Friends and rivals

When Tolkien's memorial is placed in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey next year, it will be near that of C.S. Lewis. "[H]e and Lewis will be, in death, within pipe-lighting distance of each other – at least in spirit." Philip Womack in The Telegraph:

.... Lewis and Tolkien bore many similarities: Lewis was also conservative and deeply Christian.

.... Both fought, and were scarred by, the First World War. They also both enjoyed smoking a good pipe.

Their rivalry took many forms, as they sized each other up from opposing sides of a bitterly fought war in the Oxford English department. Tolkien sprang from the unfashionable school of philology, and thought anything after Chaucer was too miminy-piminy to be the proper subject of a degree. This rankled with Lewis, whose works of literary criticism on Renaissance writings still stand strong today.

Tolkien saw his work as an act of “sub-creation”, inspired directly by God. His Middle Earth was built up from language itself, extrapolated into a unified whole. Its purpose was to resonate as mythic history for the English, filled with Anglo-Saxon echoes. Surprisingly, Middle Earth’s spiritual aspect is pre-Christian: no Christ figure walks alongside the hobbits, breathing strength into their steps.

Lewis, on the other hand, adopted a hodge-podge approach which, on the whole, Tolkien disliked. How, for example, can Father Christmas exist in Lewis’ Narnia, a mythical world of talking animals, when Christ did not visit it? Aslan the lion is the Narnian version of the Son of God, with different functions to Jesus (he appears, for example, at the Creation of the World.)

There’s also the mixed bag of fauns, hags, dryads and so forth, drawn from numerous sources. Even Bacchus pops up. ....

Their most powerful link, though, was their shared faith, manifested in particular in the idea of joy. In his writings, Tolkien was interested in what he termed “eucatastrophe”, or a “sudden joyous turn”, demonstrating the existence of God’s Providence. Lewis explored a similar idea of “joy” in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. Whenever Aslan appears in Narnia, characters become overwhelmed with the emotion. .... (more)

Philip Womack, "Tolkien and CS Lewis were the best of frenemies," The Telegraph, Sept. 24, 2026.

Willy Wonka in Narnia

Those of us who value The Narnia Chronicles have already read enough to be dubious about Netflix's upcoming 2027 version of The Magician's Nephew. It is entirely unnecessary to be a Christian believer to entertain that doubt. The production appears to have made many bad decisions, quite apart from messing with Aslan's gender. From The Telegraph, by someone obviously familiar with the books:

Uncle Andrew and Jadis

As anyone who has read the book will know, the Edwardian setting is crucial to its tone – self-consciously setting it before the First World War at a time England is still innocent and the horrors of the Somme have yet to rise out of some great hellish pit.

That prelapsarian quality is key to the story, which is essentially the origin tale of Professor Digory Kirke, the eccentric owner of the wardrobe which grants access to Narnia in later books. The Magician’s Nephew is in its essence a book set Before The Fall. At the start of the story, the wicked Jadis is trapped in suspended animation in a post-apocalyptic alternative dimension, Narnia has yet to be created by Aslan and Britain is looking forward to a century of peace. But then two children – Digory and his friend Polly – muddle around and everything changes utterly. Jadis is unleashed, evil is free and tranquility is shattered – literally so, when the future ruler of Narnia runs amok in London in scenes that have the quality of a steampunk Grand Theft Auto.

That is in contrast to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which unfolds against the background of the Blitz and where readers can infer that the children are quietly traumatised by the horror of war – one reason why they leap so readily into the great unknown of the wardrobe. But if you shunt The Magician’s Nephew forward to the post-war austerity of the 1950s, then that dynamic is changed utterly: the calm-before-the-storm aspect of the Edwardian period is missing.

If Jadis is the monster in this story, then the part of pathetic villain is played by Digory’s eccentric Uncle Andrew, a self-involved boffin who tricks Polly into disappearing into another dimension by having her touch a magic ring – then blackmails Digory into setting off to rescue her. The “Magician” in The Magician’s Nephew, as written by Lewis, has few redeeming features. Yet in Gerwig’s film he’s played by the charming Daniel Craig; judging by new images, he will be a lovable boffin, a sort of Willy Wonka of the Lewis-verse. .... (more)

Ed Power, "Netflix’s $280m ‘rock opera’ Narnia film is even madder than it sounds," The Telegraph, Sept. 20, 2026.

