What a Thriller Writer Owes C.S. Lewis
A working thriller author on the atheist who argued God on the radio, wrote the darkest children's books in English, and never stopped doubting.
I read all seven Narnia books as a boy. Every one of them, more than once, in the way you read books at that age, completely, with no distance at all between you and the page. I did not know then that the man who wrote them had spent half his life as an atheist, or that he had argued the existence of God on the radio while German bombs were falling on London, or that he would end his days writing one of the most honest accounts of grief ever put on paper. I only knew that a lion named Aslan made me feel something I did not yet have a word for. I have the word now, and as it happens Lewis had a word for it too. He called it Joy.
This is an essay about what a writer of thrillers, a man who deals in spies and blood and luxury and the dark machinery of power, can still learn from a tweedy Oxford don who wrote about talking animals and the love of God. The answer, when you look closely, turns out to be a great deal.
- C.S. Lewis spent roughly fifteen years as a committed atheist before converting, first to belief in God and then, in 1931, to Christianity. He called himself the most reluctant convert in all England.
- The conversion was pushed over the line by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien during a late night argument. Both men belonged to the Inklings, the Oxford writing circle that workshopped Narnia and The Lord of the Rings over beer before the world ever saw them.
- During the Second World War, Lewis gave a series of BBC radio talks to a frightened, bombed nation. Those talks became Mere Christianity, one of the most read works of popular theology ever written.
- The Narnia books are far darker than most people remember. That darkness is the craft lesson. You cannot make light mean anything without real dark to set it against.
- Aslan is openly a figure of Christ. You do not need to share the faith to be moved by the conviction underneath the work, the same way you do not need to be a Catholic to be levelled by Graham Greene.
- After his wife Joy Davidman died of cancer in 1960, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, a raw account of his own crisis of faith, published at first under a false name. That honesty is the most valuable thing about him.
Table of Contents
- The Most Reluctant Convert in All England
- The Inklings, and the Friend Who Changed His Mind
- A Voice on the Radio While the Bombs Fell
- Narnia Is Darker Than You Remember
- On Aslan, and Why I Do Not Mind
- When the Faith Broke
- What the Thriller Writer Steals
- Why It Still Holds Up
- Why I Keep Coming Back to Him
- Summary
- Sources
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Related Reading
The Most Reluctant Convert in All England
Clive Staples Lewis, called Jack by everyone who knew him, was born in Belfast in 1898. His mother died of cancer when he was nine years old, and the boy who had been raised in the Protestant church quietly walked away from it. The death of his mother, the cold distance of his father in the years that followed, and the horror of the trenches in the First World War, where he served and was wounded, all of it pushed him steadily toward a hard and well defended atheism. He said later that he had been angry at God for not existing, which is a strange and very human contradiction, and exactly the sort of thing Lewis was honest enough to write down.
His return to faith took something like fifteen years, and it was not a sudden thing on a road to Damascus. It was an argument that he slowly lost. He first gave way on the existence of God, kneeling to pray as, in his own famous phrase, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. But belief in God was not yet Christianity. That final step came in 1931, after a long night of conversation with two friends, and it is worth knowing who those friends were, because one of them is a name you already know well.
The Inklings, and the Friend Who Changed His Mind
At Oxford, Lewis fell in with a loose circle of writers and academics who called themselves the Inklings. There were no rules, no officers, and no agendas, as Lewis's brother Warnie once put it. They met on Thursday evenings in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College to read their unfinished work aloud and argue about it, and on Tuesday mornings they gathered at a pub called the Eagle and Child, known to everyone in Oxford as the Bird and Baby, for beer and wide ranging talk. The members included Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Lewis's brother Warnie, and a philologist who was at that time quietly building an entire world complete with its own invented languages. His name was J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books were both read aloud in that back room before the world ever saw a word of them. It is worth pausing on that. Two of the most lasting imaginative works of the twentieth century were shaped by friends over pints, picked apart, defended, and revised. It is the oldest truth about writing and the one we forget most easily. You need readers who will tell you the truth before the public ever gets the chance to.
