Book Review: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams

Pellegrin Foiskola

Charles Williams wrote a novel in 1931 about an object that gives you anything you want

In 1931, a self-educated editor at Oxford University Press published a novel about a stone that can be divided infinitely, where each fragment is identical to the original and possesses the same limitless powers. The stone can transport you anywhere in space or time. It can heal the sick. It can read minds. It can be manufactured at zero marginal cost and distributed to anyone. A stockbroker sees an obvious business model. A scientist wants to experiment on prisoners. The British government convenes a committee.

The stone destroys almost everyone who touches it.

The novel is called Many Dimensions. The author is Charles Williams, the third and least-remembered member of the Inklings, that Oxford literary group whose other principals — C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien — went on to define the fantasy genre for the rest of the century.¹ Williams went on to die at fifty-eight, leaving behind seven novels that almost nobody reads, an Arthurian poetry cycle that almost nobody understands, and a personal biography involving occult secret societies and obsessive fixations on younger women that almost nobody wants to discuss at the Narnia fan club meeting.²

Let me explain why his second novel is more interesting than any of that makes it sound.

I. The Object

The Stone of Suleiman is a small cube of milky-white substance with the letters of the Tetragrammaton — the sacred four-letter name of God — inscribed on it, or rather, constituting it. It once sat in the crown of King Solomon. A Persian prince explains on the first page that the letters are not engraved on the stone. They are in the centre. They are, in fact, the stone.³

This matters because of what happens next. Sir Giles Tumulty, a villainous archaeologist who acquired the stone through means that were probably criminal and were certainly not polite, allows his stockbroker nephew Reginald Montague to take a chisel to it. The chisel passes through the stone easily. Two identical stones sit on the table. Same size. Same weight. Same milky colour flaked with gold. Same sacred letters. Same infinite power.⁴

The manuscripts warned about this. Williams gives us the old texts in beautifully ominous translation: "The division is accomplished yet the Stone is unchanged, and the virtues are neither here nor there but allwhere."⁵ Montague ignores this, because Montague is thinking about the business model. Circlets with fragments of the stone, available for purchase, granting instantaneous travel anywhere on earth. No trains, no tubes, no aeroplanes. He is thinking in terms of price points and royalty agreements.

He is thinking, in other words, exactly the way you would think if someone handed you a zero-cost replicable miracle and you had a background in financial services.

II. The System

What makes Many Dimensions extraordinary — and what separates it from the other Inklings' work more completely than any surface-level comparison of prose styles — is that Williams is not primarily interested in the theological nature of the stone. He is interested in what happens when an object with the properties of God enters a system designed by and for people who do not believe in God, or who believe in Him the way they believe in the weather: something that exists, something that matters, something that is fundamentally somebody else's department.

The novel works through its cast systematically. Every character who encounters the stone responds according to their institutional position and their incentive structure, and every one of them is behaving rationally within their constraints. Montague wants to sell it. Sir Giles wants to experiment on it — and on anyone near it, including a hapless laboratory assistant named Elijah Pondon whom he tricks into using the stone's time-travel capabilities and thereby traps in an endlessly repeating loop of his own past.⁶

An American millionaire named Sheldrake buys a fragment for 70,000 guineas as a gift for his wife.⁷ When one of the fragments ends up in a small town called Rich-by-the-Mere and begins curing the sick, the mayor wants to dedicate it to public health. The government wants to control it. A transport union leader named Merridew wants to suppress it, because instantaneous travel threatens his members' livelihoods.⁸

Every one of these people is acting sensibly.

The point Williams is making — and here is where his novel became, ninety years before anyone thought to use the term, a systems-thinking parable — is that sensible actions performed upon a thing whose nature you have misidentified produce insane outcomes. Montague treats the stone as a commodity and is killed when the fragments reconverge. Sir Giles treats it as an experimental object and ends up burning to death in circumstances that suggest the experiment was always running in both directions.⁹ Lord Birlesmere, the government minister, proposes using it on prisoners and hospital patients — and then says, without apparent irony, that there is a difference between harmless experiments and vivisection.¹⁰

Williams lets that line sit there on the page. He does not comment on it. He does not need to. The structure is the commentary.

