Book Review – The Screwtape Letters (By: C.S. Lewis)

The Screwtape Letters is that C.S. Lewis book that you didn’t read after the ones you read in school. Unlike (but kinda like) his more famous fantasy novels, it is a Christian Apologetic (is there a better term for that yet?) series of fictitious letters sent by a bureaucratic devil (Screwtape) to his junior nephew (Wormwood). And it attempts to explain how to avoid temptation and straying from faith by telling you how to do the exact opposite, with Screwtape instructing Wormwood as he attempts to tempt his first “patient”.

There are 31 letters, and my book also contains the later-written Screwtape Proposes a Toast, that follow the Screwtape side of the conversation as his nephew attempts to sway the soul of an unnamed British man around the time of the Second World War (though not really, as the demons don’t know “time” as we do), which is about when the text was written and published in the newspaper. They read at times like essays, but do keep the flavor of correspondence throughout, and discuss how turning away from God in both large and small ways will eventually lead to the soul being cast into hell to be devoured by the devils. And with each letter (though they don’t necessarily go in “chronological” order) you can clearly read Screwtape’s increasing frustration and disappointment with Wormwood’s failure to tempt the man.

While it is impressive how well Lewis can keep the “opposite day” style presentation up without contradictions arising, there are some that pop up here and there. The most common of these being the veneer of politeness as each letter ends “Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape”, which seems like something the office workers of hell wouldn’t really attach to things they send. Even with it obviously being a lie, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use something more cold and business-like. There are a few other inconsistencies like that which always seem to pop up when representing devils, as manifestations of evil are hard to rationalize. Through most of the book, though, the motivations and desires of the demons are surprisingly understandable, and that makes the message of how easily one can be turned away from the Lord more powerful.

The book does a very good job of encapsulating the teachings of the modern Christian philosophy, and does so in an entertaining way, not just with a reverse perspective, but with the snippets of story that can be found every few lines that hint about the larger narrative both on earth and in hell that really give the reader the sense that the story is happening in a world. And this method of storytelling, coupled with the fact that Lewis is generally a good and engaging writer, smoothes over most of the rough parts of the book. There are still times that I’m not sure about how things really fit together, for instance I was sure that “our Father Below” (“Satan”) was either imprisoned in hell, or not present there but out in the world sewing lies and deceit, but of course the book is an interpretation meant to focus on a point, and not get mired in the details of things like where “Satan” is, how soon souls enter hell, and how exactly did the power structure of the fallen shake out once they were cast out of heaven.

The notion that there is an office to work at, a college to attend, and quotas to meet for devils is, of course, a ridiculous one, but as it is meant to be more of a representation of a system definitionally unknowable to men on earth, it is allowed some leeway in how it goes about it. I feel it’s more for introspection and self-analysis than really to “teach” you something directly. I won’t be making any life choices off of what I read in The Screwtape Letters, but while reading, things were brought to my attention, debated, solidified, or organized in my head that wouldn’t have likely come up otherwise. And unlike so many other texts, this one provides another useful way of approaching a problem by looking at it backwards (like the recent {at the time of writing} CGP Grey video: 7 ways to maximize misery) and seeing the result opposite the one you want to achieve, or what those who oppose you are looking to get you to do.

And, in as much as it’s trying to tell you the best way to live your life closely to God, there isn’t much here that hasn’t been said before. If you want to call it “advice” it’s solid (if you actually interpret and don’t take it from the devil’s point of view), but everyone is going to have their objections. There isn’t anything earth-shattering or miraculous, just competently executed restatements of ideas that have their roots stretching back sometimes to before Christianity.

So is it a good book, then? Yes. But of course, it isn’t for everyone. Like many of his strictly Christian writings, this is a book for Christians. It isn’t going to change anyone’s mind, and, while it is quite entertaining regardless, some might find it a bit preachy. It’s a quick read, and not particularly dense or stiff, indeed I’d call it a fairly average novel that I’d probably recommend to my friends, especially if they have some connection or ideas about the source material.

Book Review – It Can’t Happen Here (By: Sinclair Lewis)

Sinclair Lewis’ hastily written smear/propaganda novel It Can’t Happen Here has been getting a lot of attention recently, though often in connection to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (another one on my “to-read” list), with the election. That is the reason I picked up the book in the first place, but for the purpose of review I’ll mostly be putting Trump to the side in an effort to be more “timeless”. Also, there’s already a ton to unpack here without interjecting any modern politics. The book verges on being one of the tried and tested genre of “essay disguised as novel” (like, say, Starship Troopers) and certainly a lot of time is devoted to both internal and external political debate and theory. But does that really make for a compelling novel-length read?

