Customer Reviews

Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C.S. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress

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I won't comment on specifics, so as to avoid spoiling any elements of the book THIS book is written to illuminate. However, Lindskoog does a fine job filling in some of the historical, philosophical, and/or literary gaps that likely exist in our knowledge; gaps that would likely limit our understanding of Lewis' work. While not every section is equally strong, and some suffer from a bit of over-speculation (thus the loss of a star), her intimacy with Lewis' work and background is undeniable and quite helpful. I read Pilgrim's Regress first, then read Lindskoog's guide, then re-read Regress. While the second reading of Regress is not as engaging as the first, since one already knows the plot path, I found myself more in tune with the themes Lewis was exploring...and that's what a guide should do. Recommended.

I can not say enough about Kathryn Lindskoog's guides. This one is no exception. We used the Worldviews of the Western World and Veritas Press's Omnibus program and when we had finished studying the philosophers, we decided to read Pilgrim's Regress. Pilgrim's Progress had already been part of the curriculum, but Pilgrim's Regress had so much of the world's philosophies at its core, that we knew it would be a perfect book to finish up our studies.

However, we knew that many of thee references in Pilgrim's Regress might be difficult to spot and that is where Finding the Landlord was invaluable.

I highly recommend reading this classic work of Lewis. You will find it timely even for today with the same vain philosophies that deceive man and man's reaction to such. With this guide the book takes on so much more meaning and is more readily understood with the author giving you the meanings to the Latin superscripts ,allusion, and images portrayed in the book, and cross references to actual sources. Again perfect, because much of what is referenced is literature from the above curriculums.

Kathryn Lindskoog's "Finding the Landlord" is a pretty good introduction to and overview of C. S. Lewis's "Pilgrim's Regress." I've read the Regress twice before, and I've been reading works by and about Lewis for some twenty-five years. The most useful parts to me were her translations of the various bits of Latin, Greek, French, and whatnot in Lewis's book. I suspect, however, that the identification of various references and allusions to historical characters and philosophies would be most useful to one not yet familiar with Lewis's life, works, and/or thought (or the various trends of philosophy over the centuries).

However, Lindskoog oddly keeps up a rather constant beat of snarky comments aimed at Walter Hooper (the executor of Lewis's literary estate) and those connected with him and with The C. S. Lewis Company. This is no surprise to anyone acquainted with the controversy drummed up (and probably dreamed up) by Lindskoog over the position given Hooper and his work in that position. All the same, it mars a book that is probably not (in most cases) being read by anybody who needs to be distracted from Lewis's wonderful allegory by an obscure (and, again, probably invalid) attack by one Lewis scholar on another.

Most egregious are the footnotes toward the end of the guide. In "Pilgrim's Regress," Lewis inserted a lot of poems ("songs" sung by various characters) in the manner of Tolkien (and other writers, of course - notably George MacDonald). In almost every case, Lindskoog has a footnote complaining about how "the editor of "Poems" (i.e., Walter Hooper, editor of the posthumously published collected poems of Lewis) has "revised" the poem . But Lewis was notorious for tinkering with his poems his whole life through (many poets do it), so Hooper didn't "revise" anything, but simply included Lewis's latest versions. (Lindskoog often calls earlier versions of poems "more authoritative," but on what grounds?) She also constantly complains how "Such and Such" or "This and That" would have been a "better" or "more appropriate" title for a poem than that given it by Hooper. As a lot of the poems (such as those taken from the Regress) didn't originally have titles, it's rather up in the air as to what to name them, and arguing with *every* title is just petty and quarrelsome (which, one quickly learns, is Lindskoog's tone in anything connected with Hooper).

The whole thing is rather like watching the proverbial train wreck, and it perversely makes me want to read more of Lindskoog's work to see just how much she cranks up the crankery in a book (such as "Sleuthing C.S. Lewis") where she's *directly* attacking Hooper, and not just poking at him in footnotes.

I try to imagine some student of Lewis a few hundred years from now doing research on the Lindskoog-Hooper controversy. How small will it look by then? Or will it have grown and proven to be a huge dividing line in Lewis scholarship? One wonders. At any rate, this particular book is useful for what it claims to be (a guide to Lewis's "Pilgrim's Regress") but Lindskoog was misguided in including so much marginal controversy.