Miller writes at times extremely movingly about the impact that reading has especially on the juvenile mind. I particularly liked her exploration of the differences between reading as a child and reading as an adult and the way in which children inhabit a fantasy world of a novel with a passion and without any degree of removal or eye towards literary criticism.

Her description of her relationship with religion and how it impacted her to realize that Narnia was about religion (and more to the point that it was rife with symbolism and additional meanings) and overall her maturation in her reading style was poignant.

Also interesting was the exploration of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien - Miller really uses the men as foils to each other to explore their distinct religiosities and views on their manifest to write. In addition, she talks about the different approaches to writing and the relative importance of different components of a story's structure. It made clear to me that the reason I've always liked Lewis and never liked Tolkien is that Lewis is committed to a narrative, whereas Tolkien was truly a setting simulationist.

On the other hand, once she had dispensed with her central thesis, the remainder of the book really lagged and seemed to be the same key points in repetition. ( )

As a lifelong Tolkienist who first read the Narnia books as an adult, I have to agree with Tolkien in finding them lamentably slapdash; and thinking that Lewis, knowing no children, based his judgment of what children like on other books for children. But disapproving of them has never stopped me from enjoying them. Laura Miller's book is both intelligent and well informed; she has done all the relevant reading.

3 1/2 stars: Good

From the back cover: The Magician's book is the story of one reader's long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. As a child, Laura Miller read and reread the Chronicles countless times, and wanted nothing more than to find her own way to Narnia. In her skeptical teens, another book's casual reference to the Chronicles' Christian themes left her feeling betrayed and alienated from the stories she had come to know and trust. Years later, convinced that the first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as the first person we fall in love with, Miller returns to Lewis' classic fantasies to see what mysteries Narnia holds for adult eyes--and she is captured in an entirely new way.

In her search to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power, Miller looks to their creator, C. S. Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a man who stands in stark contrast to his whimsical creation--scarred by a tragic and troubled childhood, Oxford educated, a staunch Christian, and a social conservative armed with deep prejudices.

The Magician's book is an intellectual adventure story in which Miller travels to Lewis's childhood home in Ireland, the possible inspiration for Narnia's landscape, unfolds his intense freindship with J.R.R. Tolkein --a bond that led the two to create the greatest myth worlds of modern times; and explores Lewis' influence on writers like Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Franzen and Phillip PUllman. Finally reclaiming Narnia for the rest of us, Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a lifelong adventure in books, art, and the imagination.

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A good, solid book. I very much enjoyed the first third of the book, as that roughly tells my story --- loved the adventure and Lucy's character as well as Peter, completely oblivious to the deeper meaning. Then when I found out, I was both fascinated and somewhat turned off. It seemed as if Christians possessed Narnia in a way that there wasn't room for me in it. Later, like the author, I found that it is a great literary adventure, one I repeatedly turn back to. Unfortunately, I lost interest somewhat in the second half of the book as Miller delves much more deeply into Lewis' background than I had interest in.

Some passages I liked:

"What I am not, however, is a Christian; for all the countless times I have reread Lewis's books, they have never succeeded in converting me. This, to many casual observers, no doubt makes my continuing enjoyment of the Chronicles perplexing. Most of the critics .... are Christians themselves and their faith is the motivation for the attention. To everyone else, Lewis is an apologist for the Christian faith, and that is the only kind of meaning that could ever be found in anything he wrote.

The Pevensies ...can keep their head in a crisis, they belong to a long tradition in British fiction of what the novelist and critic Colin Greenland calls "competent children". I admired both their wherewithal and the delicacy of their scruples in a scene from LWW in which all four of the siblings have finally made it through the wardrobe and debate what to do next. They decide to put on the fur coats from the wardrobe before venturing on into the snowy woods, reasoning that because they're not actually taking the coats *out* of the wardrobe, they won't be stealing them.

[a dialogue, comparing Narnia to Oz]
"I didn't spend much time in Oz. It was kind of wacky and had a lot of things going on, but there was a certain weightiness to Narnia which really appealed to me." "What do you mean by weightiness?" "The fact that people were really being tested. It wasn't just 'Are we coming to the end of the adventure? Will we get back to Kansas?" but 'Will we get back to Kansas with our souls intact?'"

