LIGHT ON C.S. LEWIS

The light here is refracted through a collective portrait of a twentieth century man of all seasons through the eyes of many who knew him, among them Owen Barfield, Stella Gibbons, Kathleen Raine and Chad Walsh. Lewis died two years ago; he was a man of great certainty and sureness, although the last to impose his views on others; he was also a writer of wit, paradox, imagination and diversity. He is approached here in the alternating essays as a Christian apologist (""from temper, from conviction, and from modesty""); as one of the last representatives of ""the old Western Order""; as a scholar, a teacher, a dialectician, an imaginative writer (he wrote three science fiction novels as well as the Narnia series); etc. There is a last full section by Walter Hooper on the Bibliography of his Writings along with an index. On the whole, the man remains rather distant even if his thinking is illumined in this rather reverential retrospective.