I often become like Orual. Vision replete with roiling chaos, I easily fixate on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ instead of that everlasting Who. Initially, it’s not a novel of youth, spring, or new things. It’s a novel of hindsight and old age—the wintertime of life. The narrator queen is like a pagan Solomon—a cynical monarch who has seen it all and, at the very last, finds redemption. Brilliant—and Bitter—Narrator Update: Just undone. I read this for the first time when I was 18, I think. In many ways, in the last 40 years I have lived it. Tonight I miss my Psyche, Emily.

Low Fantasy: The setting is fantastic, being a fictional city-state in Greek times, but is very grounded in reality. There are kings and princesses, but there's also bloody human sacrifice, cruelty, and violence. No one other than Orual actually sees a god, and their worship is bizarre and pagan, and we don't even know if the sacrifices accomplish anything.

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Till We Have Faces may be more obscure than some of Lewis’s other works, but its complexity and depth make it a challenging read for all the right reasons. The subtitle of the book is A Myth Retold, referring to the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Lewis provides a synopsis of the myth in an appended note. Till We Have Faces is by no means C. S. Lewis’s most popular work. The recent movies based on two of the Narnia books have probably given them a secure place as Lewis’s best known. Yet beyond the widely read Chronicles of Narnia, it’s still a better wager that any given person has read Mere Christianity, or The Screwtape Letters, or The Great Divorce, and probably even Lewis’s space trilogy, rather than Till We Have Faces. It is not the C. S. Lewis book that people know about. It is, however, the one Lewis called his favorite. Orual wakes up and lives for a few more days. In her last days, she continues to write in her book and she is mourned by those around her. Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The king of Glome is, perhaps understandably, simply the King to everyone, save for at the very beginning when he is introduced by his given name, Trom. Similarly, the elder priest of Ungit is simply the Priest. You have seen the torches grow pale when men open the shutters and broad summer morning shines in?” What About Us?

Blasphemous Praise: It's not made a large plot point in-story, but those familiar with the original myth will know it might not have been the smartest move for the Fox to say Istra is "prettier than Aphrodite herself." White Mask of Doom: Orual's veil is described as white, and the illustrations portray it as a white mask, featureless save for two eye holes. Both her enemies and her subjects find it creepy. Lewis expects that his readers will have at least a passing acquaintance with the story of Psyche and Cupid; he wants you to note the ways he’s changed or subverted or illuminated the original tale. If you don’t know that story, it’s well worth your time to read it before you dive in to Till We Have Faces! The novel starts with the narrator, an old woman who claims that she must speak against the Gods. She is an old woman and she no longer cares if something happens to her as a result. Then the narrator presents herself as being Oural, the daughter of the King that rules over Glome. Oural is hated by the god of the Grey Mountain but she does not reveal why. Lewis, Clive Staples (1956), Till We Have Faces (Hard Cover) (1sted.), London: Geoffrey Bles, ISBN 978-0-15-690436-0, A Myth RetoldI saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” In the Greeklands, the people recognize a single, abstract Divine Nature who controls providence and exists outside of physical reality. This makes the Divine Nature impersonal, so the Greek known as Fox scoffs at intercessory prayer and idol worship as baseless superstitions. Some of Glome's priests come around to Fox's views, but non-intellectuals have no need for such a safe and uninvolved god.

It is presented as the record — and the formal complaint against the gods — of Orual, daughter of the King of Glome, a pagan kingdom to the north of ancient Greece. Her father, hot-tempered and prone to violence, has little love for his three daughters, least of all for ugly Orual. Her only friends in the palace are her beautiful half-sister Istra and her tutor, a Greek slave who she only knows as "the Fox". Lewis considered Till We Have Faces his best novel. I think he’s right. Critics and the public at large didn’t agree—or at least many didn’t, not at first. Lewis said, “that book, which I consider far and away the best I have written, has been my one big failure both with critics and with the public.” His Christian fans were put off by the unapologetically pagan nature of the book… The familiar God of Christianity never shows up in a way that was obvious. Others thought the sudden swerve toward some sort of literary work was strange, and that the prose was needlessly opaque. If you wanted a space adventure, a heavily and obviously theological work, or a children’s fantasy, you were bound to be disappointed. This was something different, a book about a woman who hated the gods and was putting them on trial.Star-Crossed Lovers: Orual and the married Bardia, though Bardia only really sees Orual as a comrade-in-arms. Right for the Wrong Reasons: The people from a neighboring country describe Orual as ruining her sister’s life out of envy. They turn out to be right, but they believe that Orual was envious of her sister due to her good fortune when in reality Orual was jealous of the God of the Mountain for enjoying her sister’s love. The story tells the ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the perspective of Orual, Psyche's older sister. Expressly, Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche. However, the book is also the account of the life and reign of Psyche’s sister, Orual, who’s telling her own tale as the aged monarch of an ancient kingdom. She’s an insular and pragmatic personality, acerbic and capable in the world she rules.