SHADOWPLAY

Good Friday is as good a day as any - and better than most - for the BBC to begin broadcasting a reading of Shadowlands, my book about love, life, faith and death.

Written in 1985, Shadowlands tells the story of Professor C S Lewis, Christian apologist and writer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the other ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ and his late flowering love for Joy Davidman, a Jewish American convert to Christianity who, after a lengthy struggle, died from cancer.

The story - with ever-widening departures from fact - became a TV drama, a stage play and a film written by William Nicholson. The book, which has happily remained in print, gives a rather more accurate account of these two fascinating people and of their beautiful, but painfully fated, love affair.


The challenge of abridging the book for radio was considerable because the book explores the lives of first C S Lewis and then Joy Davidman before charting the their all too brief time together. For a serialised reading that was simply not a workable structure, so I adapted and restructured the material to focus on their relationship with a few interpolated backward glances to their earlier lives and the experiences that made them the people that they were.

I was thrilled when I heard that Ian Richardson had agreed to read the book and, as I noted on this blog, was devastated by the news of his death just a few weeks after having completed the recording.

However, with the kind permission of Ian’s widow, Shadowlands begins its eight-week broadcast on Radio 2 tonight at 9.15 pm.

Following transmission, episodes can be heard on-line at the BBC2 website (go to the right-hand column, LISTEN, then click on ‘More Shows’).

The website also has a competition to win copies of my book and an opportunity to listen to a moving two-part interview which Ian Richardson gave the series’ producer, Malcolm Prince, and myself when we recorded the reading.

The Sunday Times wrote of Ian’s performance that he reads the book “with grace and quiet authority”, which pretty much sums it up and I am extremely proud that the last piece of work of this very fine actor should have been a reading of my book…

Aslan stooped his golden head and licked Lucy’s forehead.

The warmth of his breath and a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his hair came over her.

“Oh you’re real, you’re real! Oh Aslan!” cried Lucy, and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan.

“It means”, said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, Death itself would start working backwards . . .”

[Images: Aslan's head from film posters for Walt Disney Productions and Walden Films The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Aslan in Narnia by Pauline Baynes]