Written and first published about 1955 when the author was fifty eight years old, this is the account of the years leading up to 1929 when he ‘eventually gave in, and admitted that God was God… perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ These words are his own description of the time when he was converted from his atheism, first to Theism and then to Christianity. As I recall, he only once mentions the Lord Jesus Christ in the book and that is a couple of pages before the end. The whole reads more like a mystery thriller or an Agatha Christie whodunit where the whole of the preliminary story at last comes together and is solved in the last chapter or two. The author has been described as one of the most influential Christian writers of the twentieth century. That he was a man of towering intellect is certain, his writings are incredibly varied and in all he seeks to establish the truth of Christianity. His writings exhibit that quality of reasoning that makes them excellent books of apologetics and his mythopoeic writings are charged with spiritual truth. Many of them are radiant with a sense of God and of Christ, yet this autobiography reveals a childhood of great complexity. It is far from a straightforward, neat ‘I came to Jesus like this’ story of the kind that the evangelical church tends to propagate. For those seeking such a simple statement of coming to faith in Christ this book will not do, it is full of scholarship, wit and plenty of reasoning and yet all through its concern is with God and Christ. Clever, concise and challenging, with great skill, almost playing with words and yet containing a kind of friendly homeliness too, the author turns this his story of contrasting light and shade into a book that will lead the reader to wonder at the grace of God and His varied ways in working in the hearts of men to bring them to the knowledge of Himself. Some evangelicals find Lewis decidedly wanting as regards a clear and acceptable evangelical stance, I know what they mean. He does not fit into the neat categories that so many in the churches prefer. Others find that for them he is an almost inexhaustible source of truth. He has helped to lead them to a well-grounded confidence and faith in Christ. There is the apparent contradiction. Lewis chooses carefully the word ‘joy’ as defining both that which came to him earlier in life and he sought to find through many avenues but which eluded him and eventually came in God and Christ. Any who have read his book “A Grief Observed’ written after the loss of his wife will know that though that joy was challenged it remained. Read Lewis and be enlarged.
