It is actually a Christian apologetic, only partially in comics form, with some of the laziest vague callbacks to Pascal's Wager I can remember seeing, in which a group of men who study and interpret myth professionally are firm in their belief that this one myth, with massive parallels to multiple other things they know well, must be true, because of course what they were taught as kids is real and what other people believed in other lands is clearly entirely different, for reasons they will huff and bite their pipes and pile up formidable stretches of language to try to obscure.
Frankly, what Hendrix presents as the argument that convinced C.S. Lewis that bland 1930s middle-of-the-road Anglican Christianity is The One True Story of The Universe is so facile and dumb that I'm torn between hoping he's massively simplifying the thought-processes of professors very good at twisting ideas to their own ends or losing the bits of respect I had for Lewis.
I have to admit it: this book set my teeth on edge. In retrospect, the word "Fellowship" rather than "Friendship" in the subtitle should have been an important clue, but I missed it. It's not just that their faith was important to them; the conflict between Catholic Tolkien and atheist-turned-Anglican Lewis would have been an important thread in any book like this one. Hendrix deliberately and specifically made it central: it's the thing he most wanted to focus on. (And I see, looking at his other work, that he's a world-class god-botherer of long standing, so again I could have anticipated this with a bit more diligence.)
To me, the arguments that these men - there are other Inklings involved in Lewis's religious epiphany; I'm eliding their names for simplicity - made to themselves to justify keeping the precise faith of their ancestors are obviously naked justifications and thin excuses. I tend to cynically assume their arguments were entirely for show: they believed because it was emotionally comforting to believe, it kept them as part of the in-group, and they, as far as I can tell, pretty much all kept or went back to exactly what they had believed at about the age of five. I mean, there's no way anyone with two brain cells to rub together could seriously think "well, Balder and Tammuz and Osiris and a dozen other myth-figures have stories really really similar to that of Jesus, but Jesus is the one that God made true in the world, and I know this because...um, reasons!" is a plausible argument. It's the old circular proof of God dressed up in Oxford tweeds and wandering amiably across the countryside.
Anyway, the Christian faith stuff isn't the whole of the book, but it's central, and it distracts from the discussion of their actual work. I also think I tend to be more of a Tolkienian and Hendrix is more of a Lewisian - though, to be honest, Tolkien is a boring figure to write about, since he mostly sat and worked on things over long stretches of time, while Lewis has the religious conversion and more complicated personal life and vastly more publications and public-intellectual stuff to engage with.
This is a thoughtful, well-crafted book full of details and fine luminous art. Hendrix clearly has spent a lot of time engaging with the works of his two protagonists, and with the secondary sources about their lives and work. He has avatars of the two as paired narrators throughout the book, which is a bit transparent and a bit self-indulgent, but mostly works, in that it lets him drag a lot of subtext up and talk about it directly.
If you are a relatively orthodox Christian, the religious material will feel entirely normal and completely relevant; it may even give you some bulwarks for your own faith. If you believe in absolutely anything else in the world - if you are one of the billions for whom this is not the background noise of your life - it will be weird and off-putting and probably entirely unconvincing. I think Hendrix is writing entirely to the choir, so he probably doesn't mind.
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