![]() ![]() “The patient” is an unremarkable man who fights with his mother, falls in love, and then dies in an air raid during the Second World War. An epistolary novel, “The Screwtape Letters” features a senior demon called Screwtape writing thirty-one letters of advice and encouragement to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, who is trying to win the soul of a nameless young man. Unlike Dante and Milton, he eschewed a grand theology of the cosmos, focussing instead on quotidian temptations of the common man. Its appeal, I think, comes from Lewis’s success in writing a theodicy of the everyday. I remember wondering then, as I have been again since Justice Scalia’s interview, why the novel is still so popular. Three years ago, I saw one of the stage adaptations in New York, where it was shockingly difficult to get a ticket. ![]() Fox owns the film rights, and Ralph Winter, best known for blockbusters like “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four,” has said he will produce it. Continuously in print since Lewis published it in 1942, the novel has been adapted into plays, made into a comic book, and recorded as an audio drama by John Cleese. “The Screwtape Letters,” though, remains one of his most popular works. ![]()
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