Summerbook #19: War In Heaven

 War in Heaven, by Charles Williams

 I sort of started this accidentally; I wasn't sure if I'd read it before, and next thing I knew, I was away.  Charles Williams, quite a strange man, wrote novels which were also quite strange.  He worked at Oxford University Press, but in London, was a connection of the Inklings, had a large theological and literary interest, and seems to have been highly charismatic.  He wrote six novels, all "supernatural thrillers," and this was the first, published in 1930.  Williams' ideas of what a supernatural thriller might be are not at all what anybody else would think of.

We start at a publishing house in London, where Mr. Rackstraw comes back from lunch and discovers a dead body in his office.  So there's a mystery there.  Also, one of his authors has just turned in a manuscript tracing the history of the Holy Grail (Graal), and concluding that it currently rests in a small country church in the village of Fardles.  The archdeacon of Fardles later visits and sees this paragraph, and wonders if the old, disused Communion chalice in the cupboard could possibly be the Graal.  

And thus starts a chase through the countryside, London, and a suburban chemist's shop, involving lots of publishers, a devoutly Catholic duke, Mr. Rackstraw's wife and child, two different sets of policemen, and all the dark powers that are focused on the Graal, desiring it as a tool for their own purposes. 

It's interesting and weird and often funny; I think this is the most comedic novel of the six.  I had a hard time with the part where the four-year-old boy is in danger; I'm not a fan of kids in danger.   But it's very worth reading if you're interested in this kind of thing.