Even the good-faith actors misidentify the stone. The mayor of Rich wants to use it to heal people — an obviously virtuous goal — but Williams presents this as a slightly more sophisticated version of the same error. The stone is not a tool. Using it, even for benevolent purposes, is a category mistake of the kind that produces outcomes nobody designed and nobody can control.¹¹ The riot that erupts when the stone is removed from Rich is Williams writing the predictable second-order consequence that every techno-utopian forgets to model.

III. The Weird Theology

Williams was an Anglican who spent a decade as a member of A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a post-Golden Dawn occult society that combined Christian mysticism with Kabbalistic ritual and Masonic ceremony.¹² He held the rank of Proclamator et Lucifer, which means "light-bearer" in the original Latin and "career-ending Google result" in modern English.¹³ He maintained throughout his life that he saw no contradiction between Christianity and ceremonial magic. Lewis and Tolkien, his fellow Inklings, appear to have dealt with this by the expedient method of not asking too many questions.¹⁴

All of this is visible in Many Dimensions, and it's visible in a way that is structurally peculiar. The stone is not a Christian object. It comes from Solomon's crown. Its guardians are Sufi Muslims who speak of the stone as "the End of Desire" — a phrase Williams borrowed directly from the Rosy Cross's initiation ritual, in which the adept repeats: "I am that which I thought and the end of my desire is with me."¹⁵

The novel's theological framework is not Trinitarian. It is, as scholars have noted, closer to Hellenistic philosophy — the stone embodies the Divine Logos, the active rational principle underlying creation, and the relationship between human and divine is expressed in the impersonal Sufi phrases "under the Protection" and "under the Mercy" rather than in anything resembling a personal relationship with Christ.¹⁶

This is a Christian novelist in 1931 writing a novel whose metaphysics are more Islamic and Kabbalistic than anything you would hear in an Anglican church. And the novel's moral architecture depends on it. Because what Williams needs — structurally, for the argument the novel is making — is a God who is not a person. A God who is a law. An impersonal, absolute, constitutional principle that grounds the universe the way a national constitution grounds a government. The blogger Brandon Watson identified this precisely: the Stone of Suleiman is the Constitution of the Cosmos, and it has absolute supremacy over the laws of time, space, and thought because it is what constitutes those laws in the first place.¹⁷

You cannot amend a constitution by passing a statute. You cannot use the stone by wanting something from it. The categories don't interface.

IV. The Heroes' Problem

The novel's two heroes are Lord Arglay, the Lord Chief Justice of England, and his secretary Chloe Burnett. They are assisted by an elderly Persian mystic called Hajji Ibrahim. Their heroism consists almost entirely of refusing to do things.

This is the novel's strangest and most structurally honest feature. The villains act. The institutional actors scheme. The heroes stand still. Lord Arglay, who has spent his professional life articulating the concept of "organic law" — an inalterable and universal ideal of abstract justice — recognizes in the stone the literal embodiment of the principle he has been writing about theoretically.¹⁸

His response is not to use it. His response is not even to protect it, exactly. His response is to insist, with the stubbornness of a man who has spent decades on the bench, that one does not make demands of the law. One submits to it. Three of the novel's chapter titles make this explicit: "The First Refusal of Chloe Burnett," "The Refusal of Lord Arglay," "The Second Refusal of Chloe Burnett."¹⁹

The heroes' heroic action is letting the stone determine how things should happen.

Williams is writing something genuinely radical here, and it lands differently depending on your priors. Read as theology, it is a drama of submission to the divine will — salvation by faith, not works, in the Augustinian tradition. Read as systems analysis, it is something more unsettling. Williams is proposing that the correct response to a system whose properties you cannot fully understand is not to optimize within it. Not to exploit it. Not even to use it for obvious good. The correct response is to stop treating the system as an instrument and start treating it as a fact — something you inhabit rather than operate.

Chloe Burnett, the secretary, grasps this more completely than Arglay. She offers herself to the stone not as a user but as a vessel — as a channel through which the divided fragments can reconverge into their original unity. The effort kills her.²⁰

Williams presents this as transcendence. Many readers have found it troubling for reasons that have nothing to do with theology.

