A Review of Conversations With C.S. Lewis
About Life, Christianity, and God
By Rachel Starr Thompson
Two parts fiction, two parts history, and twelve parts philosophical apologetics, Conversations With C.S. Lewis by Robert Velarde (IVP Books, 2008) is an imaginative introduction to the life—and more significantly, the thought-life—of an author and scholar whose perspectives influenced countless Christians in his lifetime and beyond.
The book’s opening line grabs our attention: “C.S. Lewis died in 1963, but I met him last week.” The narrator is Thomas Clerk, a committed, morally sensitive atheist who is dying of cancer. A copy of Mere Christianity sits on his bedside table. C.S. Lewis, known as “Jack,” literally appears in his hospital room, an unexplained event which Jack compares to the spirits’ visitation in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (one of many literary allusions to works other than Lewis’s).
Jack and Thomas step through a wardrobe, of course, and set off on a journey that takes them to Lewis’s childhood home in Ireland, through the trenches of World War I, down the shady lanes of Oxford, into a pub to meet with the Inklings (including J.R.R. Tolkien), and even into the worlds of Lewis’s imagination.
But Conversations is not primarily a story. It is, as its title indicates, a conversation, couched in the context of C.S. Lewis’s life. Readers who are familiar with Lewis’s own work will find little that is new here; the conversations are derived largely from his writings, including famous works like Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, and The Screwtape Letters. At times the story-as-vehicle-for-conversation is dry, yet the book moves forward at a good clip. Along the way, readers listen in on intelligent discussions of reason, morality, pain, logic, marriage, friendship, Christianity as true-myth, the importance of imagination, and the nature of conversion. While Lewis’s ideas are presented clearly, Thomas’s atheistic questions are also given a fair hearing.
My fourteen-year-old sister snatched up Conversations shortly after I brought it into the house. I was pleased; it’s an intellectually stimulating and edifying read. Parents may want to screen it, keeping in mind that it discusses topics of adult interest and that C.S. Lewis’s ideas owe a great deal to Greek philosophy and other sources as well as to Biblical Christianity.
Overall, this is a worthy introduction to C.S. Lewis’s life and message. For those who would like to go further, it includes a bibliography with information on Lewis’s complete works.
Rachel Starr Thomson, author of fantasy novels Worlds Unseen and Burning Light, is a homeschool graduate and writing coach. She lives in southern Ontario, Canada.
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