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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read this book, February 28, 2006
I cannot claim familiarity with all of the other biographies of C.S. Lewis, but I do know a good book when I read one. This is an absorbing, revealing, if controversial, account of Lewis. Readers should not be afraid to tackle a biography written by someone who did not know Lewis personally-- this distance is one of the strengths of Wilson's book, for it is not clouded by sentimental recollections. Most importantly, you will be encouraged to read more of Lewis himself, particularly the lesser known works and literary criticism. Wilson offers excellent insights into these works which are largely forgotten, due to the popularity of a handful of other writings. Wilson pushes readers to start from scratch in constructing an image of Lewis: Lewis the entire man--scholar, teacher, brother, lover, and fallen human being. We are discouraged from holding fast to a more typical tidy portrait of Lewis: the affable author of a select group of Christian books and children's fantasy stories. (I love the Narnia books, by the way, and my esteem for them has not been dampened whatsoever by this book.) I didn't agree with every one of Wilson's assertions about Lewis's character or motivations, but again, Wilson's unwillingness merely to reinforce the accepted line is a great strength. Wilson's analysis is a challenge, not a conclusive rendering of absolutes. Approach it with that understanding, allow yourself to be challenged, and the experience of reading this book will be ultimately satisfying. Antoher tip: read the preface again after you've finished the book for a more complete grasp of Wilson's intentions. Yes, read other accounts of Lewis for the broadest spectrum of perspectives possible. But don't leave this one out. Not surprisingly, those only interested in pointing out errors and shutting their minds to fresh insights will be disappointed.
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30 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mainly useful as a corrective to more respectful biographies, October 27, 2002
Despite a vast amount of literature on C. S. Lewis, there are surprisingly a dearth of good biographies. In most, Lewis emerges as a bit of a plastic saint, just a little too good to be true, a bit of a high-church protestant saint. This is especially true in evangelical American circles, where many imagine Lewis to have been a nonsmoking abstainer from alcohol. Many will react with shock and dismay upon learning that Lewis's smoked so heavily that he was the probable cause of his relatively early death and his drinking was considerable, and may have bordered on the alcoholic. As a corrective to this goody-goody Lewis, Wilson provides us with a warts and all flesh-and-blood corrective. He gives us the hard drinking, mildly bawdy, addictive smoker who has a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother and a premarital relationship with a woman he would later marry. There are two questions to ask here. First, are Wilson's "facts" accurate? There doesn't seem to be much reason to doubt many of them. Second, are these adequate to create a good biography? No. Wilson's biography is valuable for one and only one reason: he delves into the aspects of Lewis's life that the other biographers would prefer to either ignore or pretend didn't exist. He also gives a slightly different slant on many of Lewis's intellectual and religious interests. But apart from the book's valuable debunking, it is a fairly lame biography. Lewis doesn't emerge as a particularly attractive person. He doesn't, in fact, emerge much as a person at all. Wilson doesn't doo much of a job of showing what made Lewis click at all. And while he does do a good job of showing that the St. Jack portraits of Lewis are all mildly bogus, he doesn't really provide us with an alternative. I do recommend that anyone interested in Lewis's life read this book, because Wilson does cover many aspects of Lewis's life the others do not. But it most definitely needs to be supplemented with other biographies. Although it has its own problems, probably the best of a bad lot is Sayer's JACK: A LIFE OF C. S. LEWIS. His is a mildly sanitized biography, but the value of the book is that Lewis does begin to emerge as a three-dimensional person. Read the Wilson biography, but then read the Sayer as a corrective to Wilson's corrective.
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31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Even Good for Irony, April 24, 2000
There is great, though, as it turns out, pointless, irony in the fact that the English litterateur A. N. Wilson penned this life of a famous Christian apologist while he was in the process of giving up his own Christian faith. One might anticipate from such a juxtaposition some unusual insight into Lewis' (in this case unsuccessful) methods of argumentation. Alas, nothing of the sort occurs. This is simply another Lewis biography, following the familiar outline laid down by Lewis' own "Surprised by Joy" and adding very little, save for catty psychological guesswork, that has not appeared in earlier productions of the prolific Lewis "industry". The book's great sensation is the assertion that the young Lewis, at around age 20, had an affair with Mrs. Jane Moore, the woman whom he "adopted" as a mother figure for the rest of his life. The theory lacks both plausibility and evidence. Lewis had lost his mother at a young age and had chafed under his father's well-meant but wrong-headed tutelage. Mrs. Moore's son, for a while Lewis' closest friend, had died in the Great War. That the two should have formed a substitute family is not at all surprising. Wilson offers no grounds for supposing that any sexual undertones were present. The kind of "evidence" that he gathers demonstrates little. To take one telling item, he points to the fact that Lewis' diaries use the Greek letter delta (our "D") as shorthand for Mrs. Moore. Of the many Greek words and names beginning with that letter, he singles out "Diotimia", the courtesan who introduced Socrates to eros. That is just a wild guess, evidently made without knowledge of the fact that delta is the first letter of the Greek transliteration of "Jane". (Our "j" sound is not native to the language but can be represented by the diphthong delta-zeta.) Wilson's major weakness as a biographer is not, however, his dubiously supported bursts of malice but rather his incurious, intellectually lazy approach to a field where he has a number of predecessors. A life that looked at Lewis from a different angle, that, for instance, probed his pre-Christian philosophical opinions and asked to what extent they truly changed as a result of his conversion or that placed his apologetics next to the works (Wells, Huxley, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin et al.) against which he was reacting or that gave adequate attention to his professional literary interests, could have been a fresh and vivid portrait. One that accepts prior interpretations with a few unflattering twists is not. There is no point in writing a biography simply in order to say what has been said before - not even if one says it with slightly more elegance and now and then taxes the subject for his failure to anticipate politically correct points of view. As a compendium of bare facts, sprinkled with factoids, Wilson's book is acceptable, but it is hard to imagine a reason for anybody to seek it out.
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