The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
by Laura Miller
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Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780316017633
ISBN: 0316017639
Label: Little, Brown and Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-12-03
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Studio: Little, Brown and Company
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Narnia and the joy of reading
Comment: Some of the Amazon reviewers seem to have approached Laura Miller's book with unfair expectations of a C.S. Lewis hagiography. Instead, Miller provides a delightful blend of personal essay, literary biography, and literary criticism. The book traces Lewis's literary and personal influences and argues for a place for Lewis's (and J.R.R. Tolkien's) fictional works within the traditional history of literature. More than that, however, Miller reveals the joy to be found in reading "stories," whether they're the canonical works of Milton or Wordsworth, or the noncanonical writers who create captivating stories. At its heart, Miller's book is about the passion for reading, and the reviewers who attack her for bias against Lewis or Christianity seem to miss the great love she retains for Lewis's works (or other works of literature), even while she recognizes her personal distance from Lewis's personal beliefs or prejudices. The book is not an attack on Lewis or his work, but is instead a touching look at how a reader's perceptions can change with each reading of a book and how we can find new ways of appreciating that work as we change.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tumbling through a hole in the world... 4.5 stars
Comment: "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 Amazons.)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Narnia and Its Discontents
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I paid to read someone else's biased opinions
Comment: I felt trapped!! I'd used a gift card to purchase this book, so I was determined to see it through to the end. However, 3/4 of the way through I had to give up. What I thought was to be an historical, biographical analysis of the Chronicles of Narnia became a psychological profile of C.S Lewis and his colleagues from one who is not credentialed to psycho-analize anyone. Laura Miller is an author who primarily argues that, although a work of fiction, the Chronicales are somehow laden with latent and evil leanings due to Lewis's defects of character. While I might agree that many of the stories require, as do most works of fiction, the willing suspension of disbelief. One must read fiction with the understanding that although the author's skema will most assuredly influence the work, it is not true that the author is deliberately trying to trick (especially) little children into believing some pretty bizarre premises if one is to take Ms Miller's opinion seriously.
I did what I rarely do--I tossed the book aside unfinished with complete disdain. I didn't buy the book to read about someone's disappointments with life and religion. I didn't buy the book to read the author's take on C.S Lewis-I bought it thinking I was getting a genuine work in which the use of story in the Narnia books was used to captivate children (and adults) and why it is we all gravitate toward stories to explain life--both secular and religious. That Lewis was a Christian is a given--and yet Ms Miller seems to take umbrage with that alone. Every author, including Laura Miller writes from what he/she knows and believes to be true. Why she should expect anything different from C. S Lewis (and cop an atitude about it) is beyond me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The White Witch is a Dominatrix
Comment:
This jarring declaration by author Laura Miller conveys a great deal about The Magician's Book. It's an eminently readable (with the exception of the overuse of the word "eponymous") swirl of Gnosticism, orthodoxy, and political correctness.
The author describes how her life was changed, in grade two, when her teacher handed her a copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe saying, "I think you'll like this one".
What Miller herself readily identifies as the "slightly supernatural" intuition of her teacher ushers her into a new world far removed from that of "...station wagons and jump rope, backyard swim classes, and spelling tests" in which she had grown up. She is held in thrall, never to be the same again.
The first section of the book, "Songs of Innocence", describes aspects of her youthful love affair with Narnia. This is the part that I liked best.
In "Trouble in Paradise", the second section of the book, Miller grapples with the dissonance that was precipitated by her revelation, later in life, that the Chronicles are carriers of deep Christian themes and symbols. This finding causes her to recoil from what she once has loved, and she describes the sense of betrayal that ensues. Her response is to attack Lewis, assailing him for purported racism, elitism, misogyny, and worse.
And so, the White Witch is a dominatrix. In a world of political correctness this makes more sense than unflinchingly identifying some things as inherently good, and others as absolutely evil.
The final section, "Songs of Experience" attempts to provide a resolution to what the author would otherwise see as an untenable position; the agnostic co-founder of salon.com who ultimately cannot help but love the orthodox land of Narnia.
The "Other Way In" that allows Miller to return to Narnia is the ancient path of knowledge. She describes it as follows: "Having lost our innocence, we must pursue understanding, knowledge, and experience to its furthest reaches. There we can hope to regain, not our lost grace, but perhaps a superior one".
Lewis himself would certainly have bridled at this Gnostic worldview.
What the author never considers is that her difficulty with the Christian content of the Chronicles may in fact stem from a lack of understanding of Christianity itself. It seems that she makes the common error of substituting broken manifestations of organized religion for the essential holy impulse to the Divine. This is evident as she writes, "It would never have occurred to me to liken Narnia to the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised". And she elaborates further, "Narnia was liberation and delight. Christianity was boredom, subjugation, and reproach".
Lewis would certainly have argued that the symbolism of the Chronicles was not a hidden agenda aimed at the conversion of unsuspecting children, but rather the wellspring of life that caused Miller and so many others to fall in love with the books in the first place.
Even though I don't agree with the author's conclusions, I still recommend The Magician's Book. It's deep, enjoyable to read, and makes you think.
Anyway, enough of this - I'm logging on to Salon...
