© 1997 Don W. King

A version of this review appears in The Christian Scholars' Review 27, (Fall 1997): 129-30.

Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins, 1996, pp. 940, £25 or $42 (hardcover), ISBN 0-00-627800-0.

While there is little new in Walter Hooper's C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, it does contribute to furthering our appreciation of the work and life of Lewis. On the one hand, Hooper offers summaries of Lewis' most popular works including most of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Ransom space trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, autobiographical works like Surprised by Joy, his books on Christian apologetics and literary criticism, and, unexpectedly, but deservedly, his poetry; to uninformed and general readers of Lewis, these summaries will be helpful. On the other hand, why Hooper only provides summaries of some of Lewis' works is never adequately explained. Still, Hooper offers as complete a bibliography on Lewis' writing as may ever exist and new supplementary material on Lewis' life, particularly the important people who influenced and helped shape him; both scholars and general readers will find nuggets here.

For instance, Hooper includes detailed accounts of Lewis' friends and colleagues as well as fascinating insights into the quality of Lewis' character. We learn that when Pauline Baynes, Lewis' illustrator for the Narnia stories, wrote to congratulate him for The Last Battle winning the Carnegie Medal for the best children's book of 1956, he replied: "Is it not rather 'our' Medal?" (625). Peter Bide, Lewis' former pupil whom he asked to perform both a church sanctioned marriage between he and Joy Davidman and a service of healing for Joy, says Lewis was "baffled" by the position the Anglican Church held regarding his wanting to marry Joy; in the end he acquiesced to both requests: "Jack was a special case. Not only did I owe a considerable intellectual debt but the ordinary demands of friendship would have made it churlish to say no" (634). Warren Lewis says Hugo Dyson, long-time Lewis confidant, Inkling, and Shakespearean, best captured the nature of his brother's relationship with Mrs. Moore: "'O cursed spite that gave thee to the Moor': poor [Jack's] whole catastrophe epitomized in nine words!'" (652). Another pupil, Dom Bede Griffiths, wanting to convince Lewis of the merits of Roman Catholicism, found Lewis resistant because he only wanted "to speak of those [matters] which unified Christians" (671; Griffiths' emphasis). Dorothy Sayers, whom Lewis said was the first important person to write him a fan letter, was never a member of the Inklings, though Lewis liked her for "her extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation-as I like a high wind" (725).

Hooper also reveals Lewis had once been the object of marital fraud. Apparently early in 1951 a Mrs. Hooker represented herself as Mrs. C. S. Lewis and stayed at the Court Stairs Hotel for over a year, all the while assuring the proprietors her husband would pay her bill as soon as he arrived. When confronted in Oxford by the hotel managers, Lewis explained that he was not married. In the legal action that Lewis reluctantly initiated upon the advice of his solicitor, Owen Barfield, Mrs. Hooker was arrested and subsequently convicted; during the process it was discovered this was a fraud Mrs. Hooker had practiced previously. Still, Lewis found the legal action horrible: "The actual scene in court was horrid. I never saw Justice at work before, and it is not a pretty sight. Any creature, even an animal, at bay, surrounded by its enemies, is a dreadful thing to see: one felt one was committing a sort of indecency by being present" (58-59). This bizarre incident ended with Mrs. Hooker showering Lewis with letters from prison insisting that if they were not married they were certainly engaged. Lewis learned she was dying and was begging to see him one last time; however, when he visited her in prison, he learned that she lied even about this. He wrote: "Poor creature . . . there's not much left of her when one takes away the fantasies" (63).

The book's great weakness is its lack of analysis. There is no section devoted specifically to analyzing Lewis' achievements as a writer, artist, or apologist; even in the summaries of Lewis' books we rarely find Hooper going beyond the obvious. He does often provide helpful background information regarding when and how books came to be, but his analysis and synthesis lack focus and sustained emphasis. When he discusses, for example, allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia, Hooper does little more than pull together other passages where Lewis refers to allegory; he neglects a thorough, critical investigation of the place of allegory in Lewis' corpus. Admittedly, scholarly analysis may have been beyond the scope of Hooper's efforts in this volume, but in a book that runs to almost 1000 pages one expects significant critical insight; a related weakness is the absence of a critical bibliography.

Though Hooper has been often maligned in recent years, especially over the authorship of The Dark Tower and related matters, he deserves thanks for this volume. While not a definitive piece of scholarship, it is a solid contribution to the growing collection of information on the twentieth century's most popular Christian writer; it deserves a place on the bookshelf of both acolyte and critic. Hooper avoids excessive panegyric and hagiography, yet this is, nonetheless, a tale tenderly told. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide is a loving testimony to a writer the author unashamedly loves.