C. S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands [Hardcover]

Brian Sibley (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Grand Rapids, MI Revell (1994)
• ASIN: B000UCB9IK
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,481,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have been a professional writer for thirty years and a freelance broadcaster for the BBC in London for almost as long.

My career began as a radio-writer with dramatisations for the BBC which include serialisations of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", C. S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia" and Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" and "Gormenghast" for which I won a coveted Sony Radio Award. I have also made radio programmes on a wide variety of topics from the history of magic to the crimes of Jack the Ripper! Series of note include "A Century of Cinema", "The Sound of Movies" and "'Ain't No Mickey Mouse Business!"

My specialist interests have always been film (in particular animation) and children's literature and I have broadcast numerous radio and TV programmes and written several books about both these topics.

For the best part of a decade I presented weekly arts and film programmes on the BBC's domestic and World Service networks but have spent the last few years concentrating on books including a couple of best-sellers on the making of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings" and researching and writing that director's authorised biography, scheduled for publication in 2006.

I live in London with my life partner, a professional magician, in a house overcrowded with so many books, DVDs and CDs (not to mention all those old videos and gramophone records!) that it is seriously beginning to look like one of Amazon.com's smaller warehouses!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So much tact, so much fine humanity, February 25, 2011

By 

Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (Paperback)

The author is very careful not to psychoanalyze C.S. Lewis. That would bring nothing new in the picture and that would not in any way explain the career and life of C.S. Lewis. It would at best explain some dark sides of his personality but in no way the bright sides of it.

The book is trying to bring together the two essential dimensions C.S. Lewis saw in life. Strangely enough love and death are these two dimensions, and strangely enough love is what he was most deprived of in his life and at the same time death is what was most present all along his life and love is finally found and experienced in an inseparable intertwining with death.

And that is or was the happiness and the curse of C.S. Lewis. Happiness because he finally discovered what love really was, existed, and curse because that love was doomed and developed within death itself, a death that was arriving, already here or a death that was promised for the nearest future imaginable.

Why did love come so late and in such dramatic conditions?

First because he met death in his own mother when he was a child along with his slightly older brother. The two boys were scarred for life by this cancer and this suffering and this end. One will make a military career heavily accompanied with alcohol and alcoholism. The other will make a career in academia, Oxford and Cambridge, heavily accompanied with cultural and artistic enquiry and research, with a deep faith in God and Christ that came rather late in his life as a compensation for his loss, and with a heavy habit forming practice of writing books and especially books for children.

His whole life is thus punctuated with self-imposed duties. A duty to his own friend Edward Courtnay Francis "Paddy" (for Patrick) Moore, that made him look after and take care of Paddy's mother and sister after World War I that brought death to this Paddy who must have been cherished by C.S. Lewis, Jack for most people.

A duty to his own brother when this one retired from the armed forces and came to live with C.S. Lewis in the Kilns in Oxford.

A duty to his newly discovered God and that duty will make him write book upon book on God, religion, sins and prayer, repentance and the end of it all which is a liberation. His religion is so personal that at times we just wonder if he is not haunted by his God and his faith and belief, haunted as if by a ghost that he had turned into a Holy Ghost, but a ghost nevertheless, and we have quite a vast array of ghosts in his life: his mother first, his friend Paddy second, later on his friend Joy, and those are only the most important ones.

A duty to love the world, other people and to share that love with everyone and first of all children. And this love for children is expressed in the most reserved and yet luxuriant style and imagination. He brings together several lines of inspiration: "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll, but also "Winnie the Pooh", "Peter Pan", "Gulliver's Travels" and probably many more. Yet his style and his other world that he calls Shadowlands or Narnia, are a fascinating mixture of escape, evasion, imagination, magic, wonder, marvelous, teenage innocence and yet teenage vanity, and so many other elements in a world of fiction, action, power, justice, love and beauty. If these seven volumes have been turned into four films, and the last one has been remade very recently, it's because of this alliance of antagonistic and yet always extraordinary circumstances, adventures, dangers and pleasures.

I am one of those who have read, and written, books for children or stories for children all my life and yet I discovered C.S. Lewis rather late and I still wonder why Alice in Wonderland is so much more famous than Aslan and Narnia and why Alice in Wonderland would be considered for adults as well as for children whereas Narnia is only for children. We just wonder why Johnny Depp did not attach his name to Narnia and preferred Alice in Wonderland.

I think personally the difference is in the fact C.S. Lewis was inspired in his life by the worst imaginable tragedies and crimes of all human history and that he lived these events with his friends of all types. H.G. Wells representing the most extreme white eugenic approach of cultural diversity. T.S Eliot representing the deepest ethical vision of terrorism, totalitarianism that made him concentrate an important part of his life on Thomas Beckett rendered as a murder in a cathedral (play, film, book). The First World War was a trauma for C.S. Lewis. The Second World War was a simple crime against humanity that no religious or simply ethical mind could envisage completely, understand in any way, explain in no way at all. In that postmodern vision of his of a world not even worth living for, he built a Christian faith and a Shadowy world of Narnia to set some truth and some love in that permanent cemetery that the world is. Shadowlands is the world of light and sunshine and this world is the world of death and crimes.

Another of his friends was J.R.R. Tolkien who took refuge in some old Norse saga and tried to bring some finality in this world of violence and war with his rings that come finally reunited, whereas the other great Ring, the one of the Nibelungenlied will always lead to some more blood shedding.

In that world there is only death that counts. As Macbeth would say: "Men must endure their going hence." Shouldn't he have said "Men must enjoy their going hence."

Jacques COULARDEAU

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars C.S.Lewis: Through the Shadowlands, August 25, 2009

By 

Charles Hamilton Sr. "The Bookworm of Humming... (LaPlata, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (Paperback)

C.S.Lewis: Through the Shadowlands is a gripping saga of first love between two unsuspecting participants who become gathered together by shared interest. Initially, for C.S. Lewis, love was a foriegn entity of unrequital dimension, entering his emotional psyche like a piercing, unidentified, flying object. Lewis is allowed to enjoy this euphoric state but briefly before his love, Joy Davidman, is tragically snatched by death from his now tender heart. Author Brian Sibley aptly tells the powerful story of an intellectual British gentleman and his sometimes brash Jewish-American counterpart, after finding themselves in happiness, realize the importance of making the most of fleeting moments; for time marches on and is respectful of no one. I highly recommend this book.

Charles Hamilton Sr, President/Founder Make Your Life Count Ministries, Author: From Darkness To Light and A Step Of Faith. [...]

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a treasure!, June 7, 2011

By 

Juanita - See all my reviews

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This review is from: C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (Paperback)

The movie Shadowlands has long been a favorite of mine. So I decided to read this biography of C.S. Lewis, which begins when he was a young boy and follows the writer through his life, emphasizing the years of marriage to his true love, Joy Davidman, her tragic death, and then Lewis's older years and his own death. It's a wonderfully inspiring story from start to finish. Very well-written, with many wonderful quotes from the great author himself. This is the book that introduced me to how profound and talented C.S. Lewis really is! I found the dignity and poetry that he brought to his own passing especially compelling. I initially borrowed the book from the library, then decided to buy a copy so I could highlight my favorite passages for later re-visiting.