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Narnia and the joy of reading
Comment: Some of the Amazon reviewers seem to have approached Laura Miller's book with unfair expectations of a C.S. Lewis hagiography. Instead, Miller provides a delightful blend of personal essay, literary biography, and literary criticism. The book traces Lewis's literary and personal influences and argues for a place for Lewis's (and J.R.R. Tolkien's) fictional works within the traditional history of literature. More than that, however, Miller reveals the joy to be found in reading "stories," whether they're the canonical works of Milton or Wordsworth, or the noncanonical writers who create captivating stories. At its heart, Miller's book is about the passion for reading, and the reviewers who attack her for bias against Lewis or Christianity seem to miss the great love she retains for Lewis's works (or other works of literature), even while she recognizes her personal distance from Lewis's personal beliefs or prejudices. The book is not an attack on Lewis or his work, but is instead a touching look at how a reader's perceptions can change with each reading of a book and how we can find new ways of appreciating that work as we change.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tumbling through a hole in the world... 4.5 stars
Comment: "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 Amazons.)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Narnia and Its Discontents
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I paid to read someone else's biased opinions
Comment: I felt trapped!! I'd used a gift card to purchase this book, so I was determined to see it through to the end. However, 3/4 of the way through I had to give up. What I thought was to be an historical, biographical analysis of the Chronicles of Narnia became a psychological profile of C.S Lewis and his colleagues from one who is not credentialed to psycho-analize anyone. Laura Miller is an author who primarily argues that, although a work of fiction, the Chronicales are somehow laden with latent and evil leanings due to Lewis's defects of character. While I might agree that many of the stories require, as do most works of fiction, the willing suspension of disbelief. One must read fiction with the understanding that although the author's skema will most assuredly influence the work, it is not true that the author is deliberately trying to trick (especially) little children into believing some pretty bizarre premises if one is to take Ms Miller's opinion seriously.
I did what I rarely do--I tossed the book aside unfinished with complete disdain. I didn't buy the book to read about someone's disappointments with life and religion. I didn't buy the book to read the author's take on C.S Lewis-I bought it thinking I was getting a genuine work in which the use of story in the Narnia books was used to captivate children (and adults) and why it is we all gravitate toward stories to explain life--both secular and religious. That Lewis was a Christian is a given--and yet Ms Miller seems to take umbrage with that alone. Every author, including Laura Miller writes from what he/she knows and believes to be true. Why she should expect anything different from C. S Lewis (and cop an atitude about it) is beyond me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The White Witch is a Dominatrix
Comment:
This jarring declaration by author Laura Miller conveys a great deal about The Magician's Book. It's an eminently readable (with the exception of the overuse of the word "eponymous") swirl of Gnosticism, orthodoxy, and political correctness.
The author describes how her life was changed, in grade two, when her teacher handed her a copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe saying, "I think you'll like this one".
What Miller herself readily identifies as the "slightly supernatural" intuition of her teacher ushers her into a new world far removed from that of "...station wagons and jump rope, backyard swim classes, and spelling tests" in which she had grown up. She is held in thrall, never to be the same again.
The first section of the book, "Songs of Innocence", describes aspects of her youthful love affair with Narnia. This is the part that I liked best.
In "Trouble in Paradise", the second section of the book, Miller grapples with the dissonance that was precipitated by her revelation, later in life, that the Chronicles are carriers of deep Christian themes and symbols. This finding causes her to recoil from what she once has loved, and she describes the sense of betrayal that ensues. Her response is to attack Lewis, assailing him for purported racism, elitism, misogyny, and worse.
And so, the White Witch is a dominatrix. In a world of political correctness this makes more sense than unflinchingly identifying some things as inherently good, and others as absolutely evil.
The final section, "Songs of Experience" attempts to provide a resolution to what the author would otherwise see as an untenable position; the agnostic co-founder of salon.com who ultimately cannot help but love the orthodox land of Narnia.
The "Other Way In" that allows Miller to return to Narnia is the ancient path of knowledge. She describes it as follows: "Having lost our innocence, we must pursue understanding, knowledge, and experience to its furthest reaches. There we can hope to regain, not our lost grace, but perhaps a superior one".
Lewis himself would certainly have bridled at this Gnostic worldview.
What the author never considers is that her difficulty with the Christian content of the Chronicles may in fact stem from a lack of understanding of Christianity itself. It seems that she makes the common error of substituting broken manifestations of organized religion for the essential holy impulse to the Divine. This is evident as she writes, "It would never have occurred to me to liken Narnia to the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised". And she elaborates further, "Narnia was liberation and delight. Christianity was boredom, subjugation, and reproach".
Lewis would certainly have argued that the symbolism of the Chronicles was not a hidden agenda aimed at the conversion of unsuspecting children, but rather the wellspring of life that caused Miller and so many others to fall in love with the books in the first place.
Even though I don't agree with the author's conclusions, I still recommend The Magician's Book. It's deep, enjoyable to read, and makes you think.
Anyway, enough of this - I'm logging on to Salon...
THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK is the story of one reader's long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis'The Chronicles of Narnia. Enchanted by its fantastic world as a child, prominent critic Laura Miller returns to the series as an adult to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power by looking at their creator, Clive Staples Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a more interesting and ambiguous truth: Lewis's tragic and troubled childhood, his unconventional love life, and his intense but ultimately doomed friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien.
Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination.
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