Alienation

Anyone who has visited my apartment would suspect that I am something of an Anglophile. They would be right. On the walls, they would find pictures of village scenes, a map of the London Underground, reproduction posters for RMS Aquitania and the Night Scotsman, a mirror from a pub, and more. Someone reading my bookshelves will find many mysteries and thrillers by British authors, from Buchan to Sayers, Allingham, P.D. James, Dick Francis, Conan Doyle, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carré, among others. Other favorite authors include Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Bernard Cornwell, Churchill, George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman), P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Adams (Watership Down), A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Louis Stevenson. I enjoy reading British history and watching documentaries about it. Much of my favorite music is British: Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Scottish Psalter, Anglican hymns, hymns written by Charles Wesley. I listen often to The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. I like English-style beers, Scotch whisky, bangers and mash, fish and chips, etc. And that's not exhaustive. I am an Anglophile, but mostly, I think, of a Britain past rather than the one since, maybe, the 1990s, when I was last there. Carl Trueman, who grew up in England, writes "The England I Knew Is Gone":

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values promoted freedoms—of speech, of religion, of expression. All of that is gone, at least from the class that presumes to define the country’s mores and morals. ....

England exemplifies the political shape a country takes when expressive individualism grips the imagination of its ruling class. It is impossible for any culture to allow everyone to be who they want to be, from transgender activists to traditional Christians. Somebody therefore has to bring order to the potential chaos, and as expressive individualism tends strongly toward the transgressive, with its core notion that personal authenticity lies in breaking with the herd (that is, the social expectations of the past), the culture-makers will typically favor those who want to demolish received ideas and traditions deemed stumbling blocks to self-realization. This turns morality on its head. Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s oppressive vices, as the moral register has shifted in a psychological direction—most notably in the trivialization of trauma, which in some cases has come to mean little more than “somebody somewhere said something hurtful about me.” Sadly, the Church has often proved little different. ....

And this is not an English monopoly. It is a Western malaise. .... (more)

Carl R. Trueman, "The England I Knew Is Gone," First Things, August 27, 2026.

Storytelling

Last year I posted about two books I wanted to read that were to be published in 2026. One of them, Michael Dirda's The Great Age of Storytelling: The Glory Days of Adventurers and Rogues, Time Travelers and Great Detectives, is now for sale at Amazon, although the expected publication date isn't until December. From Dirda's description of the contents:

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors listed in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

Reading Narnia again

I have begun to re-read the Narnia books, beginning, of course with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, not, as the current collections begin, with The Magician's Nephew. Alister McGrath, in my opinion, argues persuasively for for the publication order, with LWW first:

.... The most significant difficulty concerns The Magician's Nephew, the last in the series to be written, which describes the early history of Narnia. To read this work first completely destroys the literary integrity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which emphasises the mysteriousness of Aslan. It introduces him slowly and carefully, building up a sense of expectation that is clearly based on the assumption that the readers know nothing of the name, identity, or significance of this magnificent creature. In his role as narrator within The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis declares, "None of the children knew who Asian was any more than you do." But anyone who has read The Magician's Nephew already knows a lot about Asian. The gradual disclosure of the mysteries of Narnia—one of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's most impressive literary features—is spoiled and subverted by a prior reading of The Magician's Nephew.

Equally important, the complex symbolic structure of the Chronicles of Narnia is best appreciated through a later reading of The Magician' Nephew. This is most helpful when it is placed (following the order of publication) as the sixth of the seven volumes, with The Last Battle as the conclusion. .... (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet, 2013.)

The first set of the Chronicles I bought (I own several), published by Macmillan in 1966,  used the original order. At the bottom of the cover above, it reads "Book 6 in the Chronicles of Narnia." At some point, that changed. In the more recent collection I own, published by HarperCollins, the Narnian chronology is used, with Magician first.

Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

"Other forces at work..."

Wise counsel from a work of fiction:

...Tolkien’s assessment of history isn’t just the musings of some dour and curmudgeonly professor. His views never amounted to despair or cynicism; as is his read on history, they are tethered and illumined by hope.

This is alluded to throughout The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation, while Frodo and Gandalf are in the Mines of Moria, Frodo laments,

“It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.” Notice how Gandalf’s answer isn’t merely a reprimand or a lecture on providence.

Gandalf: “Pity? It's pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

There are other forces at work, indeed. ....

In the epic of Tolkien’s literary masterpiece, he does in fantasy and fairy tale what few theologians and professors can do in lectures. In his characters, we see despair assuaged, courage enlivened, contempt tempered. Ultimately, Tolkien reminds us that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Precisely because this is what God does, we can trust that the best strategy for the church and for us individually in the Christian life is not to relent to our reactionary impulses but to “Let folly be our cloak!”

We might think hanging on to the ordinary means of grace is an act of despair, but it's not. We can’t fathom that in these plain practices, by faith, we are participating in the most powerful things in the world. Not in a methodological, technical, or pragmatic sense; the rituals of the church do not coax God as if he’s a feral animal. God’s mystical and mysterious work is beyond all of that. Rather, they are the very inbreaking of the New Creation in our lives.

You see, in a world where God has revealed himself, become incarnate, died for our sins, and risen for our justification, who promises to come again to judge the living and the dead, there is no room for cultural moods to dictate our life and ministry. .... (more)

Caleb Wait, "A Veil Before the Eyes of the Enemy: On Tolkien, Foolishness, and the Ordinary Means of Grace," Modern Reformation, May 19, 2026.

St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

Gateway to history

I have commented before about historical novels I have enjoyed. I dislike those that take liberties with what is actually known about real people and events, but the good ones don't. The Telegraph presents a selection of "The 20 greatest war novels." The writer, himself an author of historical fiction, introduces his choices with reference to one of my favorite historical novelists:

As a boy, I devoured the historically accurate and side-splittingly funny Harry Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, which track the disgraceful adventures of the notorious Victorian soldier-cad as he skulks and whores his way through the major conflicts of the 19th century. They stayed with me. And so shortly before writing my first novel, Zulu Hart, set during the Anglo-Zulu conflict of 1879, I interviewed Fraser. “Do you ever manipulate historical facts to suit your plot?” I asked.

“I try not to,” he replied. “The trick with real historical figures is to be honest and stay true to their spirit.” One of the few times he broke his rule was not being “quite fair” to Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, in Royal Flash, the second of the Flashman series. “But he was such a swine anyway,” explained Fraser, “that I figured that was all right.”

To me, a good war novel should do exactly this: remain faithful to history while taking canny artistic licence to create convincing characters. It should rattle along at a decent pace and contain universal truths, jeopardy (no outcome is inevitable), and act as a gateway for readers to explore “proper” history. ....

Most of the twenty fictions are more serious than this one, but Fraser's ability to entertain made learning history fun:

Flashman (1966) by George MacDonald Fraser

Presented as the discovery of the long-lost Flashman Papers (a literary device that even deceived some American academics at the time), this hilarious, superbly researched book chronicles the army career of the notorious bully from Thomas Hughes’s popular Victorian novel Tom Brown’s School Days. Expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, young Harry Flashman joins the infamous Lord Cardigan’s 11th Hussars and later becomes a reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan. Somehow our cowardly anti-hero emerges from the disastrous Retreat from Kabul with his skin intact, his reputation enhanced and his eye for the ladies unimpaired.

Saul David, "The 20 greatest war novels," The Telegraph, Feb. 28, 2026.

A prophetic novel?

In the third book of his science fiction trilogy, C.S, Lewis converted his thesis from The Abolition of Man into a novel:

In 1945, C.S. Lewis published a strange, unsettling novel called That Hideous Strength. It was marketed as fiction, but it read like prophecy. ....