V. The Chloe Problem

Chloe Burnett is modelled on Phyllis Jones, a younger colleague at Oxford University Press with whom Williams conducted an unconsummated but emotionally intense affair that lasted, by most accounts, for the rest of his life.²¹ Williams's wife Florence referred to Jones as "the virgin tart."²²

Chloe in the novel is young, virginal, submissive, and defined almost entirely by her relationships to the men around her — her employer Arglay, her boyfriend Frank, the Hajji who guides her spiritually, and the stone itself. Her heroism is self-annihilation. The scholar Glen Cavaliero has observed that Williams's female characters are often unsatisfactorily realised because he is more focused on the ideals they embody than on their personalities, and that Chloe in particular feels "formulaic and superficial."²³

There is no way to argue with this. Chloe is a function, not a character. She exists to demonstrate a theological proposition — that perfect submission to the law of creation is the only correct relationship to the law of creation — and the demonstration requires her to be empty enough to serve as a conduit and then to die.

Williams could have written this with a male character. He did not. He wrote it with a young woman based on a young woman he was obsessed with, and the idealized submission at the novel's climax maps uncomfortably well onto the dynamics of that obsession. The fact that the theology is sincere and the structural argument is coherent does not make the personal projection invisible. It makes it more visible. The system works. The incentives producing the system are worth noticing.

VI. What's Actually Good

Sir Giles Tumulty is one of the great villains of interwar English fiction and almost nobody knows it. Williams gives him a foul mouth, an absolute lack of moral scruple, and a vocabulary of insults that reads like Shakespeare edited by a dockworker: "broken-down Houndsditch sewer rat," "blast your filthy gasbag of a mouth," "baboon-headed cockatoo."²⁴ Lord Arglay's assessment is the novel's best joke: "Giles always reminds me of the old riddle, 'Would you rather be more abominable than you sound, or sound more abominable than you are?' The answer is, 'I would rather be neither, but I am both.'"²⁵

Williams's treatment of time travel is remarkable for 1931, and would be remarkable in any year. When Sir Giles tricks Pondon into travelling to the past, Arglay immediately grasps the paradox: to arrive at a time before you possessed the stone, you would need to live forward again until you possessed the stone and made the trip. You would be trapped. The loop is inescapable — not because of malice but because of logic.²⁶ Sir Giles then tries a smaller experiment, sending himself ten minutes into the future, and is haunted afterward by the uncertainty of whether he is living or merely remembering. Williams gets the epistemological problem of time travel right decades before it became a standard puzzle in science fiction.

The prose, when Williams is in control of it, has a specific and unusual quality: he writes metaphysical crisis in the register of a civil service memorandum. Characters discuss the nature of reality over cigarettes. Lord Arglay treats the possibility that his brother-in-law has acquired a fragment of the First Matter from which the universe was made with the same dry juridical skepticism he would bring to a disputed property claim. The flatness is the comedy, and the comedy is the argument — the gap between the bureaucratic tone and the cosmic stakes is exactly the gap between the system as designed and the system as experienced.

The book is not, however, well-written in the conventional sense. It was published the same year as its predecessor, War in Heaven, which suggests speed of composition that Williams's prose does not always survive. Sentences tangle. Exposition arrives in undigested blocks of third-person interior monologue. The middle sags as too many minor characters pursue too many subplots involving governmental committees.

Williams described his novels as "metaphysical thrillers."²⁷ This is accurate in the way that calling a Swiss Army knife a knife is accurate. It is technically a knife. It is also a corkscrew, a saw, and a toothpick. The thriller elements are real. The metaphysics are real. They are not always the same object.

VII.

Here is what I keep coming back to.

Williams wrote a novel in which the central problem is that an infinitely replicable, zero-cost resource of unlimited power enters a society organized around scarcity, institutional self-interest, and the assumption that every object is a tool. Every actor in the system responds to the resource according to their existing incentive structure. The stockbroker monetizes it. The scientist experiments on it. The government regulates it. The union suppresses it. The humanitarians deploy it. The mystics submit to it.

The novel's conclusion is that every response except submission is a misidentification of the resource's nature, and that misidentification produces consequences ranging from personal catastrophe to institutional collapse.

Williams published this in 1931. He was thinking about the Tetragrammaton and the nature of divine law and the end of desire as understood in Sufi mysticism and Rosicrucian initiation.

I do not know what Williams would have made of large language models, or of any technology that replicates at zero marginal cost, that can be divided without being diminished, whose outputs are neither here nor there but allwhere, and whose nature is systematically misidentified by every institution that encounters it. I suspect he would have found the question interesting. I suspect he would have noted that the committees look the same.

The stone was never the point. The committees were always the point.

