Duriez begins the book with biographical accounts of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis from childhood until they met. He then shows how their personalities, tastes, interests, and ideas blended into friendship. He spends time discussing the other Inklings too, and how their collective group friendship was important to both Tolkien and Lewis. Their writing, their faith, and their careers all get explored here, sometimes in depth. If you are a fan of either author, or you like learning about authors in general, you would probably get a lot out of this book. I know I did!
Particularly Good Bits:
From his wide experience of reading [Lewis] instinctively rejected a distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature, serious and popular, and even between so-called good and bad books. A far more important distinction for him was that between good and bad readers. Literature, he increasingly felt, exists for the enjoyment of readers, and books therefore should be judged by the kind of reading that they evoke (p. 67-68).
At the core of the friendship of Tolkien and Lewis was their shared antipathy to the modern world. They were not opposed to dentists, buses, draft beer, and other features of the twentieth century, but what they viewed as the underlying mentality of modernism. They were not against science or scientists, but the cult of science, found in modernism, and its tendency to monopolize knowledge, denying alternative approaches to knowledge through the arts, religion, and ordinary human wisdom (p. 107).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some non-explicit allusions to possible sexual relationships between some adults and discussion of the trauma of wartime for soldiers.
This is my 29th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.
