Shadowlands, by William Nicholson, is a solid and unsurprising account of the brief marriage between C.S. Lewis (known as Clive), and the American poet Joy Davidman. Her cancer diagnosis overshadowed their romance but they snatched a few lustful holidays together before she expired in an NHS hospital in 1960.

Hugh Bonneville, as Clive, delivers his standard three-note performance – bemused decency, bumbling hesitation, ironic charm – which tells us nothing about the author’s inner life. Bonneville has succeeded in building a huge presence in the movie industry from an almost complete dearth of actorly qualities. He’s not handsome, sexy, tough, athletic, amusing, mysterious, evil or even slightly unpleasant. He’s not brilliant or stupid. He’s not admirable or despicable. He’s like pasta in an Italian kitchen – a tasteless yielding blandness that allows real tastes and flavours to stand out. No one has ever spotted a young star and said: ‘He’s the next Hugh Bonneville.’ And his vacantly pleasing exterior makes him a good choice to play the tweedy academic plodder whose freakish imagination created Narnia. But rather than examining the origins of those batty horror stories, the script focuses on the tepid evolution of Clive’s geriatric fling with Joy. First, they get........

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