A group biography, of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and others who made up the informal Oxford group known as the Inklings. Carpenter is also the biographer of Tolkien, and he runs a gentle touch over each of these. Between the lines, they seem a very atypical bunch – highly conservative, loudly Christian and women-hating, or at least women-ignoring bunch. C. S. Lewis comes across as repressedly gay, but maybe he was just tormented by his upbringing, which included being dumped, as a young boy, as a boarder in a British ‘public’ school. An informative book, in the end, somehow dissatisfying. Read November 2008 ( )

Naturally picked this up when a self-confessed Tolkienite, practically resenting everything else in it that wasn't of 'Tollers' when I first read it. Over the years I have become more and more dissatisfied with LOTR and all that (although I still hold his smaller works, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham,etc., in esteem) and much more open to the far more adult Barfield, Williams, and even C.S. Lewis himself. Tolkien's most radical and important influence is not so much the outward forms of the post war fantasy genre he has has almost single-handedly defined but rather his underlying mythopoeic sensibilities, which propelled Lewis into faith, and therefore in England at one remove reinvigorated intellectual discourse regarding Christianity and the 'rational' in the Modernist age. ( )

In some ways, this feels like a pendant to Carpenter's then recently published (1977) J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Whenever a biographer casts his net to catch the big tuna, he inevitably hauls in some smaller fish as well. What to do? Throw them back? Certainly not, when there is an audience out there eager to get better acquainted with the more exotic crustaceans. So this book puts the focus on the other figures in the "charmed ring" named the Inklings -- primarily C.S. Lewis and, to a lesser extent, Charles Williams. But the others are not neglected -- Havard, Dyson, Barfield, and Lewis' brother, Warnie, who, among all the more celebrated names in this proto-book club, perhaps wrote the single most entertaining book of the bunch: The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV . Carpenter, as usual, is the model biographer and his central chapter, in which he reconstructs a “typical” session of the discussion group from memoirs, correspondence and other writings, is just choice. ( )

I don’t know about drinking beer for breakfast. :) But there is no question that this fascinating book makes one want to BE an Inkling. How much poorer would fantastic literature (and Christian apologetics) be without these authors? ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/n... ( )