** spoiler alert ** First, to clear up some misconceptions.

A Severe Mercy is not a great love story.

Someone (it might have been an English professor) once explained to me that Wuthering Heights is not a love story but a revenge story, and ever since then I've liked it a whole lot more. You have to approach A Severe Mercy the same way. It's a book about human relationships, yes, partly – but mainly it's a book about God reaching into one man's life and changing its course.

As a love story, it actually kind of stinks. The author and his wife are obsessed with each other in an extremely unhealthy way – a fact which the author seems to deny to the end of the book, even after the unnatural and twisted aspects of their relationship are pointed out to him by no less a person than C.S. Lewis. He persists in thinking that the "Shining Barrier" which divided them from everyone else was a good thing, as far as it went; although he does admit that it had to be broken in order to allow God in. Apparently no one ever told him that you can't stay in love forever. Love and being in love are not the same thing, and love is much more than an emotion.

As a story about relationship and God, it's much more successful, but not without some problems. God breaking into the Shining Barrior was the most interesting and moving part of the book for me. The personal account of the author's conversion to Christianity was extremely compelling to me, especially because he was no hardened sinner prior to conversion, but an intellectual hedonist who worshipped beauty and good literature. That's the kind of conversion story you don't hear too often.

The "severe mercy" of the title refers to the wife's death at a very early age, and I guess I'll mark that a spoiler even though it's revealed in the first chapter that she dies. I admit I had tears in my eyes as I read the account of her death – but large parts of this section of the story also annoyed me. You have to read between the lines a little, and pay close attention to the included letters from C.S. Lewis, to see what is really happening, behind the author's self-indulgent sentimentalism.

And there's the key. The major problem with reading this book as not-a-love-story is the author himself. He reads as completely self-centered; charmingly, naively, sweetly self-centered, but self-centered all the same. He defines "untrustworthy narrator," so nostalgic and sentimental you have to pay close attention to notice that the Shining Barrier starts to lose its gleam even before the conversion to Christianity. Despite the fact that it was supposedly constructed to defend this great marriage of equal companions, it's Van, the author, who forms a friendship with C.S. Lewis, who visits people in Oxford, who thinks and debates and wrestles. It's unclear what Davy (the wife) is doing all this time, but apparently the equality only applies in certain circumstances.

For all that Van supposedly loved Davy so much, she actually comes across as a vague, almost shadowy figure, a mere backdrop for Van's feelings about this and doubts about that. At one point she's spunky, feisty, intense, but later in the book she's meek, her humility winning everyone around her. I'd be tempted to call her a Mary Sue, but I think it's actually Van who's the (autobiographical?) Gary Stu, and Davy's lack of real presence is a reflection of the fact that the book is really ALL about Van.

You also have to notice Van's self-congratulatory little anecdotes slipping in. At one point, he relates a story about how he invented a metaphor to explain the Incarnation, which wowed all his friends. Except... that metaphor is from Dorothy Sayer's The Mind of the Maker. Later, he makes sure to inform us how devastated his boss was when he resigned his position at a college. He's pretty proud of his good taste in books, too. And he doesn't seem to realize how incredibly privileged his and Davy's life was, small apartments or no.

This oblivious arrogance applies most of all to Van's and Davy's love story. He's convinced that their love is unlike any love ever before. No one ever loved with such romance and truth. (THEIRLOVEWASSOTRUE!!!!11one!!)

The only thing that makes some of these passages worth reading is that you can count on a letter from C.S. Lewis to cut through the crap with typical brilliance and insight.

Finally, I'm not convinced of Van's eventual theory about God's involvement in Davy's death, and the idea of "The Severe Mercy." It all stems, at the very bottom, from his conviction that he is Pretty Special. He argues that if Davy had not died, he would end up hating her and God because of her superior faith, and therefore God took her in order to save him. The Severe Mercy also preserved their Great and Wondrous Love in its youth so that he could obsessively remember it forever and ever. I'm not convinced by the logic. I think he gives God way too little credit. Who is he to say he was impossible to save any other way?

The sections on grieving are somewhat helpful too, although as I said, I find the author a little obsessive about it.

Whew. After all this, I don't know how to rate this book. I'd like to give it three and a half stars. I'll probably go with four, reluctantly. It was fairly well-written, if sentimental (and the author uses British spelling throughout, although he is American – which is a peeve of mine). As a portrait of God working in a relationship, it's fascinating but very biased. It's worth reading, definitely. Just don't believe everything you read.