Shadows of heaven Book

This is a literary critique from a modernising and 'humanist' Christian perspective of the fantastic fiction of three 'inklings', CS Lewis, Charles Williams and J.R.R.Tolkien.

We may separate the theological from the literary because not every reader will be both a Christian (which this reviewer is not) and interested in the literature of fantasy (which I am).

The theological speculation and interpretation is undoubtedly serious but I rather let it flow over me though you may not. The critique from within theology is somewhat redundant if you have no conception of God.

However, the critiques of the authors contain useful insights in part precisely because they are contextualised within a particular Anglican-Catholic milieu and a time when being Christian was a majority stance.

He points out the essential lack of humanity in the convert Lewis' science fiction and has helped to crystallise why, enjoying the books as entertainments, I cannot warm to this manipulative and cold man.

Charles Williams, least known of the three, is a different matter. I find Williams fascinating because he is one of the few writers who is persuasive about the higher sentiment of love.

This is, of course, cast in implicitly Christian terms but Urang brings out his occultist history. The books can be read, perhaps despite his intentions, as of a numinous experience that requires no God per se.

Williams (at least in his two central books) is difficult and I have suggested elsewhere that he may require multiple readings. Although critical, Urang gives us some sense of his complex quasi-mysticism.

Urang's greatest praise is reserved for Tolkien simply in terms of the sheer breadth and integrity of his vision and the use of Christian symbolic tropes in almost imperceptible ways (without Lewis' bullying).

Anyone who enjoys Tolkien will enjoy his recapitulation of LOTR and his teasing out of what is Christian and what is not.

This was written in 1971, long before the second rediscovery of Tolkien through the films of his work but soon after the first 'hippie' rediscovery of the 1960s.

Urang mentions both Marcuse and Sartre in passing and it is a book of its period. Nevertheless, it remains useful - and an insight into the 'Christian mind set' before it soured again into aggressive evangelism.

Once again, though, we have yet more evidence of the essentially conservative and backward-looking mentalities of all three men, attempting to recover an ideology that had lost its place in history.

And so it should be - except that medievalisms seem to be returning by the back door with globalisation giving platforms for PR-friendly new popes, alliances to impose morality on sexuality and fundamentalisms.

This new Christianity is not the kindly questioning of Anglican Oxford dons and publishers but something darker. We may justifiably ask whether Sauron and Mordor are not now re-appearing as religion itself.

Might a beleagured modernist not write a variant of the same fantasies in defence of freedom and the future against the new and primitive Christianities arising from the dark outerlands?