That Hideous Strength isn’t really about technology. In truth, it is about the objects of our obedience. It’s about what happens when humanity stops kneeling before God and starts bowing to its own tools. Lewis understood something many clever people miss: rejecting divine truth doesn’t make people more rational. If anything, it leaves them exposed, more vulnerable, more easily led.

The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane, and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.

Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control. ....

In That Hideous Strength, the villains aren’t crude tyrants. They are administrators. Experts. Committees. They speak eloquently. They promise safety. They insist they are beyond good and evil because they operate on a higher plane.

Lewis recognized this tone. It is the voice of people who believe themselves absolved by intelligence. People who think cleverness is a moral category. People who confuse capability with permission.

Lewis warned of the abolition of man, not as a sudden catastrophe, but as a slow diminishment. Not destruction by force, but erosion by pride. When basic decency is discarded, those who hold authority no longer judge human behavior; they redefine what it means to be human — reshaping instincts, limits, and desires according to their own designs. .... (more)

John Mac Ghlionn, "How C. S. Lewis’s Prophetic Warning Has Come True 80 Years Later," Religion Unplugged, Feb 25, 2026.

A ripping good yarn

From a review of Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson:

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day—Alexandre ­Dumas, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults. However, the pleasures of reading adventure stories are not all guilty ones. The very best of such tales not only entertain but also teach—­reminding grown men and women of fundamental truths they took in when young. ....

Treasure Island portrays an adolescent’s initiation into the depths of manly wickedness—and his boldness in fighting against it. The sinister forces that generally flee the daylight penetrate the peaceable life of young Jim Hawkins. A succession of seafaring ruffians, each more rotten than the previous—Billy Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew—arrive at his father’s inn, and bring with them terror and bloodshed, as they pursue the notorious pirate Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Pelf, loot, plunder: That is what pirates live and die for. But this fascination with riches infects the good men whom Jim knows, and with Flint’s treasure map in their possession a select group of them heads out to sea in quest of a fortune.

They are all innocents, with a lot to learn about the nature of evil. Squire Trelawney, the ringleader, unwittingly hires a crew of pirates who had sailed with Flint, among them Long John Silver, the peg-legged archvillain who has become the favorite buccaneer of popular legend. At first, they strike the Squire as virtuous men; but appearances can be fatefully deceiving, as Jim learns more quickly than his adult companions. Having climbed into a barrel on deck to get one of the few apples remaining there, Jim overhears Silver feverishly tell his fellow cutthroats of his plan to murder the good men—he imagines the most exquisite mutilations for the Squire—and take all the treasure for themselves. As Jim tells the story, “I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the ­extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

One lesson after another in maintaining his composure will follow. The pirates and the honest men will go to war, and several will be killed. Perhaps the biggest excitement comes when Jim fights to the death with the malignant Israel Hands. In a tour de force of practical criticism, Damrosch captures perfectly, sentence by sentence, the intricate and unrelenting narrative movement that renders the violent action, right down to the killing blow. ....

And for all that, it is a ripping good yarn, like Stevenson’s other most remarkable works of fiction. Each of these is singular in plot, but all are similar in their fundamental teaching: that righteous men must resist wrongdoers with all the courage they have, especially when the vicious have superior strength.

In Kidnapped (1886), seventeen-­year-old David Balfour, another slow learner, narrowly escapes a murderous pitfall contrived by his malicious, miserly uncle Ebenezer—yet still trusts the old reprobate enough to be suckered aboard a ship manned by evildoers, whom Ebenezer has paid to transport him into indentured servitude in the Carolinas. David, too, will have to fight for his life, and is fortunate to have at his side an expert ­swordsman who will become his fast friend. .... (more)

Algis Valiunas, "Stevenson’s Treasure," First Things, Jan 21, 2026.

Inklings

From "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia":

During the hectic middle decades of the twentieth century, from the end of the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered on a weekly basis in and around Oxford University to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings. ....

