The Nation has reviewed The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller, a memoir about Miller’s experience re-reading C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia as an adult. Now a successful editor of Salon, Miller was once enthralled by Lewis’ Narnia series. Her book — part memoir, part literary criticism — is her attempt to theorize why Lewis’ books have proved so enduringly popular and resonant with young audiences. The reviewer writes:
Justifying her interest in Lewis-as-writer, as opposed to Lewis the apologist, she (Miller) states that the Narnia books have not succeeded in overturning her resistance to Christianity, that they furthermore are not allegories and that she will not be taking up the religious aspect of the stories. But by his own testimony Lewis did indeed find himself retelling the story of Christianity for children: “Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” The Passion of Christ provides his first book with a shape, and Genesis and Revelation are behind his sixth and seventh books, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle. But the second through fifth books derive more clearly from secular books, some from altogether non-Christian traditions: the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, the Arabian Nights, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, The Faerie Queene, Gulliver’s Travels, the poems of W.B. Yeats, the fairy tales of George MacDonald. Lewis’s aim was always to tell stories, to do something with the pictures he saw: “Some people seem to think I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children…. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.”
The full review is here.
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