I read this memoir conversion story on my Kindle back in 2011 when it first was published. I said then that I enjoyed the story, but it left me feeling . . . incomplete and sort of lacking in understanding. I don’t think I read well on an e-reader, and that may be why I was ambivalent about Surprised By Oxford when I read back in the day. So, when I heard about the movie that recently came out, based on the book, I thought I’d watch that.

It was a good movie, not great, but solidly good. Now I had to re-read the book that I really didn’t remember much about, since I read it over ten years ago, and since I have a leaky brain. I didn’t review the book back in 2011 when I read it the first time, which is another reason I couldn’t remember much more than a vague impression of possible dissatisfaction or maybe appreciation from my first read through.

The story is deceptively simple: Agnostic Canadian feminist gets a scholarship to Oxford. She is dazzled by the Oxford experience, meets a group of “serious Christians” (and others who are not Christian at all), and eventually becomes a Christian herself. The hook is that Ms. Weber tells the story of her Oxford education and conversion to Christianity with a great deal of poetic language, wordplay, puns, Brit-speak, simile, metaphor, and philosophical thought processes. It’s not always easy to follow Caro, as she is called in the story, as she winds her way through Oxford and through literature to get to Jesus.

The influences in Caro Weber’s conversion are many and varied. There is surprisingly much less C.S. Lewis in the book than I thought there would be. Caro does attend a meeting of the C.S. Lewis Society at one point in the story, but the speaker there talks about joy and prayer rather than about Lewis specifically. Lewis sometimes enters the discussions, but not that often. Her influences seem to be more tilted toward the Romantic poets that she is studying, as well as John Milton, George Herbert, William Blake, and the other students and professors who engage with her in many conversations over the course of a year at Oxford. These conversations, sometimes adversarial, sometimes encouraging, make up most of the book, and they are indeed both surprising and challenging.

There’s also a lot of Caro’s family history in the book. The author has, or had, “daddy issues”, rightly so since her father sounds like a very broken and abusive man. (As far as I can tell, she has since reconciled with her father, who has shown some signs of repentance and change.) Of course the father issues translate to God issues, and a large part of her conversion is due to her coming to understand that God is not like her father.

The book is better than the movie, but also harder to digest. Caro sees metaphors and signs everywhere and in everything, and sometimes the language she uses to describe her thought processes is obscure and difficult to follow, at least to me. If you are more well read than I am, you may understand more clearly. I did enjoy the book more this second time than I did the first time, and I do recommend it to Anglophiles and seekers and lovers of poetry who want to read a Romantic (in the literary sense) memoir.

I would like to read Carolyn Weber’s second book, Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present. And maybe her most recent one, Sex and the City of God: A Memoir of Love and Longing?