Just before the dawn of World War II, 88 years ago, one of the members of this group, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (better known as J.R.R. Tolkien), published a quaint little fantasy book for children entitled The Hobbit on September 21, 1937. It was followed by a trilogy of books beginning in 1954 called The Lord of the Rings....

Thirteen years later, John’s good friend Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) and fellow Inkling published an even quainter children’s book entitled The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe 75 years ago on October 16, 1950. It was followed by 5 sequels and 1 prequel. There is a new set of movies to be adapted for Netflix in which filming has already begun for the sixth published book, but the first in the series, The Magician’s Nephew. ....

...[B]ooks, articles, and videos have been made about the overt and subtle Christianity packed into the books Tolkien and Lewis have created. Middle-earth has been around for 88 years and Narnia for 75. ....

I don't think that The Magician's Nephew ought to be the first in the Netflix series, even though CSL himself recommended that as the proper reading order. There are also rumors that Aslan is to be voiced by Merrill Streep! Nevertheless, when the Netflix series comes, I will hope for the best.

Mark Wilson, "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia," Catholic Bard, Nov 8, 2025.

Against domination

Joseph Loconte on one of the reasons Tolkien and Lewis remain relevant beyond just entertainment:

.... Tolkien and Lewis made a literary pact between them: They would write novels to undeceive their generation and quicken the moral imagination. ....

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power. The devil and his minions want people “hag-ridden” by the future, Lewis writes, “haunted by visions of imminent heaven or hell on earth.” Once individuals become obsessed with controlling the future, they will be “ready to break the Enemy’s commands [God’s moral law] in the present” in order to attain the one or avoid the other.

Art was imitating life. To defeat capitalism and achieve its utopian vision of a classless society, freed from the vices of envy and competition, Soviet communism waged a war against its own population: the abolition of private property, show trials, executions, and gulags. To prevent “the bacillus of mankind” from polluting and destroying German society, Hitler launched his “final solution” against the Jews: the ghettos, the deportations, the sterilization policies, and the death camps.

Thus, the dictatorships of the left and the right — political religions without God — each claimed to be the solution to an approaching apocalypse. Each demanded unquestioned loyalty to their political agendas. As Tolkien described Sauron: “He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, and he named himself Lord of the Earth.” ....

Their most beloved stories — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia — upheld the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the literary establishment, they reclaimed the concept of heroism and reinvented it for the modern mind: Their unlikely protagonists include the children of Narnia and the homely inhabitants of the Shire. As Gandalf described the hobbits: “Soft as butter they can be, yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”

During the crisis years of 1933 to 1945, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, propaganda, and state-sanctioned violence, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis stood together in the breach. They offered a vision of human life — rooted in a deeply Christian outlook — that embraced humility, self-denial, and the rejection of worldly power. .... (more)

Joseph Loconte, "Lessons About Power from Middle-earth," National Review, Nov. 8, 2025.

Deliverance

Robinson Crusoe is, of course, a classic work of fiction. Few, I suspect, think of it as a work of Christian fiction. The illustration is by N.C. Wyeth, followed by a commentary on quotations from the book.

Three times a verse of Scripture comes to Robinson Crusoe in an hour of special need.

The first came in a spell of sickness. Recalling that the Brazilians used tobacco as a medicine, he searched in one of the chests for a roll of tobacco — and found a Bible. This he opened casually, and the first words that came to him were, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." (Psalm 50:15).

"The words," he wrote in his diary, "were very apt to my case, and made some impression on my thoughts at the time…though not so much as they did afterwards. .... Before I lay down I did what I had never done in all my life: I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me."

The second occasion was during a sense of sin. Recovered from his sickness, he began reading in the New Testament with the not uncommon result that he had found himself more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of his past life. "Now," he records, "I began to construe the words mentioned above, 'Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,' in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of anything being called deliverance, but my being delivered from the captivity I was in…the island was certainly a prison to me…but now I learned to take it in another sense.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort…. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction." .... (more)

"Robinson Crusoe and the Bible"

Reading when young (or old)

Once again this summer, The Telegraph offered "The best children’s books for every age group." It's a pretty good list. A few examples:

Four- to five-year-olds

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by AA Milne

In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive child an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) by Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.

