A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis by Devin Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why of all the biographies of C.S. Lewis, including his own Surprised By Joy, should you read this biography? That’s a fair question but rather than try to answer that outright, I will tell you what I liked about this particular biography.

First, it is a sympathetic biography without being a hagiography. Brown accepts Lewis on his own terms while also recognizing his faults and foibles–particularly his priggishness as a young scholar prior to his conversion. The only place where this might be open to criticism is on the subject of his relationship with Mrs. Moore. Some might think he handled Lewis’s relationship with his war-time friend’s mother with kid gloves. I’d say he was probably being circumspect with regard to matters open to speculation.

Second, this is a good work of scholarship, which exposes the reader not only to writings they would already know, but also to his correspondence, some of which has only recently been released. We hear Lewis in his own words and see the care with which he writes to friends and total strangers. And Brown does all this in a book of modest length.

Third, Brown explores a motif of Lewis’s life, his ideas about Joy throughout his life. One sees a person who not only discovered Joy as a signpost to greater realities, but also one who tremendously enjoyed his life–his scholarship, his friends, his wife, appropriately enough named Joy, and even his last years and the anticipation of his own passing. We follow Lewis from boyhood to his last years, which while punctuated by the death of his mother and of Joy, and a horrendous grammar school experience, was a journey into Joy.

Finally, I appreciated some of the new insights this book brought me into his conversion and the role played by friends like Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. It was also delightful to read Brown’s account of the Inklings and the ways Lewis and Tolkien in particular encouraged each other in their writing projects–would we have the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings otherwise? Likely not.

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