And it was Tolkien, a devout Catholic, who helped push Lewis over the final line. On that night in 1931, Tolkien and another friend named Hugo Dyson argued to Lewis that the Christian story was a myth of the same kind as the dying god myths he had always loved in Norse and Greek literature, with one crucial difference. This particular myth, they told him, was one that had actually happened. Something in that idea reached him in a way that bare argument never had. The man who had once dismissed the Gospels as merely another version of the stories of Adonis and Loki found that he could no longer hold the line. The friendship did the work that no sermon ever could have.
A Voice on the Radio While the Bombs Fell
In February of 1941, with London being bombed almost nightly and the BBC's own Broadcasting House already struck more than once, the corporation's director of religious broadcasting wrote to Lewis and asked him to give a series of radio talks. Lewis was no admirer of the radio, but the chance to reach a million frightened people all at once was reason enough to say yes. He went on the air and spoke, in plain and ordinary English, about right and wrong and about what Christians actually believe, in talks of about fifteen minutes that he had to time down to the second.
He was chosen in part because he was a layman rather than a clergyman, and because he had been an atheist and could still remember, as he himself put it, what Christianity looks like from the outside. That is the whole secret of why those talks landed so hard. He was not preaching down from a pulpit. He was a man who had stood on the other side, explaining to ordinary people what had changed his mind, while the war screamed on outside the studio. Those broadcasts were later collected into a book called Mere Christianity, which has never once gone out of print. Almost none of the original audio survives, because the BBC kept very little of it, which is a small tragedy all its own.
Narnia Is Darker Than You Remember
Here is the thing that people forget about Narnia, and I had forgotten it myself until I went back to the books as a grown man. They are dark. A boy betrays his own brother and sisters for a handful of sweets and very nearly gets them all killed. A good king is murdered. Children are hunted, enslaved, and lied to. There is a slow and creeping horror underground in The Silver Chair, a genuine end of the world in The Last Battle, and a witch who freezes living creatures into stone and rules a whole land in an endless winter where Christmas never comes. Lewis did not write soft and comforting books for children. He wrote frightening, morally serious books that happened to have children in them, which is an entirely different thing.
That darkness is precisely why the books work, and it is the lesson that sits closest to my own desk. Lewis understood that you cannot make light mean anything without real darkness to set it against. A villain who is not truly menacing produces a hero who is not truly brave. The White Witch has to be genuinely terrifying, or else the sacrifice that Aslan makes is reduced to a pageant. Evil has to carry real weight, or the good becomes weightless along with it. Anyone who writes about the dark machinery of the world for a living understands this in his bones, or at least he ought to.
On Aslan, and Why I Do Not Mind
Yes, Aslan is Jesus. Lewis built the great lion as a deliberate image of Christ, the figure who lays down his life in the place of a traitor and then rises again, and who is, in the words that every reader remembers, not a tame lion. None of this was ever hidden. Lewis said as much himself, more than once.
And I want to say plainly that this does not trouble me in the slightest. I read those books as a boy and felt the full force of Aslan long before I could have told you what he stood for, and knowing now exactly what he stood for takes nothing at all away from him. A story does not become smaller because it carries a meaning underneath it. If anything, it becomes larger. You do not need to share a writer's faith in order to be moved by the conviction that runs beneath his work, in the same way that you do not need to be a Catholic to be levelled by Graham Greene, or a fatalist to feel the cold beauty in Hemingway. The belief is the engine of the thing. You can feel that engine running even if you would never have built it yourself. Aslan is Jesus, and Aslan is also one of the great characters in the whole of the English imagination, and both of those things are true at the same time, and I am glad of it.
When the Faith Broke
Late in his life Lewis married Joy Davidman, an American writer, in what began as a marriage of convenience and slowly became, against all of his own expectations, a deep and consuming love. She had cancer. She died in 1960, only a few years after they were married. And so the most famous Christian apologist of his century, the very man who had explained God to an entire nation over the radio, sat down and wrote what it actually felt like when God fell silent.
The book is called A Grief Observed, and he published it at first under a false name because he did not want it tied to him. It is not a comfortable read. In its pages he turns on all of the easy answers, including his own. He writes about knocking on the door of God in his hour of need and hearing only the sound of bolting and double bolting from the inside, and after that a silence. This is the same man who wrote Mere Christianity, and here he is describing his own faith as a house of cards that the first real wind had knocked flat. He does not tidy it up at the end. He works his way through it, raw and furious and grieving, and what comes out the far side is something quieter and harder won than anything in the radio talks.