Nine- to eleven-year-olds

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by CS Lewis

CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no child who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame

The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”

(more, perhaps only available to subscribers)

Emily Bearn, "The best children’s books for every age group," The Telegraph, July 15, 2025.

Buchan

Although published more than three years ago, I only came across it yesterday while searching for something else. Buchan is one of my favorite early 20^th century authors. From "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer":

If asked to list important lay Christian writers from the twentieth century, people tend to list names such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. One name that will probably not figure is John Buchan. Yet this omission is unfortunate, because Buchan was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and widely read British Christian authors, and, more importantly, he is an author whose works still have much to teach Christians today.

Buchan is best remembered today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but there was far more to his life than the writing of this single book. ....

Buchan...stands in the Christian tradition of moral realism. In his writings he teaches us that right and wrong, good and evil, are not mere human political inventions, but have objective existence, and that human beings have to take the right side in the battle between them. ....

[I]n Greenmantle, his hero, Richard Hannay, is rescued by the wife of a woodcutter while lost on an undercover mission in Germany in World War I. Her husband is away in the German army fighting the Russians, and she and her children are poverty-stricken and have very little food. However, out of Christian charity, she unhesitatingly offers food and shelter to Hannay, who is suffering from a bout of malaria, and her example changes Hannay's attitude completely:

'When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Hun some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' .... (more)

Buchan wrote in the inter-war years, and his books sometimes reflect prejudices common in Britain then, particularly anti-Semitism. I have posted about that before, and especially recommend this Gertrude Himmelfarb essay.

Martin Davie, "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer," Christian Today, April 23, 2022.

Action and adventure

Dirda has reappeared at The Washington Post with "What are the best adventure novels?" including a list of books that he would choose:

What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By “adventure” I don’t mean “exciting” — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker’s dozen:

• 
  Homer, The Odyssey
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• H. Rider Haggard, She
• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
• John Buchan, Greenmantle
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood
• P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

I haven't read The Odyssey since it was assigned in school. I never got into Haggard or Burroughs, except for a couple of the Tarzan books when I was in grade school. I know nothing about Bengtsson. But I do know the rest, and many are among my favorite reads.

Dirda goes on to consider some of the post-WWII titles he might choose as great adventure novels, and again, it's a list that includes many I've read with pleasure. Most of the rest of the essay is about another author unfamiliar to me, Lionel Davidson, and particularly his The Rose of Tibet.

I am very much looking forward to the book Michael Dirda is working on, an "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain."

Michael Dirda, "What are the best adventure novels? Let’s add a hidden gem to the list," The Washington Post, July 30, 2025.

Frederick Forsyth, RIP

I did enjoy his novels, especially Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War (both made into excellent films). He also narrated the BBC series Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. I used the first episode of that as an introduction to a unit on the military in an international relations class. From the Washington Post obituary:

Frederick Forsyth, a mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue who used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, died June 9 at his home in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. He was 86. ....

For a half-century, Mr. Forsyth was one of the most successful authors of the cloak-and-dagger circuit. He wrote more than 20 novels, short stories and other works, reportedly selling more than 75 million copies in more than a dozen languages. ....

.... Mr. Forsyth, who had mulled for years the attempted assassination of De Gaulle as scaffolding for a novel, spent a little over a month at the typewriter and finished the manuscript for The Day of the Jackal with the aid of many packs of Rothmans cigarettes.

The book was about a French paramilitary outfit that hires a remorseless British hit man known only as “the Jackal.” The tensions build on a collision course between the hired killer and an unassuming French police detective racing to stop him. The first four publishers who were pitched “Jackal” didn’t understand the book, Mr. Forsyth later told The Washington Post: “The point was not whodunit, but how, and how close would he get?” ....

In 1972, Mr. Forsyth won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. An acclaimed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, starred Edward Fox as the Jackal and Michael Lonsdale as the French police official. .... (more)

Brian Murphy, "Frederick Forsyth, thriller writer of ‘Day of the Jackal,’ dies at 86," The Washingtyon Post, June 9, 2025.

