Book Write-Up: Haunted by Christ, by Richard Harries

Richard Harries. Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith. SPCK, 2018. See here to purchase the book.

Richard Harries is an English scholar, theologian, and radio commentator. He has been active in the House of Lords in the area of human rights.

This book is about the faith, or struggles with faith, of renowned literary authors. These authors include: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, Samuel Beckett, W.H. Auden, William Golding, R.S. Thomas, Edwin Muir, George Mackay Brown, Elizabeth Jennings, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Shusaku Endo, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and Marilyn Robinson. These authors varied in terms of their profession or commitment to Christianity, but they still thoughtfully engaged it and found it to be of value.

Some chapters are more comprehensive than others. The Dostoevsky chapter, for example, goes through three of Dostoevsky’s classics, whereas the section on Flannery O’Connor focuses on one of her short stories. This is understandable, though, since O’Connor shares the chapter with three other Catholic novelists.

I found that, overall, the chapters that discussed books that I had read came alive to me more than the parts that discussed books that I had not read. That is not because Harries fails to provide background information. He dutifully conveys the plots and the significance of the plots—-not necessarily in stirring prose, but the information is still there. It is just that, with books that I had read, I could think, “Oh, okay, I remember that.”

There is not a whole lot that I can remember from this book that really stood out to me. Maybe that is because some of the spiritual points did not intrigue me or speak to me that much, or they are commonly circulated in the Christian culture. A lot of it amounted to a search for wonder or a tentative praise for simplicity. The chapter about C.S. Lewis and Robert Pullmann was impressive, though, in that it went into how Lewis’s life experiences, background, and ideology shaped his work, as well as critiques of his fiction. The critiques that Harries covers are not so much literary, as they are moral: is Lewis conveying a message in such-and-such a passage that is psychologically harmful for children?

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. My review is honest.