This book is somehow much better than it has any right to be.

I say that because, when I sit down to list all the things I didn't agree with, the list is very long. And what Gunnar Urang gets right, he often has no justification for getting right -- he was guessing, and guessing lucky.

Guessing, because this book was written very early in the history of Tolkien/Lewis/Williams criticism, before all the big modern falderal about The Inklings had come to be. (An exaggerated falderal, I would add, because Tolkien and Williams were not influenced by each other, or by Lewis, really; it was Lewis who was influenced by the others.) Indeed, this book was written while J. R. R. Tolkien was still alive, although C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams were dead. That means that Urang had no way of knowing of the complexity of Tolkien's cosmology, which would only be revealed after Tolkien's death. And although he had access to all of Lewis's and Williams's published works, he ignores much of Lewis's -- Narnia, for instance, is left out, even though it reveals much one of the doctrinal problems that both Lewis and Williams were guilty of ignoring: of over-emphasizing the divinity, and under-emphasizing the humanity, of Christ. (Think about it: how often does Aslan just sit down and have a casual chat with Eustace or Shasta or Caspian? Aslan is not God made man, or even God made lion; Aslan is The Boss And Don't You Forget It.) Urang looks at only a subset of the works of each author, meaning that there is a genuine lack of critical scope to this book.

He also seems, at first glance, to try to shoehorn his three authors into a sort of a Pauline metaphor: Lewis the exponent of Faith, Williams of Love, Tolkien of Hope. On Tolkien, he's mostly right (although Tolkien was more an advocate of Courage -- i.e. refusal to submit to despair -- than Hope as such). There is some truth in the case for Lewis, too. Williams -- no. Or, rather, Williams placed a great weight on Love. But Williams was not talking about Christian love -- agape, or maybe philia; Williams was really talking (whether he would admit it or not) about erotic love, which has nothing to do with agape. The word isn't even used in the New Testament! And I think Urang under-estimates just how incredibly occult Williams was -- and how much Williams's perversity affected Lewis. On the whole, I think Urang over-values Lewis and Williams and under-values Tolkien. So his framework is openly defective.

And that's just the surface. I could say much more.

But a book is not its table of contents or its outline. Despite the problematic framework, I thought this a solid book, and a decent read. I don't always agree with Urang's interpretations (especially of Williams, although I will freely admit that I am no expert here -- plowing through Williams is beyond me). And yet, I think there is a lot of insight to be had here, not so much into the psychological processes of the authors but into the psychology of their works -- e.g. of how Lewis's "thinking in pictures" (to use a phrase Temple Grandin came up with after Lewis was dead) informs his world view, or of how Tolkien used the techniques of myth to give a clear lesson.

This isn't the best analysis of the Inklings out there, and I don't think anyone should read it without reading Tom Shippey's works on Tolkien first. Frankly, one should also do some research on heresy first, too (Monophysitism. You'll run across it in Urang's book, but it's easy to skip over unless you know a little about the subject). Still, I think this book well worth reading.

Just be prepared to do more research on some of the iffy points. ( )