Rating: 4
My dad and I have both been reading a lot over this past year, and I’ve noticed that for the most part we have very different tastes. He likes dense books and favors histories, whereas I generally like things with more pace and the occasional fluffy plot, with thicker material sprinkled in. C. S. Lewis has been the author where our tastes overlap the most. My favorite book of all time is Lewis’s Till We Have Faces which my dad picked up this year and enjoyed about as much as I did. He just finished reading Out of the Silent Planet while I was reading The Screwtape Letters. From there we’re finding other books that we both like, and it’s been a lot of fun having book talks with him on the phone.
I’m not an especially religious person, which is why it surprises even me that I like reading C. S. Lewis so much. His writing is concise but illustrates the point well and usually with humor, and his approach to various subjects is always unique. This book is no exception. I chose it for my Christian Studies selection, and I could have picked up a purely nonfiction book with the same information and most likely thoroughly disliked it. From the perspective of Screwtape, however, the same subject matter becomes much more interesting, and (in that paradoxical way fiction has of making reality more real) even more true. Screwtape is entertaining in a morbid sort of way, which also aided my enjoyment of the book. If I were to read him simply as a character without the author’s background agenda, I would want to read more from this character.
From Screwtape’s letters to his nephew Wormwood, we learn where humanity makes its biggest pitfalls by seeing how eager the demons are to guide them in that direction. The virtues and sins are looked at and discussed in depth as they pertain to Wormwood’s “patient,” a human he is trying to win the soul of. While the gimmick gets a little old, it still allows for some fun exchanges while not sacrificing the meaning of the book.
There were moments where I felt the agenda getting pushed a little too much, and this is even more true in the follow-up story “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” In it Screwtape is addressing a graduating class in Hell, and spends most of his time talking about the issues with “democracy” as it’s being handled in that day’s British society. It’s a thinly-veiled commentary from the author himself, to the degree that sometimes you don’t really see Screwtape in the voice anymore. Even with that, and with the fairly long list of things I disagree with, I still really enjoyed these stories. And let’s face it, this isn’t a book that is shelved in Fiction, it’s shelved in Christian Studies. It’s supposed to be pushing an agenda, and I can accept that and enjoy it for what it is.
This post has been a part of my Read the Store Challenge for 2014.
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Life Flails 