Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant but unsound
Review: A. N. Wilson's biography of C. S. Lewis is a brilliantly written book. Wilson is a very talented writer who in some ways describes the life of Lewis and his works better than any of his other biographers. His book clever, witty, often insightful and really absorbing.
Wilson is probably at his very best when he describes Lewis's books. He gives short summaries or impressions of almost all of them, and with the exception of three or four he finds much to praise and really awakens a desire to read them.
Those of Lewis's books he doesn't like are "Mere Christianity", "Miracles" and "Thoughts on the Psalms". The latter is, admittedly, not a very exciting work - except for the very insightful chapter called "A Word about Praising", which makes it worth buying - but the fact that Wilson rather sharply dislikes Lewis's most apologetical works says a lot about the former's attitude to traditional Christian faith.
So what does Wilson believe himself? Well, one can't really tell after having read the book. He seems to have a general sympathy for religious beliefs, but much less so for traditional ones. And there's is a curious fluidity in his appoach to matters of belief. Some kind of lack of a position which comes across as... unserious.
Somewhere I read Wilson saying - I have forgotten where, but I think I quote him verbatim - "Whether you are speaking about the truth or fiction it's all about storytelling. And what is thruth anyway?"
This is very revealing. Wilson is first and foremost a story-teller. A very good one, but telling a rattling good story is obviously his top priority, nothing else.
Of course one cannot write a biography and wittingly invent things about one's subject, but there is the distinct feeling when reading the book that Wilson cannot quite avoid the temptations of story-telling. He is unwilling to refrain from including a beautiful formulation, a witty remark or a striking conclusion even if it somewhat carries the reader in the wrong direction and streches the truth and the evidence of the matter.
And, actually, there seems to exist evidence that Wilson once or twice did invent things out of thin air, besides the fact that he made some serious mistakes about his subject.
Kathryn Lindskoog, a well known Lewis scholar has made a list of the errors and inventions in Wilson's biography. I advise you to read it before or after you read Wilson. [...]
Just as annoying is Wilson's habit of psychoanalyzing Lewis and his faith. It is e.g. very obvious in some of the chapter headings such as "Redemption by parricide" and "Regress", but can be found at many places.
This tendency goes hand in hand with Wilson's at times condescending tone towards Lewis and his beliefs. He has praise for Lewis as well, but when he doesn't agree with Lewis, Wilson always comes across as the wise and insightful man who has seen through the faults in Lewis's arguments, character, or faith. The reader simply cannot miss that the true hero of the book is A. N. Wilson.
One curious fact that may be of relevance here is that the only one of Lewis's important books that Wilson has nothing to say about is "Till We have Faces". It is not easy to tell why, but Wilson-like I'll make some guesswork where facts are absent.
One of the main themes of "Till We Have Faces" is self-delusion. In the book Lewis shows that he is very well aware of our ability to delude ourselves and and has thought long and hard about the importance of true self-knowledge. For Wilson to present this theme would mean to greatly undermine his analysis of Lewis's beliefs and call into question his own.
It is also quite possible that Wilson simply didn't grasp all of the book and felt unsure about what to do with it. When writing about "The Great Divorce", Wilson reveals a serious misunderstanding when claiming that the tragedian with the chained dwarf at the end of the book is Dante. For all of his qualities as a literary critic, this shows that he would be well capable of misunderstanding a deeper and more difficult book like "Till We Have Faces".
To conclude: A. N. Wilson's biography is hasardous reading. If you are a sceptic and don't care much for Lewis, Wilson may well make you understand why Lewis was a very interesting man and a great scholar, and will make you want to read some of his books.
If Lewis is one of your heroes and you share his beliefs you should think twice before reading it. You might gain insights from it and you will certainly be entertained, but you may lose some things in reading it as well. Truths, half-truths or errors - they all have a tendency to stick when presented with such brilliance as in in this book.
Beauty can be deceptive - that's one of the lessons we could have learnt from Lewis. Another one, and more typically Lewisian, is that truth is the most beautiful thing there is.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb book
Review: After years of hearing that Wilson's book was a 'hatchet job', I was surprised and delighted by how detailed, thoughtful and entertaining this biography really is. But I fear it will do little to halt the "ghettoization" of C.S. Lewis studies by the small, narrow conclave of so-called Christians who insist on turning the man into a saint.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected!
