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.
