Alan Jacobs tells us in A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, that if we really love an author we will not shy away from his or her faults: that we will take the good with the bad, and exercise both charity and intelligence (“To read with intelligent charity” is one of the goals of Theology of Reading) in discerning between the two. This is an important point, as it leads one to wonder if many of the people who rely regularly on Lewis’s work have taken the time to learn about his life. Some evangelicals revere Lewis so much that when they hear that J.R.R. Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity they insist it must’ve been the other way around, as if, because Lewis made Christian apologetics a significant part of his writing he was somehow a more “solid” Christian than Tolkien, or must’ve been one longer!
But there is greater incentive than mere honesty to read The Narnian. It is a vivid, entertaining, informative and (to use a word from Lewis’s era) delightful book. Jacobs has a knack for combining insight and intellect with good prose, and does not seem to believe in good ideas badly expressed. His writing style stands out only because it is better than most writers’, when in reality the strength of his analysis easily matches the strength of his expression. Jacobs is primarily an academic writer, and has clearly had to adapt his prose for a popular audience. Some of its clarity is lost, especially in comparison to A Theology of Reading, a more academic work. But it is still clear, well constructed, and vivid, acting not just as a means of conveying information, but as a source of enjoyment and beauty for the reader. It is Jacobs’s prose style that pushes the book from one you’d read intermittently over a few weeks or months to one you don’t want to put down!
As a professor of literature, Jacobs is well equipped to bring Lewis’s writings to bear on a study of his life, and does so powerfully. The book, then, is not so much a strict, blow-for-blow account of Lewis’s life, but examines him in light of his writings, gleaning much of its information from Lewis’s letters, and the diaries and testimonies of his friends and relatives. Every writer’s work is affected by the events in his or her life, and every writer’s life is affected by his or her writing. Lewis is no exception, and Jacobs is a biographer qualified to examine those effects. There is a significant amount of exegesis (all done in his wonderful prose, for those who had begun to groan!) of Lewis’s works, fiction and non-fiction, and at the end of the book it is not just Lewis that the reader understands better, but his entire body of work.
Jacobs spends a great deal of time writing about Lewis’s “inner life:” his rejection of Christianity at fourteen, his time as an arrogant but extremely gifted prodigy, his feared loss of imagination, his service in the Great War, his friendship with Tolkien and the Inklings, his eventual re-conversion to Christianity from atheism, the period of fame that followed, and his late-life marriage to Joy Davidman. It is about Lewis’s character, not just about the events of his life, and this is one reason it is so engrossing a read. Jacobs finds the perfect blend of outward and inward life.
Jacobs has done anyone interested in Lewis a great service. I have not read any other Lewis biography, so I can’t comment on how it compares to what’s out there, but regardless, it is a fantastic read. The life of Lewis, inward and out, is as engrossing as any of his Narnia stories (or at least almost!), and Jacobs is the ideal writer to bring that life alive in prose.
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