, the god’s wrath drives her into exile. Orual, realizing too late what she has done, spends the rest of her life haunted by guilt. “I did not know how I hated the gods,” she writes later. “I was their enemy for having loved too much.”
The second half of the novel follows Orual’s reign as Queen of Glome. She becomes a capable and just ruler, a woman who hides her face behind a veil and her heart behind the duties of power. Her wisdom and strength as a monarch contrasts sharply with her spiritual weakness as one who cannot forgive herself. Lewis shows her crown as both salvation and disguise: she fights for her kingdom with courage but never escapes the inner war with the gods. The political battles of her reign, defending Glome’s independence, administering justice, commanding loyalty, mirror her spiritual struggle for meaning. She wields authority outwardly while inwardly living in rebellion against divine authority.
What makes Till We Have Faces extraordinary is its moral and emotional honesty. Lewis does not offer easy redemption. Orual’s eventual vision — her final confrontation with the gods in a kind of dream-trial — reveals that her “complaint against the gods” was really a complaint against love itself. She wanted Psyche for her own; she could not bear a love that transcended her control. Only in the end, when her face is finally “given back” to her, when she sees herself truly, does she glimpse the divine beauty Psyche had seen all along. “How can they meet us face to face,” she asks, “till we have faces?”
Lewis’s prose in this novel is spare, rhythmic, and powerful. There is little of Narnia’s mythic brightness here; instead, he writes with the gravity of Greek tragedy. The landscape of Glome is as harsh and real as the human soul it represents. Every image — the mountain, the river, the dark temple of Ungit — serves as both physical place and psychological symbol.
Till We Have Faces a story of perception. The same scene on the mountain is heaven or rubble depending on the eyes that behold it. Psyche’s faith allows her to see the palace of the gods; Orual’s reason and jealousy reduce it to stone and mud. Between those two visions lies the entire struggle of belief. By the end, Orual’s reign, her power, her intelligence, and her love are all stripped bare until only one question remains: can the human heart bear to see truly?
In its depth and ambiguity, Till We Have Faces stands as Lewis’s best mature work in a widely varied corpus of brilliant books. It is a myth retold that is etched into my understanding of the world.
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