Starting before the start, my edition has an intro by Perry Meisel, a fact I usually wouldn’t mention save for the fact that I tried reading it and found it slow, boring, and enthusiasm-killing (as many introductions tend to be). I didn’t get very far before stopping, and my memory is (intentionally) hazy so I have no direct criticisms other than I’d recommend skipping it.

The actual novel starts off a bit slow, beginning (as many novels are wont to do, unfortunately) with a description of a dining room and then an event taking place there. You’re introduced to the townspeople (some of whom won’t show up again until more than halfway through), given a bit of foreshadowing, and then the book settles in to its slow-burning start for several chapters. There’s some political chatter, and a few characters that, if one knows the time period, are obvious stand-ins for real historical figures (most of whom I had to look up because this time is a bit glossed over in history classes), but other than that, the start is a rather boring look into the life of a middle-American newspaper man.

That man is Doremus Jessup (dormouse sometimes), a college-educated reporter type who returned to Fort Beulah and ended up buying the local newspaper, the Informer. He’s just your average guy, with a couple daughters, one married one not, a son he hates (and you will too if you read it), a plain wife, a dog wonderfully named Foolish (one of the most clever bits of the book), a super-masculine friend named Buck, and an affair that makes all his points about the immorality of his enemies a little more dull. Though shortly after we, the readers, find out about this affair, it is then “suggested” to Doremus by his daughter with the very strangely written “kind of be lovers”, which I can’t help but feel is an attempt to justify what had just been written, even though it should be plain to the reader that, despite his flaws, Doremus is a better person than the Fascists who start running the place. In any case, I was not persuaded to forgive Doremus, nor like him much more, especially with him being written like a person I’d not want to spend much time with really, but that seems to be one of Lewis’ go-tos.

The book plods along until we get to the actual election of Buzz Windrip, Democratic Party candidate, facing off against boring Republican Walt Trowbridge. At this point, to add to his large cast of political stand-ins, Lewis starts throwing some real people under the bus, most notably Upton Sinclair (I’m not sure how much was motivated by people getting their names mixed up) who’s all in for the obvious pseudo-fascists. Other real people are sprinkled in here and there; Franklin Roosevelt has to be mentioned because he was President at the time, and other people it’s just fun hearing about if you know the time period, like Harvard Nazi Putzi Hanfstaengl. Buzz is a demagoguish (called so by the Saturday Evening Post in the novel) populist styled after Huey Long to the point that it’s heavily implied he’s from Louisiana, though they never tell you outright what state he was Senator for. He gets support from religious radio hosts and everyone who wants to government to give them $5000. Apparently that makes him pretty popular (though, other than people liking money, there’s never really any indication of why he is being supported) and he releases a 15-point program that if divvied up correctly could be the bullet points of either major party currently, with a few “this guy is obviously going to try and be a dictator” bits thrown in for good measure. He then wins because the book has no plot otherwise, and starts making America a hellhole.

It might sound like I’m being pretty down on the book so far, but that’s because I’m trying to give you a bit of the plot, which for pretty much the whole way takes a back seat to Doremus’ political philosophy arguments in his own head. He spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a “modern democrat” (or a “Lincolnian democrat”, whatever that could possibly mean) or something and about how terrible the current regime is without doing anything about it, probably because a newspaperman doesn’t make for an exciting action hero and that isn’t how Lewis writes. Doremus seems to disagree with everyone else who proclaims a political opinion, but most of them are either communists or one of Windrip’s “fascist” “Corpos”, and it’s pretty obvious he is actually pandering to the common mindset of those likely to buy the book and read it. Still, it is excellently written and quote worthy. It’s one of those books where you feel like there’s some important message you need to remember on every page. And it’s probably the main draw for the book (which is good considering how much room it takes up) not the tale of the upstart dictator. At the very least it makes you think about and solidify your own positions, a thing Doremus doesn’t do a very good job at.

With his newfound “absolute power” (slightly explained away by him intimidating Congress) Windrip starts to do all sorts of things, like reorganize the states into many fewer zones to be more easily governed, inflate the currency, take a bunch of that money from everyone, and put people that criticize him in jail and later concentration camps. All this is done by replacing the civilian government, the courts, and much of the military with his cronies in the “Minutemen”, who the army is ordered to train, and they obey that order for some reason. The Minutemen don’t start out like your normal fascist gang, though, in fact, their turn to the violence that often characterizes such party movements happens only after Windrip becomes President, and far too suddenly for it to make any sense. They go from jolly marching squad to merry murderers in the space of a page, and most of the rest of the story for our “heroes” hinges on them becoming crueler, which those in such positions would do, but I’m just not sure as quickly.

