Alan Jacobs (author of the very good The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis) writes:
I don’t think Lewis was by any means a natural storyteller, and all of his fiction suffers to one degree or another from his shortcomings in this regard. Every time he sat down to write a story he was moving outside the sphere of his strongest writerly gifts.
What were those writerly gifts? Above all he was a brilliant satirist and parodist — abilities bolstered by his greatest more-generally-intellectual gift, a prodigious memory — and the master of a familiar, trust-inducing essayistic tone. (A tone that, by the way, he put to excellent use in his scholarly work, which is why The Allegory of Love and his OHEL book remain so exceptionally readable.) Now, his fiction sometimes benefits from these skills. For instance, consider the just-right pitch of this passage from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe —
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you — you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.
— or the terrific parodies of administrative jargon in The Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength.
But in the basics of the kind of storytelling he liked best — creating vivid characters and keeping a lively plot moving along — Lewis struggled, and I think at times he knew it.
