Reviews for Many Dimensions

The average rating for Many Dimensions based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-28 00:00:00 Blase Sorritelli "Many Dimensions" was published shortly after "War In Heaven" and while it is quite different it is equally fine. The major difference would be that "War In Heaven" is a Christian religious fantasy centring on The Holy Grail. "Many Dimensions" is a spiritual fantasy using as its focus a strange stone with other-worldly powers originally possessed by Suleiman the Magnificent. Further the cast of characters involves Hajji, an Islamic Persian ambassador, who plays a not insignificant part in the plot. The plot ranges over a much wider field than in the earlier novel. Events involve not only the major players but extend to Labour union relations, the government and even the international scene. The characters are somewhat better drawn in this novel. One meets Sir Gerald Tumulty once again and he is, if anything, more obnoxious than before. Against him are set the trio of Lord Christopher Arglay the Chief Justice, Chloe Bernett, the latter's secretary and the previously mentioned Ambassador Hajji. Apparently Chloe is the most vulnerable of this group but in the end she is the most significant figure and can be regarded as the main character in the novel. The fact that Arglay constantly calls her "child" {she is 25, he's in his fifties} grates on a modern reader but one should bear in mind that the book was written in the early thirties. Chloe has far more agency, individuality, and depth of character than any of the women in Tolkien. The stone itself has a number of unique powers. It allows its possessor to travel in space and time and it will cure disease. But perhaps its most potent power is that it is the source of tremendous visions. The great visionary sequences which occur in this novel are absolutely mind-blowing. They are unique to Williams and there is nothing comparable in the works of Tolkien or Lewis, his fellow Inklings. One final point worth noting is that while it is at its core a spiritual fantasy, "Many Dimensions" has features that remind one of science-fiction. The stone itself is an artefact which can be analysed and {to a limited extent} manipulated. Time-travel, time-loops, and alternate realities are all major ideas in the story. This is a remarkable, rewarding and quite original novel.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-31 00:00:00 Darrell Hartsell Another Charles Williams occult thriller. These are an acquired taste ie chocker with mystical visionary religious gibbering, while also managing good characters, some proper horror, and excellent ideas. Williams has a particular knack for really nasty villains--nasty in petty malice as well as great world-destroying schemes--and for the kind of weakness/selfishness that turn people into villains without them ever really intending or thinking about it. And when I say people I mostly mean men: he's very good on portrayals of toxic masculinity in various forms. This is of course partly because he majors in women who become saintly spiritual self-abnegators, and this book has an amazing case of that as the heroine resigns her will to the Higher Powers in a frankly quite creepy way if that isn't your idea of religious exaltation. It feels like a death cult to me. What is great is the McGuffin--the villain gets hold of the Stone of Solomon from its Muslim guardians. There's some incisive and funny stuff about the chaos it would cause if someone really was marketing a magical stone that can heal and teleport; there's also a major Muslim secondary character who's a key and respected part of the team that tries to retrieve the Stone, and there is a delightful absence of Christian triumphalism or denigrating of other religions. Absence of horrible bigotry is a pretty damn low threshold, I grant you, but it's still one most authors of occult thrillers fail to reach, so.