Though Wingfold himself plays but a supporting (though important) role in the story, There and Back is the final installment of the Thomas Wingfold trilogy. A dozen years have now passed since the completion of the second volume, Paul Faber Surgeon. It is obvious, however, that the character of Thomas Wingfold still exercised a hold on the mind of his creator, much as had Robert Falconer earlier in his career. It took Falconer ten years to get into print from brain-child to finished book. Now Wingfold has been waiting in the wings twelve years to make his final appearance. MacDonald brings him back in another burst of creative energy that produced one final long, massive novel replete with many of George MacDonald’s signature tunes. During the previous few years, MacDonald’s books had been shrinking dramatically. Yet even as he was struggling to get underway with Lilith, suddenly here came another monster book—the ninth longest, in fact, in his entire corpus of over fifty titles.

Wingfold ages exactly at the same rate as his creator. In the story, consistent with MacDonald’s own life, exactly twelve years have passed. Thomas Wingfold (now approximately forty) and Helen (thirty-seven) and their young son have relocated to a country parish some thirty or forty miles outside London.

The theme again, as in the two previous Wingfold books, is belief. Is the Christian story true? Does God exist? If so, what kind of God is he, and what is to be our response to him?

Two new characters, Barbara Wylder (one of MacDonald’s wonderfully memorable young women—strong, energetic, feisty, determined, outspoken, hungry, fearless, and full of a heart of compassion) and Richard Tuke (a good, honest, hard-working sincere agnostic), now follow in the questioning footsteps of Paul Faber, asking what belief means, and, on a more profound level, where truth is to be found.

The people and surroundings have changed, but the essential themes have not. This third book in the trilogy concludes MacDonald’s multifaceted examination of the fundamental themes of man’s need for God, and the validity of the Christian faith.

Wingfold presses a little harder in this case than he did with Faber, forcing the imperative question, not merely whether one believes in God, but what manner of God forms the object of that belief. He makes the bold assertion that it is better to be an honest, open-minded atheist than a so-called Christian who believes in a false god.

Thomas Wingfold Curate laid the groundwork for spiritual birth, with the awakening of Wingfold himself after a long struggle to come to grips with the truthfulness of Christianity. MacDonald even uses the term “born again” in Wingfold’s case, a rarity for MacDonald who zealously avoided terms that could be associated with traditional or “evangelical” jargon. Yet he recognized the imperative of the principle involved—that there is a new birth, a new outlook, a “salvation” that must come. Paul Faber Surgeon followed as the natural outgrowth of the curate’s new faith—the spread of that faith into the lives of those around him. Now in There and Back, another conundrum is raised: The question of moral goodness.