C. S. Lewis

Publishers Weekly

Why a new biography of C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) now? White, who has written a biography of Lewis's friend Tolkien, offers no satisfactory answer in this pedantic and lackluster study of the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Relying on no new archival information, White retells the facts of Clive Staples Lewis's life, already well known from the hands of previous biographers. Born in 1898 in Belfast to a solicitor and his wife, the young Lewis escaped often into a world of fantasy, re-creating his own fictional world in stories. White recounts Lewis's university days, including his famous friendship with Tolkien and others, his early struggles to get appointed as a lecturer and his prolific writing life. White also records Lewis's youthful struggles with relationships, as well as his eventual amatory success in his famous marriage to Joy Davidman (chronicled in the book and film Shadowlands). White attempts to offer critical interpretations of Lewis's writings from his novels to his Christian apologetics but succeeds primarily at offering summaries. Moreover, the book's sluggish prose ("apart from his brilliance, Jack was a man like any other"), lack of critical insight and dearth of new or startling information about Lewis renders it superfluous. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this new biography of C.S. Lewis, White takes a deconstructionist perspective as he examines the writer's major works, e.g., Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia. He explores Lewis's life in a speedy manner, not lingering on any particular episode, and argues that Lewis has been misrepresented by those who want to portray him as a champion of Christian orthodoxy and conservative values. Highlighting what he sees as Lewis's shortcomings, White strives to prove that because Lewis resisted modernism he was little more than a relic in an ever-changing world. But White makes a mistake in attempting to separate Lewis from his Christian faith and in judging him apart from the time in which he lived. Although Lewis did in fact dislike many modern advances, this was because he saw them as part of a great secularization that he felt would bring about spiritual bankruptcy. This book does not replace better treatments of Lewis's life and faith, such as George Sayers's Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times and David Downing's The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis's Journey to Faith. Not recommended.-Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Prolific English biographer White (Leonardo, 2000, etc.) delineates in lively fashion the less than saintly life of the Christian apologist, children's author, Luddite, and fuddy-duddy Oxford don. Best known for his Chronicles of Narnia, a charming allegorical adventure disguising a complex Christian hierarchy, Lewis was first and foremost a scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature, a tutor at Oxford for most of his life, and a drinking comrade of fellow don J.R.R. Tolkien and their disputatious group of Inklings. Born Clive Staples in 1898 to middle-class Protestant parents in Belfast, young Jack (as he was known) enjoyed an insular fantasy world with his older brother until their mother's death when he was nine. Privately tutored to enter Oxford during WWI, he made a deathbed promise to take care of a soldier friend's mother, which turned into a 30-year relationship with Janie Moore, estranged but never divorced from her husband and a good 20 years Lewis's senior. White offers opinionated speculation on "Mother," as Lewis called her, with whom he lived at his Oxford home and about whom he never spoke openly; despite Lewis's Evangelical disciples who insist it was a platonic mother-son relationship, White reminds us that "apart from his brilliance, Jack Lewis was a man like any other." A late bloomer as a writer, Lewis began tapping into his childhood fantasy world in 1938 with the Ransom series, followed by The Screwtape Letters (correspondence between two devils) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which in 1950 inaugurated the seven-volume Narnia series. White impishly refutes the portrait of Lewis as "St. Jack of Oxford," frankly discussing his religiousorthodoxy, elitism, and antimodernism in all forms, as well as his eyebrow-raising later liaison with American pen pal Joy Gresham. A previous biographer of Tolkien, the author also offers a thorough look at the crucial support and influence each writer had on the other's work. A readable, balanced portrait of a great humanist.