Good Grief!

A few years after the death of C.S.Lewis, Owen Barfield, one of Lewis's long-time and closest friends, tried  to describe the change that went over his friend in the 1930s.  Barfield noted that Lewis had adopted some kind of posture, that Lewis had ceased to write in the mode of "I say this" but rather in the mode of "This is the sort of thing a man might say."  This observation has long perplexed me, as in my reading Lewis (predominately his fiction and literary essays, not the apologetics) I've never really noticed this before. But I have now, in the reading of A Grief Observed, which (supposedly) contains the notes from four of C.S. Lewis's notebooks written right after the death of his wife in 1960.  (The book was published under a pseudonym in 1961.)  Though there are passages of apparent actual grief in this book, there are also a lot of passages that feel like Lewis is posturing, that the exercise basically is Lewis setting up straw men arguments about the absences or cruelty of God in order to wriggle around them later. This makes the whole book (which fortunately is short) an essay in what Lewis calls "rhetorical chicanery."  I cannot imagine anyone finding anything of worth in these rantings unless one comes to them already as a Christian seeking confirmation of one's pre-existing superstitions.  This edition has an additional essay on Lewis by Chad Walsh, which is far superior (but with occasional lapses) to Lewis's own writing in this slim book.

Misled by Expectations

Publishers are idiots. In the blurb on the back cover of this book, The Wolf in the Attic (2016) by Paul Kearney, the prospective reader is told upfront a plot-point that doesn't happen until half-way through the book. And indeed, the book starts out so slowly that the reader is itching to get to that plot-point to see if it will go anywhere. It does, but in the end it isn't very rewarding.  Basically this is the story of a young Greek girl, Anna, who came to Oxford, England, with her father in the mid-1920s escaping the wars in Greece. It is now five or so years afterwards, late in 1929, and soon in the new year Anna will turn twelve. For the first half of the book, Anna tries to find a place as an English girl. It is very boring.  For the second half of the book, she becomes involved with some gypsies who represent one side of an ancient quarrel.  The Roadmen, chasing the gypsies, represent the other.  Anna now finds herself set-up to take sides in the old quarrel.  This, too, is not very interesting.  C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien make cliched cameos in Anna's story, and the cynic in me would suggest that the only reason for their appearance in this book is to get blurb-makers to make comparisons between this novel and the two classic (and bestselling) fantasists. Otherwise they serve no purpose. Yet this isn't entirely a bad book. The set-up takes way too long, and the whole backstory is rather muddled. But basically, this is a young-adult novel, the first-person narrative of a twelve year old girl, masquerading (presumably another decision made by the idiot publisher) as an adult fantasy novel.  Thus misrepresented the reader expects something much different from what this book actually delivers. I will certainly have second thoughts before buying another book published by Solaris, for obvious reasons, and I won't be actively looking for further books written by Paul Kearney, for other reasons.