Review: Despite a vast amount of literature on C. S. Lewis, there are surprisingly a dearth of good biographies. In most, Lewis emerges as a bit of a plastic saint, just a little too good to be true, a bit of a high-church protestant saint. This is especially true in evangelical American circles, where many imagine Lewis to have been a nonsmoking abstainer from alcohol. Many will react with shock and dismay upon learning that Lewis's smoked so heavily that he was the probable cause of his relatively early death and his drinking was considerable, and may have bordered on the alcoholic. As a corrective to this goody-goody Lewis, Wilson provides us with a warts and all flesh-and-blood corrective. He gives us the hard drinking, mildly bawdy, addictive smoker who has a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother and a premarital relationship with a woman he would later marry. There are two questions to ask here. First, are Wilson's "facts" accurate? There doesn't seem to be much reason to doubt many of them. Second, are these adequate to create a good biography? No. Wilson's biography is valuable for one and only one reason: he delves into the aspects of Lewis's life that the other biographers would prefer to either ignore or pretend didn't exist. He also gives a slightly different slant on many of Lewis's intellectual and religious interests. But apart from the book's valuable debunking, it is a fairly lame biography. Lewis doesn't emerge as a particularly attractive person. He doesn't, in fact, emerge much as a person at all. Wilson doesn't doo much of a job of showing what made Lewis click at all. And while he does do a good job of showing that the St. Jack portraits of Lewis are all mildly bogus, he doesn't really provide us with an alternative. I do recommend that anyone interested in Lewis's life read this book, because Wilson does cover many aspects of Lewis's life the others do not. But it most definitely needs to be supplemented with other biographies. Although it has its own problems, probably the best of a bad lot is Sayer's JACK: A LIFE OF C. S. LEWIS. His is a mildly sanitized biography, but the value of the book is that Lewis does begin to emerge as a three-dimensional person. Read the Wilson biography, but then read the Sayer as a corrective to Wilson's corrective.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected!
Review: I didn't like this book. Wilson uses this book to express his real doubts on Christianity rather than just focusing on C.S. Lewis. His comments on page 164 & 165 are just plain silly. He seems to be an apologist for the Jesus Seminar rather than a serious biographer on Lewis. He challenges Lewis' comments, in Mere Christianity, that Jesus was either a "raving lunatic" or who he said he was. This is in question, as Wilson puts it, because all four Gospels don't contain the exact same information. He, like the Jesus Seminar, wouldn't question for a minute different accounts of the same historical event, written in history books, by several eyewitnesses from their own personal perspectives. However, in this book his bias shows through! My recommendation is not to waste your time with this book, because I'm not at all sure it is accurate about Lewis.
Rating:
Summary: A Tender Look at C S Lewis
Review: If you're looking for an enlightening look at the life of C S. Lewis and his cult following, look no further. This book takes a tender but blunt look at the life and writings of Lewis, as well as those that passed through his life. This book feels slow to read, but with good reason: it's a book to be cherished and savoured. Curl up with it during quiet times, or when you have insomnia, and you'll suddenly find yourself in the same room as the creator of Narnia himself. This is a touching read, and especially appropriate for junior high, high school, or college readers just discovering Lewis or wanting more information about him.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting sidelong glance at the great man
Review: It is refreshing to see A. N Wilson trying to take a somewhat critical view of the "C. S. Lewis industry" as he calls it. He attempts to make some controversial new highlights but to my mind he does not quite make it. He has a lot of information here but it is not put together more convincingly than the books written by the fans of the Narnia man. As he was a professor at Cambridge I think there are plenty of people who would have "blown the whistle" if he as many dodgy things as ANW makes out. And - it's just occurred to me - who is ANW to criticise the CSL industry? he is part of it too now...
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read
Review: Some of the reviews here are quite disturbing. Lewis in the dock? Filth? - Those people must be talking about a different book, surely. Wilson clearly admires Lewis and loves and knows his works. Most of the claims attributed to his biography by other reviewers are not actually made in the book. It seems to me that many people find it hard to accept that Lewis's lifestyle differed from the one accepted among American Evangelicals... Wilson never accuses Lewis of not being politically correct, on the contrary, he points to the times he lived in to make us understand. It's a pity many fans of Lewis will be deterred from reading this book by some of the other reviews here; this is a fair and compassionate biography which helps the reader understand Lewis and his world; above all, however, it is excellently written, and I found it hard to put it down once I had got started.
