Kirkus Review

This portrait of the Lewis-Tolkien-Williams circle is an altogether slighter and less closely reasoned endeavor than Carpenter's splendid 1977 biography of Tolkien. Part of the reason may be that the Inklings, as those remarkable Thursday night companions began styling themselves some time in the 1930s, are something of a made-up topic. It is true that all were practicing Christians or Christian apologists in what they saw as an anti-religious environment; nearly all had some professional or private connection with Oxford; most felt at odds with the prevailing literary fashions. Beyond that, their differences are more striking than their similarities. As Carpenter eventually concludes, their chief link is that they were all to some degree intimates of Lewis, a great believer in the institutionalizing of friendships. Tolkien the philologist and staunch Roman Catholic, Lewis the rather glib Anglican and brilliant popularizer, and Williams with his hermetic schemata of human-divine relationships (expressed in a series of bizarre novels, an incomplete Arthurian cycle, and some very strange dealings with a circle of female disciples) were the unlikely center of the group. The other regulars were Lewis' brother and lifelong companion ""Warnie"" (a monument of quiet decency and eventually the author of some highly regarded studies in 17th-century French history), the lively but not especially prolific scholar Hugo Dyson, and R. E. Havard, the Lewis and Tolkien family doctor. Others came and went, from that curious figure Owen Barfield to the young John Wain. An uncommonly interesting confluence of lives; but Carpenter has really produced a sort of biographical pastiche built on an uneasy marriage of methods, including frequent You-Are-There effects that do not sit well with the more impersonal bits of exposition. He does provide some penetrating judgments (especially of Lewis) and some absolutely fascinating excerpts from various collections of private papers (notably Tolkien's); otherwise, a tantalizing almost-book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.