This was so good… and yet so heartbreaking at the end!
It was recommended to me by an acquaintance, who told me that this is the love story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. I knew she died young, and left him bereaved, so I asked, “It’s not about her death, though?” She said, no, it’s their love story.
Spoiler alert: she lied. But only kind of… because there’s really no way to tell their love story without including her declining health; it’s a pivotal part of the story. And there was a *little* redemption, so it wasn’t JUST straight heartbreak.
I was immediately sucked into this first person novelization of Joy’s life. She is written as such a sympathetic character, trapped in a dreadful marriage at a time when divorce, even for infidelity and abuse, was difficult at best. Because of all the stress (or at least that’s what I gathered), her health was delicate. It’s at this time in her life that an acquaintance who happens to be an American scholar on C.S. Lewis (strange that there is a scholar whose specialty is on the work of another living scholar) introduces her, via correspondence. I knew that Joy and Lewis corresponded for years while she was still in America and still married, but I think I was always a little in love with Lewis’s mind myself, so I SO identified with Joy’s feelings for him. What seemed strange to me was that she denied to herself for so long the nature of what she felt, because of Christian expectations (again, never mind that her husband was abusive and cheating). At last, when her health takes a turn for the worse, her doctor tells her that she must get away from her stress, or she will die. So, two years into her correspondence with Jack (as he’s known by his friends), she at last indulges what she’s wanted to do for so long. She leaves her boys behind with her husband and her cousin Renee (who ironically had come to live with them to get away from her own alcoholic husband), and she goes to England.
What follows is, essentially, a forbidden romance, filled with longing and tension and mental anguish on Joy’s part, never knowing what exactly Jack is thinking, even as he becomes increasingly dependent upon her friendship and scholarly support. His actions lead her to believe that he loves her, but when she can stand it no more and all but asks, he essentially shuts her down. She realizes later that he has his own hangups that must be overcome. Joy’s husband, meanwhile, falls in love with her cousin Renee, and at long last, Joy finally gets her divorce, and brings her boys to England. What finally brings about a change in Jack and Joy’s relationship is the fact that her visa is about to expire, and unless she marries a citizen, she’ll be deported. But this is the age in which King Edward VIII abdicated to marry an American divorcee, because the Church of England would never condone it–so Jack assumes the church will not marry them in the eyes of God either.
This is why Joy’s illness is so pivotal. It brings their suppressed feelings to a head, forcing out into the open what has long been denied…
I don’t like sad endings, but as I said, this one has a *bit* of a bittersweet character to it. And otherwise, so engrossing!
My rating: ****1/2
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
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