C. S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt, 1984. Print.

Before there was Wicked, there was Till We Have Faces. Wicked may be clever, but Till We Have Faces is profound. It is a retelling of the old Cupid and Psyche myth, but at its core it is a retelling of the Book of Job without as much complaining or accusing—and a lot more action.

Wicked purports to be the “real story” of the Wicked Witch of the West from Oz. It is a cute idea, I suppose, kind of like John Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Wicked has the cute Oz characters. As Shelby Foote would say, “It does what it does.”

Till We Have Faces tells the Cupid and Psyche story from the perspective of one of the jealous sisters. Only in Till We Have Faces, Princess Orual, a.k.a. Maia, loves Psyche. Everyone does. Psyche is both beautiful and loving. She is perhaps too perfect, and she is a princess to boot. Eventually, the people in the illiterate and semi-barbaric city state of Glome—somewhere north of Greece—believe Psyche is a kind of Jonah and has brought bad luck to the country.

Like the better known King Agamemnon who ruled another city-state, King Tron of Glome agrees to sacrifice Psyche, a.k.a. Istra, to the local mountain goddess for the good of the people. The local goddess is nothing more than a black rock housed in a shrine, but the city has priests and vestals dedicated to her.The Aesop-like Greek slave known as the Fox, who tutors the princesses, says their goddess Ungit is the same as the Greek Aphrodite.

Psyche is not slaughtered, but she is chained to a tree in an isolated spot on the mountain and left to die. It was assumed that either Ungit’s son who lived on the mountain or his vile beast would kill her. The sacrifice, like Iphigenia’s, seemed to work. The plague and drought that had affected the land disappeared.

After some time, Orual and her trusted bodyguard Bardia secretly go the mountain to recover Psyche’s bones for proper burial. The chains are there, but there are no signs of Psyche’s remains. While Bardia sets up camp, Orual goes out alone looking for her. She encounters her in a lovely mountain field, and Psyche looks very happy and even more beautiful.

Psyche tells her sister how happy she is now that she is married to a god. She shows Orual her palace, but Orual sees only hillside. The only caveat in the relationship is that Psyche is not allowed to see her husband. They spend time together only in the dark at night.

No, Orual is not jealous. She is worried. She glad her sister is happy, but she worries if perhaps her sister is being deceived. On the other hand, wasn’t that a god that Orual saw in the lightning storm? Didn’t she actually distinguish the shape of a palace for a moment, or was it just the evening mist?

She tells Bardia and the Fox what she saw. Bardia thinks Psyche’s husband may be some kind of grotesque beast who is ashamed of his looks. Fox suspects he might be one of the thieves known to operate from mountain hideouts. Neither would want a beautiful princess to see what or who she was really married to.

Although Psyche invited her back and assured her that she was fine, Maia returned to Psyche and convinced her to literally shed a light on the situation just as in the original Cupid and Psyche story. And that, as the Homer liked to say, is when Psyche’s troubles begin.

Till We Have Faces is partly an adventure story. Orual does have some real adventures. Because her father dies without a son, she becomes the queen and the monarch of Glome. Unlike Psyche, Orual is ugly. From the time she was a teen, she always wore a veil. The Fox, Bardia, and her chambermaids become the only ones who ever see her face. She becomes known as a warrior queen; perhaps Lewis was inspired by Penthesilea, Hippolyta, or maybe Boudicca. Her rule itself resembles that of Elizabeth I.

Queen Orual never marries. She carries some guilt for what she did to Psyche. No one is really close to her. Her father the king never really accepted his daughters when he was alive. Her other sister becomes boy crazy. “She had always been feather-headed and now grew wanton…” (25) She manages to get married off to a neighboring prince before she causes too much trouble. Prior to that she had flirted with a young palace guard. The palace snoop snitches, and the young man is made a eunuch and sold into slavery. As I said, the place is semi-barbaric.

Because of her Greek tutor who taught her philosophy and how to read, Orual is able to civilize Glome somewhat. Still, she always carries a sorrow and an anger towards the gods. Why was she so ugly? Why did the gods act so mysteriously and rarely reveal themselves? Why do they victimize mortals? What happened to Psyche?

Orual has struggles and suffering. She does not suffer quite like Job, thankfully few people do, but she asks similar questions. The veil become a symbol. It does give meaning to the title. Lewis is asking some of the same questions that he does in The Problem of Pain.

And he does it exquisitely. The style is very different from his other works of fiction. Lewis was certainly one of the best nonfiction writers of the twentieth century, but this matches his best fiction in style. It suits the narrator Orual and the time period. We would today call it fantasy, more like Tolkien than Arthur C. Clarke. The fantasy really comes through when the gods manifest themselves—or perhaps those are merely dreams?

Nevertheless, Queen Orual has something to live for, and in the end that is what matters. It is something bigger than herself, and perhaps something bigger than her kingdom. The revelation of God in Till We Have Faces is different from the Book of Job’s, but it is just as real and reassuring, and like Job we are reminded—or perhaps we learn—that the wisdom of God is nothing like the wisdom of man.

It is a beautiful book.