And of course the potential backlash to all of Windrip’s plans is ignored. Lewis seems completely ignorant of the idea that states had less than 75 years (a larger amount of time has elapsed between the publication of this book and the day I am reviewing it than between it and the Civil War) before fought a war for “states rights”, and that many Americans have guns they aren’t afraid to use. It’s not entirely unrealistic to me that there wouldn’t be a second revolution, or some other large form of armed resistance, but there is no mention for ¾ of the book of anyone fighting the Corpos with guns. All the pushback from the states at being disintegrated, all the fighting men would do if they really saw a government this openly cruel and tyrannical (to white people) is swept under the rug for the convenience of the plot, without even a token reference. At one point the main character gets enraged, goes to his desk, gets out his revolver, and then puts it back into the drawer within moments. The idea of actually fighting back is never even seriously considered, and that infuriates me reading it. I get that he’s a news guy, and wants to win the battle with words, but no one else talks about it either, the only time anyone else even thinks about fighting is when a Minuteman is trying to get with Sissy (Doremus’ unwed daughter) and she mentions it. This general disregard to arm gets a character killed when he barges in on an illegal court proceeding, that follows what he knows is an illegal arrest for simply writing an article critical of the regime, and has the gall to stand there alone shouting at armed men to let the man go. As his character was supposedly a soldier, you’d think he’d have the sense to bring a gun, or a club, or at least an angry mob so he didn’t get singled out and killed so easily, or anything at all save his temper. But the story wouldn’t move along then.

And the story does start to move on, at an increasingly fast pace as Lewis’ writing deadline approached and he attempted to cram in everything he wanted to say. At least that is my inference (he was on a pretty strict “get this published before the election” deadline, though). And his Nobel-Prize-Winning writing style really starts to break down. Lewis himself understood that living up to his prize was difficult if not impossible following his receiving it, and while I’m not trying to determine here what writing deserves a Nobel Prize (though I’ve been reading more by the laureates recently), I think it’s safe to say that the last half of this novel is not why he won any awards. Mistakes begin to increase, plotlines are lost, and the rest starts to fly by at breakneck speed. Nearing the last quarter, at the only time where the book goes back in time for a moment, a character is resurrected magically as the two timelines don’t line up (he’s dead in the end in both, unfortunately for him). Randomly inserted is a whole chapter about a black intellectual who attempts to explain that blacks submitting to the government would be better for everyone and gets killed for it in what I assume was supposed to be an impactful scene but since I had just learned of his existence a few pages before I wasn’t that surprised or interested. And, as with other contemporary books, “nigger” (or negro) is used quite liberally in this chapter (and in a few other parts of the book) while words that are presumably “fuck” or the like are censored with a “     “. And this is followed by the government beginning to unravel in a surprisingly bloodless manner.

The end especially, but the whole thing really, just lacks plot coherency. There is the fire of fascism (though a bit toned down from what we know now even with the torture and the murdering and such), but there is no smoke: the motivations of the antagonists just don’t make sense. And that’s a problem because it’s fairly easy to write characters that could understandably be swayed by a National Socialist agenda (there is one, and for his part Shad works). And to me that can partially be attributed to Lewis just not knowing how people work. He’s terrible at writing children (‘s dialogue), which is fine because there’s only one that does anything, and his other characters seem completely ignorant of that fact that in regular conversation people aren’t as truthful and ridged as an author is capable of being. The way Doremus talks most of the time, or how Sissy talks about affairs and rape, are gratingly inhuman, and others act more like robots for the plot. It’s probably for the better that they are absent most of the book in favor of political semi-treatise. But there’s a whole lot written for not a lot of substance. It all boils down very easily, and didn’t need to be stretched into a novel, but it’s not an egregious offense. There are parts that are quite insightful, or mirror modern problems so well one thinks “when was this book written?”, because it feels like yesterday. And that does give a little hope, that we’ve been worrying about the same problems for so long they obviously mustn’t be that big a deal.

But that does make the political aspect a bit dubious, especially in the modern day. Lewis keeps trying to hit you with the idea that some boisterous snake oil salesman can trick everyone and turn the country into a fascist state, that “it can happen here”, but it just never lands. He just doesn’t have any of the details worked out, he get the broad strokes about the people’s hate for the “’Jewish Communist’ Atheists” and the desire for money and power, but everything smaller seems missing. I get that the “facts” about how the European regimes came to power had not yet been fully established as the history was still being made when the book was written, but as someone who has read more than the average person on how Hitler (and other dictators) came to power, this just doesn’t click. In the same way that today, for all I might not like Trump and his “politics” I can’t call him a fascist, there’s too many pieces missing. Electing Huey Long president would probably have been a mistake, but it wouldn’t have resulted in this book becoming true. And I think the book is the worse for being written as allegory to him on a fairly tight deadline.

