DEEP MAGIC, DRAGONS & TALKING MICE
How reading C S Lewis can change your life
By Alister McGrath
Hodder & Stoughton. 208 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 1 444 750 300
Last year Alister McGrath published a very well-received major biography of C S Lewis. Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice is a short hardback book which flows out of the research for that previous project.
It gives us the author’s own helpful and perceptive summaries of Lewis’s thoughts on various key areas of life. The book imagines taking the reader to meet Lewis for a tutorial in his Oxford rooms or for lunch at a pub and such like, and being able to question the great man and listen to his answers. The topics of these invented conversations range from the meaning of life, friendship and the importance of stories, through to education, suffering and the hope of heaven. It makes fascinating and stimulating reading as we are put in touch with Lewis’s thought from his various writings and talks. Some well-known quotes from Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain break surface a number of times. In particular, Lewis’s ability to excite our imaginations rather than just address our powers of reason is seen as the key to his success in becoming the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century.
