by Douglas Bond
273 pages / 2016
RATING: Gift

“Second Lieutenant C.S. Lewis in the trenches of WWI” – if that doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what will. War in the Wasteland is a novel about teenage Lewis’s time on the front lines of the First World War. At this point in his life, at just 19, Lewis is an atheist, and his hellish surroundings seem to confirm for him that there is no God.

Now when men are hunkered down in their trenches waiting through another enemy artillery barrage, there is good reason, and plenty of time, to talk about life’s most important matters. Bond gives Lewis a fellow junior officer – Second Lieutenant Johnson – who won’t let Lewis’s atheistic thinking go unchallenged. Their back and forth sparring is brilliant; Bond has pulled the points and counterpoints right out of Mere Christianity and other books Lewis wrote when he became the world’s best-known Christian apologist.

Bond has crafted something remarkable here, capturing in grim detail what it must have been like to live, eat, and sleep barely more than a stone’s throw from enemy troops hidden away in their own trenches.

I think older teens and adults who have an interest in history, World War I, apologetics, or C.S. Lewis are sure to enjoy War in the Wasteland.