Charles Williams as a novelist is largely forgotten in his native England, alas, but he is and always has been ‘big’ in the USA. I discovered his novels as a teenager and read them all, without in the least understanding them, for there is nothing in fiction quite like their adventurous spiritual profundity and richness, their urbane style and elegant prose, grammatically and syntacticially perfect without ceasing to be breathlessly exciting.

Williams was a publisher, a poet and a sometime guest lecturer at Oxford University, which position he held thanks to his great friends and fellow Oxford Inklings, Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He was a man of unusual genius in several kinds of writing, including literary criticism, theology and his seven remarkable novels, of which War in Heaven was the first, published in 1930.

I am currently engaged in a re-reading of all seven, and have just started War in Heaven, having finished Descent into Hell and All Hallow’s Eve. War in Heaven is perhaps the easiest and most accessible of these seven theological and philosophical ‘thrillers’, concerning as it does the discovery of the Holy Grail in the vestry safe of a quiet country church in the fictional village of Castra Parvulorum (or, as the OS maps refer to it, Fardles), the Archdeacon’s encounter with the legendary Prester (Presbyter) John, and the doings of Sir Giles Tumulty, one of the most satisfyingly wicked of all fictional villains. He was so satisfactory a villain that Willliams used him again, in Many Dimensions.

What drew me as a teenager to War in Heaven and Williams’s other novels, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t really understand them? All I can do is quote Housman and say that through these pages there blew “into my heart… from that far country” an air, not that kills, but that brought life and wonder and joy, and has kept me returning to these books down the years.

Williams’s great friend, C. S. Lewis, once wrote that Williams had the great and very rare gift of creating believable and interesting and unforgettable ‘good’ characters, as well as truly memorable evil ones. It’s just a pity that one has to send of to America to get hold of these wonderful novels, satisfying but decidedly not easy reading.