Rating:
Summary: A Thoughtful, Intelligent Biography
Review: This is a terrific book: witty,informative, kind, and thoughtful. Lewis comes alive in these pages: not as a stained-glass saint, but as a Christian seeking to live and explain his faith. A.N. Wilson obviously has great admiration for Lewis and his writings, and it shines through. I wish there had been more about Narnia, but on the whole this is an outstanding, balanced, and well-written look at a very complex and wonderful man. Those who carp about this book seem unwilling to admit that Lewis drank beer and smoked too much and was at times distressed. But if you want a view of the whole man, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Much better than I expected
Review: Until recently, I had, like many other fans of C.S. Lewis, a very negative impression of Wilson's biography of him. That impression was based largely on discussions I had had with other Lewis fans on the Internet and on criticisms of Wilson coming from other Lewis biographers. I had heard that Wilson had lost his faith while writing Lewis's biography, and I thought that there was, therefore, not much chance of him presenting a sympathetic account of Lewis or of Christianity. A few months ago, I saw that this new printing of the book was to be released and was hopeful it would be a revised edition. When I discovered that it wasn't, I decided to buy and read it anyway and judge Wilson's work for myself. As you can see by the rating I gave it, my verdict was quite positive. It is impossible to maintain, however, that the book is not seriously flawed. There are inaccuracies that have been catalogued by others. Wilson sometimes criticizes Lewis and his work in a way that strikes me as unfairly harsh. He also often seems inconsistent. As a small example, on p. 150 he characterizes the likening of Charles Williams' appearance to that of a monkey as "unkind", while on p. 170 Wilson is himself applying the word "simian" to Williams. There is occasionally a disjointedness to the text, as if Wilson sometimes forgot what he had written earlier in the book. Anecdotes or quotes are sometimes presented for the second time as if it were for the first. Despite all that, I greatly enjoyed reading this book. Perhaps Wilson doesn't write as well as Lewis, but he nevertheless writes very well. Wilson's alleged turn to agnosticism was, for me, not evident in his writing. (Whatever antireligious views he may have developed are certainly not as intrusive as, say, those of Richard Marius in his biographies of Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther.) The fact that Wilson is not as deferential to Lewis as are some of his other biographers brought, for me, a certain genuineness to those moments, not a few, when he expressed a high regard for Lewis and his writings. It is a pleasure to read someone with Wilson's eloquence write about some of my favorite books with sincere appreciation. Wilson is often blunt and opinionated, and sometimes simply wrong. For me as a reader, that was a price worth paying. I come away from _C.S. Lewis: A Biography_ with a greater understanding and an even greater admiration for Lewis than I had before.
Rating:
Summary: Much better than I expected
Review: Until recently, I had, like many other fans of C.S. Lewis, a very negative impression of Wilson's biography of him. That impression was based largely on discussions I had had with other Lewis fans on the Internet and on criticisms of Wilson coming from other Lewis biographers. I had heard that Wilson had lost his faith while writing Lewis's biography, and I thought that there was, therefore, not much chance of him presenting a sympathetic account of Lewis or of Christianity. A few months ago, I saw that this new printing of the book was to be released and was hopeful it would be a revised edition. When I discovered that it wasn't, I decided to buy and read it anyway and judge Wilson's work for myself. As you can see by the rating I gave it, my verdict was quite positive. It is impossible to maintain, however, that the book is not seriously flawed. There are inaccuracies that have been catalogued by others. Wilson sometimes criticizes Lewis and his work in a way that strikes me as unfairly harsh. He also often seems inconsistent. As a small example, on p. 150 he characterizes the likening of Charles Williams' appearance to that of a monkey as "unkind", while on p. 170 Wilson is himself applying the word "simian" to Williams. There is occasionally a disjointedness to the text, as if Wilson sometimes forgot what he had written earlier in the book. Anecdotes or quotes are sometimes presented for the second time as if it were for the first. Despite all that, I greatly enjoyed reading this book. Perhaps Wilson doesn't write as well as Lewis, but he nevertheless writes very well. Wilson's alleged turn to agnosticism was, for me, not evident in his writing. (Whatever antireligious views he may have developed are certainly not as intrusive as, say, those of Richard Marius in his biographies of Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther.) The fact that Wilson is not as deferential to Lewis as are some of his other biographers brought, for me, a certain genuineness to those moments, not a few, when he expressed a high regard for Lewis and his writings. It is a pleasure to read someone with Wilson's eloquence write about some of my favorite books with sincere appreciation. Wilson is often blunt and opinionated, and sometimes simply wrong. For me as a reader, that was a price worth paying. I come away from _C.S. Lewis: A Biography_ with a greater understanding and an even greater admiration for Lewis than I had before.
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