I find this to be the single most important thing about him. A lesser writer, and a lesser man, would have protected the reputation he had spent decades building. Lewis instead published his doubt. He let the whole world see the great apologist on his knees, uncertain, in the dark. That honesty is worth more than all the certainty that came before it, and it is the reason I trust everything else the man ever wrote.
What the Thriller Writer Loves
So what does a man who writes about smugglers and assassins and the slow rot at the top of the world actually take from all of this. Rather more than you might expect.
He takes clarity. Lewis wrote about the largest subjects there are in the plainest language he could find, because he had learned on the radio that you cannot hide a weak idea behind a fine sentence when you have only three and a half minutes and a frightened audience listening. Write for the ear. Say the difficult thing simply, and trust that simplicity carries further than ornament ever will.
He takes the weight of evil. Make the darkness real, or the light will mean nothing at all. A villain worth the name is one the reader genuinely comes to fear, and a hero is only as brave as the thing he has to stand against.
He takes conviction. Lewis's work has a spine to it because the man believed something and was not the least bit embarrassed by it. A story with no conviction underneath it is only a row of events placed in sequence. The reader can always feel whether or not there is an engine running somewhere beneath the surface of the page.
And he takes honesty, which is the hardest one of all. The willingness, as in A Grief Observed, to write the true thing down even when it costs you something, even when it undercuts the image you have so carefully built. Readers will forgive a writer almost anything except the sense that he is faking it.
Why It Still Holds Up
Most books written in the 1940s and the 1950s feel exactly like books written in the 1940s and the 1950s. Lewis somehow does not. His prose is clean enough to have been written this very morning, his arguments still bite, and the Narnia books still do to children today precisely what they did to me all those years ago. That kind of durability is not an accident. It comes from the plainness of the language, from the moral seriousness underneath it, and from his steady refusal to write down to anyone, child or adult.
And then there is the ending. The Last Battle, the final book in the series, opens in genuine darkness, in lies and defeat and the ending of an entire world. And then Aslan calls them all to come further up and further in, and the children climb higher and higher into a country that grows more real and more vivid the deeper they go into it, a place where every good thing they had ever loved turns out to have been only the cover and the title page of the real story, and where now at last they are beginning the great tale which no one on earth has ever read, the one that goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before it. I have read a great many endings in my life. I am not sure that any of them lift the spirit quite the way that one does. A man who could write the darkness as well as Lewis could, and then turn around and write that, has earned every reader he ever had. He certainly earned this one for life.
Why I Keep Coming Back to Him
Lewis is still there in my writing, and I do not think he will ever fully leave it. I return to him most often when I am least certain of anything, which happens a good deal more than I usually let on. I write about good and evil for a living, and the longer I do it the less sure I become that I truly know what either of those things finally is, or what is real underneath all of it. Are we a simulation, lines of something running on a machine we will never be allowed to see? Is there one God, the way that Lewis came in the end to believe, or are there many of them, the way the old myths he loved so much always insisted there were? Are we alone in all of this, or are we watched, or have we been visited? Is everything we so confidently call a universe really nothing more than a tiny speck living inside some vast animal that is itself moving through a world far larger than we could ever survive the knowledge of? I do not have the answer to any of it. Most days I do not even hold a firm preference.
What Lewis gives me is not certainty, and it never was. It is the example of a brilliant and doubting man who took the questions seriously, who chased them all the way down as far as they would go, who lost his faith and found it again and then lost his grip on it once more at his own wife's deathbed, and who never once pretended that any of it was simple. He believed, in the end, but he had spent years on the other side, and he never forgot what the other side looked like. That is the company I want around me when I am sitting and staring into the dark. Not a man who stands ready to tell me exactly what is real, but a man who freely admits that he is not entirely sure either, and who keeps on writing all the same. That, when you strip everything else away, is the whole of the job. And it is why a man who writes thrillers about demons and bloodlines and mind control keeps a tweedy old Oxford apologist on the shelf, always within reach.
Summary
- C.S. Lewis was a committed atheist for around fifteen years before a slow, reluctant conversion, first to belief in God, then to Christianity in 1931.
- His friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a fellow member of the Oxford Inklings, helped push him over the final line during a late night argument about myth and truth.
