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The Magician Book A Skeptic Adventures in Narnia Laura Miller Books

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The Magician Book A Skeptic Adventures in Narnia Laura Miller Books

An abundant source of information on the life of CS Lewis, of medieval English literature, of Tolkien, and the author's own life. Sadly, the book is disorganized, and we get too little insight in Narnia and the Narnia saga. An OK read, but for a casual Narnia reader, who wanted a to understand more of the world of Narnia, it was a disappointment.


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The Magician Book A Skeptic Adventures in Narnia Laura Miller Books Reviews

Miller's book is a wonderful tour through childhood books I loved, love, and still read. It is a well-arranged synthesis of memoir of reading Narnia, literary criticism, and some biography of Lewis and his cohorts, particularly Tolkien. Given the nature of the title, Magician's Book A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, one shouldn't be surprised, as some of the reviewers here are, of Miller's conflicted feelings toward Lewis. One hand, she reveres him for the intellectual, warm, and often spiritually and emotionally embattled man he was, and yet she has a profound discomfort for the "books' 'secret' significance" as someone who had in adolescence left the Church. Miller is unapologetic about her feelings. Citing a query of Tolkien's "'What class of men ... would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' The response, also provided by Tolkien, was 'jailers.'" Miller responds, "I, too, longed for escape, but as I saw it, Christianity was one of the jailers" (101).

Magician's Book works to disentangle, shed light--and some darkness too--about what kind of writer could evoke the magic of Narnia that remains charming for a self-professed agnostic or atheist. Knowing that Aslan is a symbol for Christ, or that Eustace's conversion is representative of Saint Paul's, or even Susan's sad fate at the end of The Last Battle, how does a non-Christian still experience that magic? Miller also grapples with the unpleasant racism in The Horse and His Boy--Calormenes as Turks--without venturing near the pit of "political correctness"; she contends that Lewis was a man of his times and certainly not alone in fetishizing the "Orient."

So once again, if you are a Christian and don't feel conflicted as readers like Miller (and I) do of being non-Christian fans of Narnia, then this book may not seem worth your while. It is not a diatribe against Lewis, but it is not a rose-colored-lens one either. I don't mean to say Christians shouldn't read this book; by all means, all Narnia fans should read it! But be aware that Miller is an atheist/agnostic and is not interested in seeking some sort of spiritual epiphany.

As a child, I too was surprised to discover (thanks to my Pentecostal pastor) that LWW was a Christian allegory, but I wasn't dismayed until years later, I finally got around to reading The Last Battle. Like many other readers, I was shocked by the damnation of Susan. I was probably about her age, interested in things many girls are interested in--boys, looking pretty, etc., yet I didn't feel those were qualities enough to shut me out of Narnia. This didn't keep me from loving the Narnia books, but I never did read LB again. And it's a pity; I'm a total fan; I have two editions of the full series and even the wonderfully acted audiobooks (which I highly recommend), all for LB. Miller's book was a tremendous sigh of relief--to know someone else who felt the same way I did, and had the passion to research Lewis and the creation of these books. For me, Miller is the perfect person to write this book, a non-religious fan of Lewis who advocates children's literature as an entity unto itself, rather than simply "derivative writing."

Miller begins with absolute affection; the first part of three in Magician's Book is devoted to the child's reading experience. She dissects how a child's reading experience trumps the adult's, because children seek story rather than "an aesthetic experience." She devotes a chapter to why talking animals are such a delight for children "Animals, like infants, belong to the vast nation of those who communicate without words, through gesture, expression, scent, sound, and touch. Children are immigrants from that nation, and, like most recent immigrants, still have a mental foothold on the abandoned shore" (28). Talking animals are then the closest companions a child can have--creatures, who unlike adults, can easily alternate between the verbal or physical.

In the second part, she tackles her philosophical problems with Lewis, raising the usual issues of sexism, racism, and what Lewis himself calls "bloodery"--the various abuses and bullying of boys to other boys. She invokes Freud, but acknowledges the crudeness of Freudian studies during Lewis's time--and its limitations overall. This and the third parts include Lewis's biography and the entrance of Tolkien, and here is the heat of Miller's critical work What is a myth? What is language? How does the "patchwork" of Narnia, with its disparate myths all joyously brewed together reflect England? How is that patchwork in harmony with itself? What is an allegory really and what constitutes a (medieval) romance? She postulates that Narnia was for Lewis the "third road" a road that is neither the straight and narrow nor the broad but "a 'bonny road,' twisting through fern-covered hillsides. That is the road to 'fair Elfland'" (270). This quotation is from the Scottish ballad "Thomas the Rhymer," and Lewis spends a great deal of time in his own book, The Discarded Image, fascinated by the dangerous but rewarding road alongside faerie rather than the Christian pilgrim.

Miller's language is clear and crisp. She has a tendency to recant for a sentence or two, making tiny footnotes as she speaks, such as "You can die in the wilderness where I come from [Sierra Nevada]; hikers do all the time. In Britain, you might catch a cold. But the wildness of Lewis's Britain is no less vivid for being notional and poetic. It is an idea of about the natural world..." (217). Nevertheless, she synthesizes some exciting arguments about Lewis the man and his books. I highly recommend, especially to lovers of Narnia seeking a thoughtful, unabashedly critical discussion.
"A long time ago, I opened a book and ... what I found inside (was) a whole new world ... The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world."

Laura Miller fell in love, at the age of eight - with a book. "First loves are famously tenacious," she writes, one reason that she finds herself returning, decades later to the magical universe that was Narnia. Readers of this book are the beneficiaries of her quest to understand the compelling power of the written word and the imaginary worlds authors create for both childrean and adults.