"Cooler than Cool"

I'm not sure when I first discovered Elmore Leonard, but it was after the time he was writing Westerns (but I do have DVDs of some films based on his Westerns). I believe I own copies of all of his crime novels, all eminently re-readable. I once gave old paperback copies of several of Elmore's books to a graduate student who aspired to be a screenwriter. A new biography of Elmore was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal today. From that review:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So reads the 10^th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. ....

Leonard’s style was Hemingway-like in its economy and reveled in the unexpected delights of the American language. His stories often began in the middle of a scene, and where they went after that was anyone’s guess. His opening lines, such as this one from 1980’s Gold Coast, were collectible: “One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

His crime stories, filled with oddball crooks and moody cops, were hard to pigeonhole, but Leonard’s audience grew to bestseller proportions, boosted by screen adaptations and near-idolatrous reviews. Many of his later works—among them LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), Out of Sight (1996) and Tishomingo Blues (2002)—have been reverently republished via the Library of America. Martin Amis would write that Leonard’s prose rang with the “American rhythms” of Robert Frost and Mark Twain. Ann Beattie compared his fiction, in its moral complexity, to Flannery O’Connor’s. .... (more)

Tom Nolan, "‘Cooler Than Cool’ Review: Elmore Leonard’s Life of Crime," The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025.

"Romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress..."

Occasioned by a new release of Richard Lester's Three Musketeers comes a review of a film I thoroughly enjoyed in a theater when it was first released, and have owned in some form ever since home video became affordable. The review reminded me that the screenwriter was one of my favorite authors. I just ordered Criterion's new edition, coming next week.

Few works have sparked the cinematic imagination as routinely as Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. A hasty count indicates some 40 movie versions (the first and latest from France, in 1903 and 2023) and many more made just for television. But by common consent, the best yet is Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), originally conceived as a single film with intermission but ultimately released as two separate pictures. ....

Three seasoned actors in their prime—Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay—were cast as the world-weary musketeers: Athos, Aramis and Porthos. Michael York, fresh from his central role in the soon-to-be Oscar-winning Cabaret, nabbed the plum part of the callow D’Artagnan (ultimately, the fourth musketeer)....

Raquel Welch, the very essence of feminine sexuality at the time, so her participation—as Constance, the queen’s dressmaker and the object of D’Artagnan’s ceaseless affections—was non-negotiable. Who knew then that this screen goddess, often as not wooden in dramatic parts, had talent as a comedic foil? ....

Landing Faye Dunaway after Bonnie and Clyde but before Chinatown and Network was a coup, and she portrays the ruthless Milady de Winter, an agent of much misery, with such unforgettable hauteur that it’s hard to imagine anyone else inhabiting the role. Christopher Lee lends her lover, the fearsome one-eyed Comte de Rochefort, exactly the kind of menace that made him irreplaceable on screen for so many decades. ....

...[T]he real casting masterstroke was placing Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood’s leading leading men, in the pivotal role of Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the throne and the figure discreetly controlling most of the saga’s action. Heston plays Richelieu with a welcome light touch, giving just the right weight to sotto-voce comments, asserting authority by never raising his voice and letting an arched eyebrow or a sidelong glance serve his character’s needs. ....

...[T]he Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser, whose early “Flashman” novels, with their outlandish bounder protagonist, served almost as dry runs for his spirited condensing of Dumas’s massive chronicle into two efficient pictures, each running less than two hours. It was Fraser who, when Mr. Lester asked how a particular scene should look, said, “like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt”—a comment the director clearly took to heart.

None of this makes these pictures high art, but they are consummate entertainment. Few of us want a meal of Bergman and Bresson every night. Sometimes, the menu calls for romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress, and, of course, sexy women and dashing men. And when you want to dine out on that, Mr. Lester is happy to serve you. (more)

David Mermelstein, "‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Four Musketeers’: Richard Lester’s Spirited Swashbucklers," The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2025.