[Getready]

I have read that book at least 4 times. I think the book is about the deeper evils which use the human desire to create heaven(utopia) on earth as an avenue to allow the deeper evils destroy all of us. All the while letting the duped utopians feel good about the horrors they are unleashing.
It is an allegory about the battle between Satan and the Church of Christ on this earth. Tremendously inciteful.
The character of The Director is spot on. Mark Studdock has ambition to succeed enough so to acquiesce to the evil machinations of the N.I.C.E.
Dr. Filostrato is a fully accomplished sadistic mad scientist with an anti-life agenda posing as a progressive life enhancing ideologue. The Macrobes are terrifying. The whole trilogy needs to be made into a motion picture series by a producer not willing to sacrifice the message to market pressures and current sociological error.

[steve86]

Good review / analysis.

[cuz1961]

and its not by accident that the hero of the trilogy is named

Ransom.

Christ was the ransom price paid to free man from the bondage of sin.

( the hideous strength is one of my earliest favorite books. i even gave the name ransom to my offspring )