Looking for the King by David C. Downing

I had to read this. Its subtitle is An Inklings Novel and of course, that attracted me at once. Also, it was mentioned on the Mythopoeic Society website AND David Downing has written several books on CS Lewis (Into the Region of Awe, Into the Wardrobe, etc.,) and I simply needed to see what this novel was like.

I would give it mixed reviews. As a chance to glimpse, however briefly, what life might have been like for the Inklings at Oxford during WWII, the book was quite charming. But the story and the characters (unfortunately, the raison d’être for a novel) were uneven and not quite as fascinating.

Tom, an American in Britain, is writing a tour-guide on the legend of King Arthur and is visiting appropriate sites in England in the hopes of coming up with some new information – if not the source and identity of Arthur himself. Laura, also an American, is visiting her aunt and is anxious to find the source and meaning of several vivid dreams she has been having about sleeping kings, abbeys and horses and other Arthurian-type places and symbols.

They team up to explore the countryside and enlist – if not the actual help – then at least the support and opinions of CS Lewis, Charles Williams, JRR Tolkien and several other Inklings.

The plot does not really develop much beyond that – except for at the very end, wherein we discover a German spy and several staunch British policemen.

The biggest problem with this book is its lack of character development. Tom and Laura are pleasant enough folk, but they often say and do things that arise, not so much from who they are as characters, but what the author needs them to do at that moment. Much of what happens is scantily developed and seems to come out of left field. Many of the things that CS Lewis says and does seem to come directly from a biographer’s list of notes, rather than from his personality as described in the novel.

I did finish the book, and as I said, enjoyed meeting Lewis and Williams on their own turf, but would not recommend Looking for the King for anyone other than a Lewis or Tolkien fan.