Foggy Book Club discussion

(Chapters 25 - 28)

Hello, what are your thoughts on these chapters?

Thus you tell me! with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives. This is a crying example of something I have complained about already--your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient's death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?

One of my favorite elements of this book, that has come up time and again, is how we never actually get to hear from Wormwood. We get to hear how "whiney" or "gleeful" Wormwood is but never read Wormwood's actual correspondence ourselves. So it's left to our imaginations how frustrating Wormwood apparently is. And somehow Wormwood embodies everyone's least favorite co-worker: no team working skills, no ability to comprehend common sense, and definitely lacking in imagination. While Screwtape as Wormwood's "uncle" obviously enjoys in some ways explaining things in more depth than possibly necessary, it's also obvious that Wormwood is... well... oblivious.

And it's clear from the start how it's all bound to go, isn't it? Especially with Wormwood at the helm.

I definitely think the point you said about explaining things more in depth than necessary is a key issue for me with this book - I feel like more and more as the book goes on, we stop learning about what Wormwood's patient is actually up to, but we also don't learn that much about the whole heaven / hell thing, or at least I felt like it could have been further explored.

But I do agree, that Lewis used a lot of very relevant and real characteristics in his characters, which make us feel like we know them, because we know someone like them.