A Severe Mercy

Sheldon Vanauken and the woman he calls Davy — Jean Davis — marry in 1937 and build a rule around it. They will share everything: what one reads the other reads, every interest held in common, and no children, since motherhood would be an experience they could not share equally. They call it the Shining Barrier. They buy a boat and name her Grey Goose, after a bird that keeps one mate for life, and sail her.

Christianity gets inside the barrier at Oxford. Davy is converted first and further, and the pledge that put their love above everything now has something above it. C. S. Lewis is teaching there; the two men correspond, and the letters are printed in the book. Davy dies in January 1955, at forty, of an illness in her liver, and the title comes from a phrase in one of Lewis's letters. What follows her death is the part that has kept the book alive: Vanauken goes back through the marriage and reads it a second time, and finds that the Shining Barrier had been an attempt to stop time, and that what he had called love was, in his own later phrase, pagan love invaded by Christ.

It is for a reader who can take a grief book that also argues. The reservation is the self-regard in the prose — Vanauken writes about himself and his own taste with great care, the Oxford is laid on thick, and the aesthetic pitch never lets up. Davy is seen entirely through him, with no independent account of her own in a book largely about her. And the last third does apologetics alongside memoir; anyone who does not grant the premises will feel the argument being made.