Literary lion

C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. By Alister McGrath. Tyndale House; 431 pages; $24.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN HIS inaugural lecture as professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, Clive Staples Lewis (Jack to his closest friends) referred to himself as a living “dinosaur”. Sixty years later Lewis seems more than ever like a figure from a distant age. Invariably dressed in tweed jacket, grey flannels and tie, even on holiday, he smoked a pipe and drank beer in pubs with his cronies, the “Inklings”. Lewis was an old-fashioned man of learning and lover of books, a classical scholar who never visited Rome. When he travelled to Greece in 1960, it was the first time he had left Britain since he fought in the trenches in the first world war.

So why, half a century after he died (on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley), are Lewis and his writings still of interest? This biography by Alister McGrath, a theologian at Kings College London, provides an answer.

There were three Lewises. The first was the distinguished Oxford don and critic who seemed to have read everything and to have remembered it all. He was an inspiring teacher whose lectures, delivered without notes, were a sell-out and whose books illuminated Milton, Spenser and medieval love poetry.

The second Lewis was the former atheist and Christian apologist, who in his radio broadcasts and books such as “Mere Christianity” and “Surprised by Joy” communicated his vision of the intellectual and imaginative power of the Christian faith. Finally, there was the author of bestselling popular novels. Notable among these are the seven fantasy books that make up the “Chronicles of Narnia” and which began being published in 1950.

Inevitably, the first Lewis is now largely forgotten. The others endure to an extent that would have once seemed unlikely. He has been described as the “patron saint” of American evangelicalism and his writings have found a new generation of readers in a world where many Christians are disenchanted with the failings of clergy or ecclesiastical institutions. Meanwhile, the cinema has brought to a vastly bigger audience “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, a book that was written for children but with the serious portrayal of the Son of God as the Lion. In addition, as a colleague and close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis is widely seen as the midwife of an even bigger blockbuster, “The Lord of the Rings”.

Mr McGrath’s clear, methodical biography is intended as a work of analysis rather than synopsis. Much of the story has been told before, not least by A.N. Wilson in 1990. But it is a story that bears retelling, partly because of the continuing interest in various aspects of Lewis’s character, and partly because his personal life was so eccentric, not to say odd.

After his mother died when he was nine years old, Lewis left his native Belfast and his father for ill-chosen boarding schools in England, which he found more disagreeable than the wartime trenches. As a young don in Oxford he, and later his brother, lived in curious circumstances with a much older woman, Janie Moore. Later, as a confirmed bachelor, he found himself marrying, loving and supporting through her final illness, Joy Davidman, an American poet and writer who had come to Britain with two young sons in tow. Much in Lewis’s life remains a mystery.