Postponement

Further posts will come later today, but for the moment I’m just beat.  In the meantime, you can content yourself with a viewing of one of the most beautiful music videos ever produced.  A term like “music video” doesn’t even begin to do it justice:

No joke.

Conversations with C.S. Lewis

“Books written about C.S. Lewis” is a well-established and pretty dense field, and the forty-five years that have passed since the great don’s death have seen certain of these books become entrenched as classics in their own right even as new additions to the field are appearing all the time. January of this year saw the publication of Michael Ward’s sensible but not uncontroversial Planet Narnia, while Ignatius Press has Fr. Milton Walsh’s Second Friends, out only recently, comparing the thought and works of Lewis and Msgr. Ronald Knox.

But in May a smaller and more unassuming book came out that is also worthy of our time. Robert Velarde’s Conversations with C.S. Lewis (Amazon link here) is not an academic book – though it is a scholarly and well-researched one – and could instead be described as a work of historical fantasy. Perhaps. It’s also a work of creative biography, a riff on The Great Divorce and the Divine Comedy, and a highly practical introduction to Lewis’ general philosophies disguised as a pleasant little novel.

Velarde is a former atheist and author of The Heart of Narnia and the forthcoming Inside the Screwtape Letters. He also has his own blog, A Reasonable Imagination, whereat interesting things are frequently posted.

He has managed to distill a sort of outline of Lewis’ ideas about religion, ethics and imagination into a series of conversations between the polite modern atheist Thomas Clerk and what seems (to Clerk) to be the genial ghost of Lewis himself. The two men travel through time and space, visiting such essential Lewisian locales as his home at The Kilns, his chambers at Magdalen and the Eagle and Child, long-established public house and home of the Inklings. They argue with “The Great Knock,” Lewis’ imperturbably logical boyhood tutor, swap stories with J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, suffer the torments of the clerks of Hell and watch as a great Lion surveys His country. Conversations serves in this way as both a biography (in a limited sense, of course, though its moments are well-chosen) and a survey of Lewis’ works.

As these travels progress, Lewis and Clerk (or Jack and Tom, as they prefer) wind up discussing all manner of things, from “true myths” to trilemmas; chronological snobbery and the basis of all moral values. All of the major stuff is here, though I should say that Lewis’ works of literary and historical criticism (The Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, etc.) are rather underrepresented. The loss is not keenly felt, though, and their omission is certainly prudent. The most important thing is that Velarde manages to capture Lewis’ “voice,” as it were, very well. Those who have read much of his works before will recognize many of the same cadences at work in both the real and the fictional Jack. This is no small feat in and of itself, quite apart from the book’s other successes.

Trivial note: The main character’s surname (Clerk) may have been chosen as an homage to the pseudonym (N.W. Clerk) under which Lewis himself published A Grief Observed in 1961, the joke perhaps being that, just as Lewis tried to disguise his authorship of a book he wrote, so too is Velarde trying to disguise the presence of himself in a book ostensibly written about a fictional character. Or I could just be reading too much into it.

In any event, at 186 pages Conversations with C.S. Lewis is not an especially taxing read, and is ideally suited to those for whom a brief and enjoyable introduction to Lewis would be just the ticket. But make no mistake; this is also a pleasurable read for those already familiar with Jack and his works – on par, in some respects, with Peter Kreeft’s Between Heaven and Hell (a positive blurb from Kreeft graces the back cover of Conversations, in fact). I look forward to the upcoming book on Screwtape with great interest, but for now I’m content merely to give Conversations a solid recommendation.

Exterminators coming to television

The great well of irony seems to run deep for Simon Oliver and Tony Moore. Their comic series (through Vertigo, an imprint of DC), The Exterminators, was originally conceived of as a television show and shopped around to the appropriate offices with this in mind. It was not picked up. So they retooled it into a comic series and its release was met with widespread critical and popular acclaim. It started out strong. It carried its weight. It moved along admirably. Then about six months ago it just conked out, began wallowing in boring, asinine crap, and never managed to recover. The sales slumped; danger could be felt; the series was cancelled. What had been intended to run to 50 issues will instead run only to 30. I don’t know when the last one will come out, having given up on the title months ago, but I seem to remember seeing a new issue at the shop a few weeks ago.

So now, naturally, after this dramatic collapse of a series that had once been reckoned Vertigo’s most promising, Showtime has decided to turn it into a TV series after all. No word on showrunners or cast just yet, but I imagine they’ll drop much of the mystic/sci-fi stuff in favour of more character drama. It will still be weird as hell (speaking scientifically), of course, but I suspect it will also be just slightly more straight-laced. As long as it matches or exceeds the insanity implicit in the cover displayed to the left, I have a feeling all shall be happy enough.

In related news, there’s also no word on what’s happening with the TV adaptation of Garth Ennis’ Preacher, which was picked up ages ago and then apparently forgotten about. I’ve become less and less eager to see that one realized, anyway, so I can live with this state of mystery.