The Shadowlands by William Nicholson

Shadowlands by William Nicholson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reading this play was a much different experience than the rest of the works we have read thus far. It is the only book on our list that is not actually written by C.S. Lewis, and in that sense it was kind of refreshing to have an outsider's opinion and interpretation of Lewis' life.

The first question that I asked myself while reading this drama was how accurate it really is. In our class discussion we addressed this concern. It is, overall, a fictional work, but there are some factual elements in it. For example: we learned that the poem Joy reads to Lewis, as well as Lewis' justification for marrying Joy (her first marriage did not count since her husband was already married a first time), were accurate. However, some of the details on time were not accurate. Joy was living in London before she came to Oxford, and their meeting was not exactly how it appeared in this drama. Also, C.S. Lewis was not a kind of withdrawn, somber sort of man. Rather, he was outspoken and extroverted. Him and his wife would often go to the pub and do karaoke. He loved her because she was able to dish it right back at him.


Overall, I was really grateful for the experience to read The Shadowlands. I appreciated the insights in class that helped me place it in proper perspective, but all in all I think Nicholson did an excellent job capturing C.S. Lewis.

After reading this play, I am really looking forward to reading the movie adaptation.  This is a remarkable and unique love story!


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Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading so many books by C.S. Lewis, it was really nice to hear in his own words what life experiences he had that made him that unique individual. I am not the biggest fan of autobiographies in general, so I appreciated the companion biographical story told in The Essential C.S. Lewis, but I think Lewis does a pretty good job at honestly representing himself, particularly his childhood and educational career.

Things I did not know before (including bits from class discussion):

Lewis went by the nickname Jack. His mother died of cancer when he was a kid; he had little to no relationship with his father, and was an atheist the majority of his young life. It was “The Great Knock,” a mentor and teacher, who taught him to really question things, and though an atheist himself, it was these principles that taught Lewis to rethink atheism, which lead to his conversion to theism, and later Christianity.

Another insight from this that I appreciated was that Lewis did not trust emotions from a very early age. He seemed to be afraid of raw emotion, and I think that explains why he takes such a logical, rational approach to many of his arguments. Lewis also had a wild imagination. I loved reading about his childhood and the description of his house full of books. Without TV and video games, he was left to entertain himself with his own thoughts and rich imagination. I really like that, and that is something I hope to cultivate in my own children someday.

Something else I did not know: Lewis was also wounded in WWI and told his friend, Patty, that if he died he would take care of his mother. Apparently when Lewis moved in with her that lead to a rather interesting relationship—though Surprised by Joy does not mention that. Lewis does claim that he had a past before converting though, and that would only make sense.

I like this idea of joy that Lewis describes and the complexity of it. At first Lewis thought that was what he would have to give up when he became a Christian, only to discover that this was the opposite case. Joy tried to find him his whole life, but it came when he did not expect it. Joy comes in moments—in a sense of something beyond ourselves, something heavenly. Lewis also describes joy as an unsatisfied desire and kind of painful. The want of it is kind of like Heaven, in his opinion. We try to find joy fulfilled by false substitutes and through desire, but real joy is greater than pleasure or happiness. It also makes it the most valuable.

The book ended a bit abruptly to my liking. It seemed to focus mostly on his conversion to theism and not necessarily Christianity, and then it cut off from there. Again, one of the aspects I dislike about autobiography (and how blasted modest they try to be when I would rather just hear about their great accomplishments as unique individuals). I’m grateful for outside texts to give me more context for his life from a more objective point of view, and to hear more about the other aspects apart from his conversion (though that was, of course, important).

Until reading more on his life in The Essential C.S. Lewis, I also had no idea that his wife’s name was Joy. I think that is kind of ironic given the impetus of Joy that Lewis tries to answer in this autobiography.


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The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Great Divorce is an episodic book by C.S. Lewis that sets out to teach us that, in the words of George MacDonald as an epitaph for this work, “there is no heaven with a little of hill in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

In class we talked a lot about the title and the significance of that. Lewis is clear in this book, as in his others, that pacifism and relativity is not acceptable. To enter Heaven, the only reality, we have to put everything that makes us hellish out of our hearts. The interesting thing that stood out to me, mainly because of the parallel I feel it has to my own faith as a member of the LDS church, is that while Lewis says that he did not mean this to be “a speculation at what may actually await us” (x) in the afterlife, there is something about eternal and gradual progression that he puts a lot of focus on.

I think that gives hope to imperfect people like me, who probably have plenty of hell that they have not divorced in their hearts, to feel like they can still make the choice to become perfected. You have to start somewhere. “It’s only the little germ of a desire [or mustard seed] for God that we need to start to process” (98). I think that was one of my favorite messages from this book—at the end of the day, it is a choice. A lot of the characters we meet in this story were at the point of choosing heaven, but there was always something left in their hearts that they were just not willing to give up, “choices that had really been made long ago” (144). However, once someone decided to give the place a try and put off their natural selves, they gradually get “solider—grow acclimatized” (53). I like how Lewis wrote it. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end,” Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened” (75). As a Latter-day Saint, this almost feels like reading scripture.

I think that the form of this book lends itself to lots of symbolism, but the main thing we discussed in class was that of substance—comparing the ghosts to hell and then to even that tiny apple from Heaven, which was “made of some different substance, so much solider” (21). At one point a voice shouts at the ghost trying to take this apple back on the bus to “put it down” since “there is not room for it and hell” and he should instead “learn to eat such apples” (49). Heaven is described as being the only place where reality actually exists. Hell was basically the size of a crack in the ground compared to the reality of Heaven (137-138). “Hell is a state of mind…but Heaven is not…Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly” (70).

Something else I learned in class that I did not know from simply reading was that our guide, George MacDonald (in many ways a parallel to Dante’s Inferno Heaven guide, Beatrice), was a real character in Lewis’ life who he claimed “baptized” his imagination as a teenager even though he was not yet committed to Christianity. Brother Young, my professor, suggested that MacDonald’s teachings might be even more similar to LDS doctrine than Lewis’. This is definitely something I would be interested in learning more about.

And then our protagonist wakes up. Was it really all a dream? I like that instead of just waking up that he wakes up to “the clock is striking…and the siren howling” to warn of the England bombings. It does not matter what is going on in life, hard or lukewarm, we need to remember that we need to make the choice to divorce hell from us at all possible costs.


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