Me and the devil

Comparisons between C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Thomas Davis’s The Devil Likes to Sing are inevitable, but I can’t go there. When I tried reading Screwtape years ago, I just couldn’t get into it. (Let me assure the Lewis fans who just gasped in horror that I have read many of his other books.)

Timothy McFarland, the narrator of The Devil Likes to Sing, is ABD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Despite his failure to get a dissertation approved by his doctoral committee, he hangs around Hyde Park, developing a career as a hack writer of schmaltzy gift books. When his wife walks out on him over his self-possession and selfishness, the devil starts showing up. The devil sometimes looks like John F. Kennedy, sometimes takes on other guises, and sometimes appears to McFarland the way he shows up for the rest of us: merely in his head.

The devil may have been a fallen angel, but in Davis’s version the devil is not a complete unbeliever. He accepts the idea of the incarnation, which he saw as a liability when applied to himself—it limited him in time and space. The devil not only likes to sing: he likes church, even the Eucharist. The reason the devil likes church seems based on his own conceit that he has something to say about how the church does its business.