Her goal is to answer one of the most difficult questions in the world of art as a whole "how to acknowledge an author's darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book." That's a conundrum that all of us have confronted at some point. Virginia Woolf was a snob, as Miller points out, while T.S. Eliot was anti-semitic. Wagner's music - and the myths the underlay his operas - were part of the foundation for Hitler's racist philosophies. Musicians and artists collaborated with loathsome regimes.

Miller's specific problem is how to reconcile her growing disaffection with organized religion ("Christianity as I knew it offered such a drab, grinding, joyless view of life") with the wondrous universe of Narnia as portrayed by Lewis - and specifically her realization, at the age of 13, that Lewis had written the books as a sort of Christian text/fairy tale. "I felt betrayed," she admits. Moreover, despite her obsession with the world of Narnia, Lewis's efforts to win this particular reader as a convert bore no fruit, although she admits that "if any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these," she admits. But what is intriguing is Miller's recognition today that while she may not have been impelled to become religious, she had definitely internalized the morality of Narnia - an underlying morality that lies at the heart of any organized religion. The character of Edmund, she writes, may not have immediately struck her as an example of original sin. But he offered a moral lesson, nonetheless, as a boy whose Judas-like betrayals "had been made up of many littler, unchecked moments of spite and ire that I could easily have indulged in myself." Meanwhile, reading about Lucy's goodness, she could see how that made the fictional character happier "and drew her closer to other people." Even while still unconscious of the overt religious message, the moral lesson was clear. "These books communicated really deep, why-are-we-here, life-and-death concepts to me," she writes.

But the religious element is simply the jumping off-point (and a recurring theme) for Miller in this graceful and eloquent book. Ultimately, it reads as half a literary memoir of Miller as a reader - her evolution from a passionate bookish child into a more critical adult able to draw new kinds of conclusions about the merit of a book. It is in that light that she returns to the Narnia chronicles and explores Lewis's other writings - his autobiographical volumes and letters as well as his apologetics. In the process, she does an admirable job of exploring and explaining just what it is about fictional worlds that enrapture us throughout our lives. On one level, this is a thoughtful rumination on numerous aspects of the Narnia chronicles - the impact of Lewis's fascination with Norse myths and medieval romances on the books, for instance, as well as the literary friendship between Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein (of Lord of the Rings fame). But just as the Narnia books operate on multiple levels, so does Miller's book. Ultimately, the latter tackles the most fundamental question of all, the nature of the relationship between a reader and the novels they consume (or, in the case of Miller, myself and countless other biblioholics, devour.)

Tackling the Narnia books is a perilous undertaking, on many levels. To those with strong Christian views, they are beyond criticism in some sense, because of their content and their author. They also are canonical children's books, and as such, prized by many who, like Miller, adored them but who, unlike her, are uncomfortable critically reassessing them as adults. (Indeed, she notes, the genre of children's literature, however crucial it is in shaping our imaginations, tastes and personalities "belong to a class of literature, that, in the opinion of many, doesn't merit serious critical consideration." The magnitude of the challenge notwithstanding, Miller forges ahead to tackle - often with visible discomfort - the flaws that she as an adult can now detect in this once-idolized author. Lewis was misogynistic and elitist - and she even points to elements of racism in the Narnia novels.

Some reviewers choose to focus on the fact that Miller is returning to these books as an agnostic. But I detected no hostility toward religion - more of a lack of comprehension that she wants to resolve. Why, since these books now so clearly appear to be religious and even polemical, did they play such a formative role in her life? (She does reach a conclusion, albeit one that feels somewhat forced; she has found her own need for a kind of apologetics.)

Ultimately, this is a deeply personal book, however much Miller's strong reportage - including interviews with fellow childhood fans of Narnia and other literary figures - and literary analysis may seem sometime to dominate the narrative. Any review, in my opinion, is therefore more likely to be highly subjective. To me, this was a wonderful, erudite and provocative look at not only a series of specific books, but at the nature of what it means to be a reader. As such, and because of the beauty of Miller's own writing, I have to award it 4.5 stars.

(For the record, I wasn't one of the children like Miller who became enraptured by Narnia. Instead, I wanted to join the troupe of children that Arthur Ransome wrote about in a series of novels that I still possess, decades later, beginning with Swallows and s.)
A study of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series from an intriguing perspective that of a nonbeliever. Miller makes it clear in her prologue that she is enthusiastic about Lewis' work but remains unmoved by its Christian message. As a Christian myself, I was preparing for something that was perhaps bitter or deconstructionist, but it is neither. Like Lewis himself, Miller has a talent for presenting a complex subject in a concise and direct manner, well organized and reasoned without being dry.

Miller reveals the influences that led to Narnia, from country Irish landscapes to the British Empire's encounter with the Middle and Far East, from boarding schools to medieval cosmology, from Norse gods to Greek heroes. One of the most fascinating chapters deals with the contrast between Tolkien's purist approach to language and culture, and Lewis' more inclusive patchwork Anglo vs. Irish, Catholic vs. Protestant, one vs. many.

She preserves the sense of wonder and mystery of her subject even while she examines its structure and origins, something which is difficult to do at all, let alone do well. I recommend this book highly to anyone who loves Narnia, and would encourage fellow Christians to read it as well. Much of what has been written about Narnia assumes that its magic is only window dressing for the Gospel message; Miller reveals its other richness.
An abundant source of information on the life of CS Lewis, of medieval English literature, of Tolkien, and the author's own life. Sadly, the book is disorganized, and we get too little insight in Narnia and the Narnia saga. An OK read, but for a casual Narnia reader, who wanted a to understand more of the world of Narnia, it was a disappointment.