- During the Second World War, Lewis gave BBC radio talks to a bombed and frightened nation. Those talks became Mere Christianity.
- The Narnia books are genuinely dark, and that darkness is the craft lesson. Light means nothing without real dark to set it against.
- Aslan is openly a figure of Christ, and that takes nothing away from the stories. Conviction underneath a book is an engine you can feel running whether or not you share the belief.
- After his wife Joy Davidman died in 1960, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, a raw record of his own crisis of faith. That willingness to publish his doubt is the most valuable thing about him, and the reason a working thriller writer keeps coming back.
Sources
- Britannica, entry on the Inklings, members and meeting habits: britannica.com
- The Gospel Coalition, chronology of Lewis's BBC broadcasts and the 1941 invitation from J.W. Welch: thegospelcoalition.org
- CSLewis.com, on Lewis as atheist turned apostle and the fifteen year conversion: cslewis.com
- 1517, account of the 1931 conversion and the night with Tolkien and Dyson: 1517.org
- Wikipedia, A Grief Observed, publication under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk after Joy Davidman's death in 1960: en.wikipedia.org
- Christian Daily International, the Eagle and Child pub and the Rabbit Room where the Inklings met: christiandaily.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Was C.S. Lewis really an atheist?
Yes, and a committed one for roughly fifteen years. He lost his childhood faith after his mother died of cancer when he was nine, and he hardened into atheism through his school years and his service in the First World War. He later described his eventual return to belief as the most reluctant conversion imaginable, calling himself the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
How did C.S. Lewis become a Christian?
Slowly, and against his own resistance. He first came to accept the existence of God after years of intellectual struggle, then took the further step to Christianity in 1931. The decisive moment came after a long night of conversation with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, who argued that the Christian story was a true myth, a dying god story of the kind he loved that had actually happened.
How were Lewis and Tolkien connected?
They were close friends and both core members of the Inklings, the Oxford writing circle. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, was one of the friends whose late night argument in 1931 helped move Lewis from a general belief in God toward Christianity in particular. The two of them read early drafts of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings aloud to each other and the rest of the group.
What were the Inklings?
The Inklings were an informal Oxford literary group active mainly in the 1930s and 1940s. There were no rules or officers. Members including Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and others met on Thursday evenings in Lewis's college rooms and on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child pub, nicknamed the Bird and Baby, to read their unfinished work aloud and critique one another.
What is Mere Christianity and where did it come from?
Mere Christianity is Lewis's best known work of popular theology. It began as a series of BBC radio talks delivered during the Second World War, when London was being bombed. The talks were aimed at ordinary people and timed to a few minutes each. They were later collected and published as a single book, which has remained in print ever since.
Are the Narnia books Christian allegory?
Lewis preferred to call them a supposal rather than a strict allegory, but the Christian imagery is deliberate and open. Aslan is a clear figure of Christ, dying in a traitor's place and then rising again. You do not need to share the faith to be moved by the stories, which work completely as adventure and as myth on their own terms.
Why are the Narnia books considered dark?
Because they deal seriously with betrayal, murder, slavery, fear, and the end of the world. A child sells out his siblings, a good king is killed, and the final book stages a genuine apocalypse before its redemptive ending. Lewis treated children as capable of real moral weight, and the darkness is what gives the light its meaning.
What is A Grief Observed about?
It is the book Lewis wrote after his wife Joy Davidman died of cancer in 1960. It is a raw and doubting account of bereavement, in which the famous defender of the faith records his own deep crisis of belief. He first published it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk so that it would not be read as his own work.
Why should a thriller writer read C.S. Lewis?
For the prose, the clarity, the moral seriousness, and the sheer craft of it. Lewis wrote about enormous subjects in plain and durable English, he built genuinely frightening villains, and he was honest enough to publish his own doubt for the world to see. Clarity, the weight of evil, conviction, and honesty are lessons for any writer at all, in any genre.
Do you have to be religious to enjoy C.S. Lewis?
No. The faith is the engine underneath the work, but you can feel that engine running whether or not you share the belief, the same way you do not need to be a Catholic to be moved by Graham Greene. Aslan is both a figure of Christ and one of the great characters in the English imagination, and the second is true for every reader regardless of what they believe.
