He never tried, like Dante or Byron, to effect the course of history. He observed, he loved, he prayed, he laughed and talked, and, above all, he wrote: a stream of poems, plays, novels, biographies, reviews, essays; a body of work which still astonishes the reader with its variety and vitality.
Moreover, nothing is quite what it seems: each piece evokes something other than itself; his imagination delighted in unexpected connections -- and he found connections everywhere. A review of a detective novel for a newspaper will contain a sentence that opens on to a huge theological vista; an essay on literary criticism will lead one into a complex piece of psychological analysis; a footnote in a biography will encapsulate an entire historical era; a piece of theological speculation will reveal itself to be intimately concerned with the hidden pains of everyday loss and disappointment.
Throughout the immense variety of genre the unique vision remains constant; the 'voice' of Williams is unmistakable.
(Charles Williams - A celebration, Introduction by Brian Horne. Gracewing, 1995)
A place for an occasional examination of the work of the Inklings... and to marvel at, in Charles Williams' words, "... the staff work of the Omnipotence".
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