Books: Return of the Grail

WAR IN HEAVEN (290 pp.)—Charles Williams—Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3).

“Dear me!” exclaims the archdeacon, and well he may. He has just been informed that the Holy Grail, the very chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, sits at that very moment in his own parish church at Fardles. The archdeacon rushes home and hides the battered old cup in a cupboard, but almost before he can say Sanctus he is conked cold, and the Grail is hijacked by one of the Devil’s disciples.

Before the Grail is restored to its keeper, the Prester John of early Christian lore, the reader sees murder done and a black mass sung, right in broad British daylight. In short, he enters the other world of Charles Williams (TIME, Nov. 8 et seq.), the English religious mystic who toward the end of his life (1945) set on paper a series of modern visions which he called novels (All Hallows’ Eve, Descent into Hell, etc.).

War in Heaven, the fourth of these to be published in the U.S., ranks with his best. It has the excitement of a good spy thriller, but as in all Charles Williams’ stories the figures in the chases and counter-chases are the fleshed souls of men & women, some striving to be saved, some bent on being damned. Not all readers will relish Williams’ metaphysics, or find his book easy to follow. But most will know they have been in the company of a writer to remember.