Notes

¹ Williams was a member of the Inklings from approximately 1939 until his death in 1945. See Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978). C.S. Lewis considered Williams a genius; Tolkien was more ambivalent. For an overview of Williams's place among the Inklings, see Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩

² Williams was a member of A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross from 1917 until approximately 1928, rising to the rank of Proclamator et Lucifer. His emotional fixation on Phyllis Jones, a younger colleague at OUP, lasted decades. See Philip Jenkins, "Shadows of a Saint," The Christian Century, May 25, 2016; and "Why Was Charles Williams the Odd Inkling?" Christianity.com. ↩

³ Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931). The Persian prince's declaration appears on the first page. Full text available at Gutenberg Canada. ↩

⁴ Williams, Many Dimensions. The division scene is the novel's inciting incident; the manuscripts' warning — "The division is accomplished yet the Stone is unchanged" — is quoted by Lord Arglay immediately afterward. ↩

⁵ Williams, Many Dimensions, Chapter I. ↩

⁶ The Pondon time-loop is described in Chapter VI, "The Problem of Time." For a thoughtful analysis of Williams's time-travel logic, see "Charles Williams' Many Dimensions — More Weird Fantasy From a Christian Perspective," FracTad's Bookshelf, April 27, 2024. ↩

⁷ Williams, Many Dimensions. Montague sells a Type to Sheldrake; the figure of 70,000 guineas is mentioned in the novel. ↩

⁸ The Merridew subplot is summarized in "Many Dimensions," Wikipedia. ↩

⁹ Williams, Many Dimensions, Chapters XVI–XVIII. Both Montague and Tumulty die as the Types reconverge. ↩

¹⁰ Williams, Many Dimensions. The exchange between Lord Birlesmere and Sir Giles about "harmless experiments" versus "vivisection" is quoted in FracTad's Bookshelf review. ↩

¹¹ The critique of the mayor's "good use" of the stone as a subtler form of the same instrumental error is discussed in George S., "Many Dimensions by Charles Williams (1931)," Reading 1900–1950, April 16, 2015. ↩

¹² On Williams and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, see Aren Roukema, Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2018), and Sørina Higgins, "A.E. Waite and the Occult," The Oddest Inkling, December 11, 2013. ↩

¹³ Jenkins, "Shadows of a Saint." Williams's rank in the Fellowship is confirmed by multiple biographers; Lindop discusses it in detail. ↩

¹⁴ Tolkien was "always wary" of Williams's occult involvement; see "Charles Williams: The Third Inkling," Evangelical Times, July 11, 2019. ↩

¹⁵ The connection between the phrase "the End of Desire" and the Rosy Cross ritual is identified in Roukema, Esotericism and Narrative, and summarized in the Wikipedia article on Many Dimensions. ↩

¹⁶ The theological analysis of the stone as embodying the Divine Logos in a Hellenistic rather than Trinitarian framework is from the Wikipedia article on Many Dimensions, drawing on Cavaliero and Roukema. ↩

¹⁷ Brandon Watson, "Charles Williams, Many Dimensions," Siris, November 2013. Watson's analysis of the stone as "the Constitution of the Cosmos" is the clearest single-sentence description of the novel's theological architecture I have encountered. ↩

¹⁸ Williams, Many Dimensions. Arglay's concept of Organic Law is introduced early in the novel and gradually mapped onto the stone's properties. ↩

¹⁹ Chapter titles visible in the table of contents at Barnes & Noble listing. ↩

²⁰ Williams, Many Dimensions, Chapter XVIII. Chloe's self-sacrifice and the reconvergence of the Types is the novel's climax. The EBSCO Research Starters entry provides a concise summary. ↩

²¹ On Chloe as a projection of Phyllis Jones, see the Wikipedia article on Many Dimensions and Lindop, The Third Inkling. ↩

²² Florence Williams's description of Phyllis Jones is quoted in "Charles Williams: The Third Inkling," Evangelical Times. ↩

²³ Glen Cavaliero, Charles Williams: Poet of Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). The critique is summarized in the Wikipedia article on Many Dimensions. ↩

²⁴ Sir Giles's vocabulary is catalogued in FracTad's Bookshelf review. ↩

²⁵ Williams, Many Dimensions. Quoted in FracTad's Bookshelf review. ↩

²⁶ FracTad's Bookshelf review provides the best concise explanation of Williams's time-travel logic. ↩

²⁷ Williams's self-description of his novels as "metaphysical thrillers" is widely cited; see the Amazon listing and various reviews at Goodreads. ↩