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Jack: The Life of C S Lewis

JACK: a life of C.S. Lewis
By George Sayer
Hodder & Stoughton. 441 pages. £8.99
ISBN 0 340 69068 2

C.S. Lewis is the most widely read and effective apologist for the Christian faith which the 20th century has produced. His books, both fiction and non-fiction, continue to sell at a prodigious rate. Next year will see the centenary of his birth, and the Christian publishers are doubtless preparing for a major sales offensive to mark the event.
Having now read three biographies of Lewis, I believe this one is the best. The early biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, written a decade after Lewis's death, was a little too close to its subject for objectivity and too eulogistic. At the other end of the spectrum, A.N. Wilson's more recent biography came across as obsessively iconoclastic, and was, perhaps, more an exercise in the author's seeking to justify his own defection from Christian faith than a sensible appraisal of Lewis.
George Sayer, the author of Jack (first published in 1988 but reworked) was a pupil of Lewis at Oxford in the 1930s and became a lifelong friend. He was head of English at Malvern School until 1974 and often had Lewis to stay for walking weekends during the 1940s and 50s.
Having known at first hand the rigor of argumentative discussion with Lewis in the tutorial room, among the Inklings, and on those country walks, he brings a perceptive yet warm clarity to his subject. With care and balance he covers the facts of early life in Ireland and school; the details of the great scholar's life at 'The Kilns' and his career in Oxford; his relationship with his alcoholic brother Warnie and the formidable Mrs. Moore, meetings of the Inklings and his marriage late in life to Joy Davidman Gresham. Most helpful of all, we are given a brief introduction and explanation of all Lewis's books including his first publication Dymer, his academic books such as Allegory of Love and Preface to Paradise Lost, as well as his more well-known publications.
Lewis would probably not have called himself an evangelical, but his commitment to the core of Christian revelation makes all his books of immense value to us, and this biography makes superb reading.

JEB
Dr John Benton