Letters to Malcolm

I remember reading an Amazon review of C.S. Lewis's Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer which confidently asserted that the "Malcolm" of the title was Malcolm Muggeridge, the English journalist and writer who became an outspoken Christian in his later life. (It's still up.)

This isn't true, of course. The Malcolm to whom Lewis was writing was imaginary. But just yesterday I came across a book which is full of letters to Malcolm Muggeridge. It's called Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966–1982. The author is David G. Reagles (what makes someone decide to use their middle initial, incidentally?).

It draws on the thousands of fan letters that Malcolm Muggeridge received for his religious writing. Unlike some authors, Muggeridge was very appreciative of this fan mail, and very responsive to his readers; not only writing back, but even sending them copies of his books, and meeting with them in person. He kept the letters in the hope that someone would write a book such as this one.

Muggeridge is a strange case. He has nothing like the stature of C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, perhaps because he was unwilling to engage in traditional apologetics. I rarely hear anybody quote him, even conservative Christians. Nevertheless he seems to have spoken to many people in his own time, and his resistance to the tide of liberal secularism was most courageous.

He's regularly mocked for his debate with the Monty Python crew over Life of Brian, but I think he acquitted himself very well. He was quite obviously fighting a lost battle. The Pythons' insistence that they meant no disrespect to Christianity is not terribly convincing, and even seems like a cop-out.

Despite a certain amount of academic jargon, this is a fascinating insight into the lives of British people living through the liberalization and secularization of Britain, and how they reacted to that. The letter-writers had a great deal to say about their own histories, and it's deeply interesting.

It's a pricey book, so it might not be worth actually buying first-hand. I came across the e-book on the library catalogue while looking for something else, and I've been printing chapters out to read them on my tea-breaks.

Aren't books wonderful? So many different things can make material for a book.