Till we have faces. A myth Retold

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Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's kept ambiguous whether the mysterious events attributed to the Gods actually are divine in nature. Up until the moment that Orual sees the God of the Mountain with her own eyes. This is one of Orual's chief complaints throughout the narrative: the gods expect us to believe in them but refuse to provide any clear evidence. One day, by chance, Orual hears a myth from a priest in a foreign land; to her surprise, it is her and Istra's story. But the priest's version gets many details wrong; in fact, it makes Orual out to be the villain of the story. Angered, Orual decides to set the record straight: to tell her story, and to make it her accusation against the gods. However, in the process of writing her story down, she is confronted with divine visions and hidden truths about herself, and ultimately she is forced to reinterpret everything she knew. Heel Realization: Throughout the last stretch of the book, Orual is confronted again and again by how she had mistreated the people around her. She freed the Fox, but never allowed him to go home. She loved Bardia, but she hated his relationship with his own wife, so she'd go out of her way to make things difficult for him if she felt slighted. Finally, of course, her treatment of Psyche was purely selfish, and it takes her till near the end of the book to realize this.

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. We affirm his work and ours in the regular daily operations of men, and we don’t reject or despise the daily business of living, leading, and serving. And we believe in his covenant work across families and generations and through the church.

The Blank: The Queen's favorite In-Universe bit of Wild Mass Guessing about her veil is that she wears it to hide the emptiness where her face would be. This theory in particular helps her intimidate wily politicians and brave soldiers into ceding to her demands. Apocalyptic Log: At the beginning Orual comments that she knows the gods may strike her down at any moment for her accusations against them. At the beginning of the second part, she notes that she must hurry in her writing, because she knows she will die soon. The narrative ends mid-sentence, with a comment by Arnom that he found the queen dead, her head resting on the book.

Perspective Flip: The book is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but with Psyche's older sister as the "hero." However, the book ends up inverting this trope. When the night comes, Orual sees lights flashing and then hears an unearthly voice screaming at Pshyche. When Orual gets ready to cross the river, she sees a man in front of her, a man more beautiful than every man she ever saw in her life. The God tells Orual that Pshyche will have to remain in exile for the rest of her days and that she will be punished as well. On the way home, Orual thinks about her sister and about the possible punishment she will have to suffer as well as a result. 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. Orual: Now, for the first time in all my life (and the last) I was gay. A new world, very bright, seemed to be opening all round me. Legend Fades to Myth: Orual lives long enough to see her sister's life become some form of the Eros and Psyche myth.Once she became queen, Orual freed the slaves of Glome and gave them freedom, which in turn made them loyal to her, and from her point of view she gained a small army at no extra cost. She worked Bardia ragged to keep him away from his wife, and she never let the Fox return to Greece. From the outside, she seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to her father, but internally she was no better. To her credit however, Orual comes to realize just how selfish she was. Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love." Just So" Story: Orual mentions there is a story that explains why pigs are not suitable as sacrifices to Ungit, but does not tell it. Later, she discovers that what happened between Psyche and the Brute has become a myth to explain the changing seasons, which inspires her to write the novel.