Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Dark Tower [Book Review]

[I spoil quite a lot of this story. I don't really spoil the ending because there isn't one anyhow.]

"The Dark Tower" is a novel written by C. S. Lewis. It is unfinished and also fragmented. What remains of the novel was published posthumously in 1977. Apart from the fact that Lewis never finished this book, parts of it are actually missing, likely burned by someone who did not know exactly what they were throwing into the fire. But what remains is a fascinating piece of literature, so don't let that bug you too much.

The story of "The Dark Tower" has to do with some people at Cambridge who were experimenting with a device called the chronoscope. It is a device that can peer into either the far past or far future. It has no way of actually setting it though, so there is no way to know exactly which period is actually being viewed.

However, what these gents actually see through the window is so incredibly surreal that it brings to question what is actually being seen. One of these odd visions takes the form of a man with a stinging horn coming out of his forehead, who they dubbed the "stingingman." If he uses this sting on someone, they become emotionless drone-like beings.

Things get even crazier when one of the people watching this "Othertime" ends up materializing on the other side and even turns into one of the stingingmen. It is here that the men begin to wonder if they are even seeing another time at all. Things are just too strange, and it is hard to fathom how this sort of world could exist on earth at any point in the future or the past.

The titular dark tower seen through the chronoscope is the same as the tower at the Cambridge library. How could it exist there when things are so weird? And lastly, one of the men watching ends up getting his soul switched with his double on the other side, trapping him in Othertime. This makes up the second major half of the story where you actually get to explore the other side of the chronoscope.

I say that he has a soul swap, because he actually does become the stingingman in the Othertime universe. He thinks like him, has the same urges, has the same language, but he is not the same man. That means that the stingingman is still the stingingman, but someone else is pulling the strings. This goes well with what I call the "meat puppet" theory for how the soul works. A soul controls the body, but the body still is what it is regardless. The mind, all of its knowledge, and memory, have nothing at all to do with the soul. A person's actual identity seems to come from the soul, however, that has very little if anything to do with the body and it's brain. You are who you are regardless of what your brain thinks it is. This actually lines right up with my own personal beliefs.

There was also one other incident before the book abruptly ends that, although subtlety presented, gave me a very pleasant shock. In one scene, the transferred stingingman was reading from a book in that world's own language, and he read about a genuinely evil man that was doing experiments on children. When he read that the man was later assassinated, it seemed to me that he tried to say "Thank God," but couldn't actually say "God." Although it isn't completely clear who he was trying to thank, the point was that there was no word in the stingingman's head that could reference the one being thanked.

The latter paragraph suggests that the world on the other side of the chronoscope might actually be Godless. This could be true considering one of the men watching it called the place Hell. Now, I'm not saying that this place really was Hell. It is more suggested that it was a parallel dimension that was running alongside our own timeline. However, if this place truly was Godless then it certainly comes close to being like Hell, insomuch as it is a place separated from God.

I am very sorry if this review is confusing. The story itself can be confusing at times. It does not help that entire swaths of content is missing from it, and also that it simply stops before there is any real conclusion. It is a bit frustrating, to say the least. However, what is there has enough to make it all so very interesting, and I do recommend that you read this one through. Just take it for what it is. Don't worry so much about what is missing, and focus on what is there to read. What you will get from it is an extremely surreal fever dream that came out of the mind of the man who gave us Narnia. It is very much worth the journey.

This blog was written on February 10, 2025.

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