I suppose through this review I’ve sounded pretty down on the book, a side effect of it being easier to list faults than to heap praise, but if it had been a truly bad book I wouldn’t have finished it. I was interested the whole way through, and the politics and philosophy are intellectually stimulating. It’s a book that really makes you think about, rescale and reorganize just what your beliefs are. I took copious notes as I read both for this review (which are included below because of the sheer mass of them, especially when considering how few I take for other books) and for myself to read in the future in the form of photos of paragraphs to pages. It really does seem like there is something important to remember on every page, and that the opinions are well-considered and wise. But as a side effect it is quite dense, and the actual story, already a mere ghost, starts sliding to a halt many times. I enjoyed the book and it’s worth a read if you’ve been considering it; I’d recommend snippets before I’d recommend the whole book, though. As post-prize work of a Nobel Laureate it isn’t as good as one would imagine, as a smear book to prevent the presidency of Huey Long it was late but perhaps would have been effective, as an expression of a political philosophy to which you can compare your own and think about heavy decisions it works well, but as a tool for evaluating modern politics, or story about a realistic rise of Fascism in the US it falls a bit flat.

Notes

Intro by perry meisel is terrible  

Why do they always describe the dining room first, it’s a bore? 

Pg 16 “for the first time in all history” I think not

The rarely seen whisper exclamation

When was this written?

I ask again (comic books and radio complaints)

Page 26, error or intentional

Page 31 last paragraph

Spit and image

Pg 40, paragraph after break

I have yet to find an author that can describe characters in ways I can remember

I always loved the idea of the communists being Jews, and then you find out the communists hate the Jews

Interesting list style in pairs with no oxford comma

Jewish atheists said the cardinal

Chapter 6 excerpt

Doremus isn’t the greatest person in the world

Democrats in cleveland

Pg. 58 flags and song

Capitalize the he when referring to God

These 15 points sound like a mixture of both parties today (that’s why two parties doesn’t make sense, they don’t always line up)

Windrup is like dr oz selling fake medicine

Napoleon wasn’t short  

Lincolnian democrat?

I like all the special character œ just isn’t around much anymore 

He doesn’t look as nice as a nazi

Never mentions the state buzz is from

Saturday evening post calls him a demagogue

Lots of real people (putzi)

The colonel speaks in unexpected places where its news to speak

“summer schools  in which well-know writers taught the art of writing to eager aspirants who could never learn to write”

Interesting collection of people voting for him

Trance well foreshadowed

Cherishes the woe(?)

Chapter 13

One problem is it seems every page is worthy if remembering

John ball 1381

Spelling mistake “adanced” 114

“kind of be lovers”

I feel like the daughter suggesting adultery just after we learned about it is just meant to try and make it okay(or maybe she knew)

Just ripping at upton Sinclair, tearing him apart

The states would fight way more fiercely than portrayed here, I feel like he’s hand waving

Firing workers paid a dollar a day(nobody gets their 5,000 dollars)

He pandered to both groups in private. 

Why inflation is bad

Lewis neglects how many people in the us own guns and would form mobs of their own to fight the minute men however small their resistance ended up being (and more soldiers would likely disobey orders {if they saw white people getting hurt})

The minute me are far from the average facist gang, intentionally, but perhaps unrealistically so, their turn to evil seems rather abrupt

Jung

He can’t write children

Will rodgers censored

The book takes a while to get going

“it can happen here” 217

Rexall

Robbed him of bootlegging

Sissy talking about rape is strange

It tasted like saltpeter, was that so hard to say Sinclair Lewis

Plaint

Depreciated? Pronunciation

Why censor words?

The the mistake

Defended itself out wards

It starts to ramp up near the end

They know when to break with family

Apparently they re-incarnated swan

So far in the boo there’s been the fire of fascism, but there was never the smoke

Few typos and mistakes near the end, he’s losin’ it (still more mistakes)

That bit about “today’s” youth and all around it seem like thy were written yesterday (and give a little hope)

His rebuke of private corporations and talking if the need for government control seems overly strong

Even then war with Mexico wouldn’t last long at all

Mexican, Ethiopian, and Chinese patriot

Second to last work misspelled

Strange rebellion