The White Witch is bad through and through, almost as uncomplicated as a fairy tale villain. But she's not the ground on which the story's moral battle is fought. Edmund is. For Jonathan Franzen, the plausability of Edmund's corruption is an example of the ethical gravity that gives the Chronicles much of their power. 'What I so admire about them .... was how well Lewis understands how real evil is to children. How real a sense of guilt at having done something very bad is. And how vital to having a story with real meaning that possibility is. All of the books I liked best had main characters who were not all good, who were not victims of bad things but were actually agents in creating bad things."

Skepticism, like faith, is more a matter of temperament than indoctrination. Any of of a half dozen serious flaws in any theological worldview can undermine the beliefs of someone who doesn't much want to believe in the first place. One many I know says his moment of disillusionment came when he looked at a map depicting the distribution of all the world's religions and realized that which one you belonged to depends more on where you were born than on the irresistibility of divine revelation.

The part of Lewis that produced the Chronicles of Narnia was not especially welcome among [the male Oxford authors]. While this strikes me as sad, it's also not surprising. They smoked, drank beer, argued philosophy and subjected one another's work to ungentle criticism ("not another fucking elf" one famously said to Tolkein). There was no place for Lucy in the masculine social world Lewis had created for himself. She was, however, more than welcome in Mr.Tumnus' sitting room, and perhaps that's why pictures of them whiling away an afternoon over sardines and sugared cakes feels so extraordinarily gratifying, less like a first meeting, than a longed for reunion. In Narnia, if nowhere else, the little girl and the learned bachelor can sit down together at last.

"This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia" Aslan said, "that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." But the inversion of Aslan's statement works, too; knowing him there also enables us to see where he *isn't* in this world. Tiffany wasn't seeing the spirit of Aslan in her church. "That was how I started understanding the idea of other cultures and other religions, because Narnia was so real to me. ... And if my religion was going to say that all of those other guys are doomed, then I didn't want to have anything to do with it."

I didn't for a moment feel lectured to or patronized by the Chronicles as a child. An adult reader, observing a dose of theology being dispensed, might well experience the irritation that most nonbelievers feel toward someone trying to convert them; its almost impossible to proselytize without condescension. However, what I saw in Edmund was not a representation of original sin but a boy whose one great, terrible mistake had been made up of many littler, unchecked moments of spite and ire that I could easily have indulged in myself.

When it comes to a favorite author, the impulse to try to dmeonstrate that he wasn't really a racist, or at least wasn't so bad, can be nearly irresistible. ... Nevertheless, he did hold those opinions, and they can't be rationalized away.... the racism, sexism, and snobbery of various types lie pretty close to the surface in some parts of the Chronicles, and so do some of the less easily labeled faults like Lewis' knee jerk objections to any kind of change or reform.

The child readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who do not recognize it's parallel story b of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not necessarily mistaken. Our particular, immediate experience of something is as true as the conclusions we reach after we have sorted all the details, figured out which ones match a pattern we've observed before, and discarded the rest. To me, the fact that Aslan was a real, material, warm and furry lion was as important as the fact that he died and was brought to life. It was even more important, really, since death wasn't especially interesting to me and animals were.

To be stories at all” Lewis wrote, “they must be series of events; but it must be understood that this series—the plot as we call it--.is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.”
Everyone is available, is susceptible, to the spell of a story. That is one reason critics have generally found it unworthy of study; Lewis observed that the more story predominates a book, the less intellectuals think of it. The appetite for and appreciation of story requires no training or cultivation…. But it is potent. The word “spell” as Tolkein mentions, once meant “Both a story told and a formula of power over living men.” Where does this power come from and what is it made of? Tolkein thought that to ask this question was to speculate about the very origins of language and the mind.

"Most romance*, however, belongs to the youth and speaks to the desire to get out in the world and prove oneself, which may be why the form proliferates most luxuriantly and in some of its purest strains in children's fiction. I knew as a little girl that there were really two kinds of readers: those who liked 'Little Women' and those who preferred 'The Phantom Tollbooth', but it wasn't until I learned to think like a critic that I understood exactly where the difference lies; 'Little Women' is a novel, 'The Phantom Tollbooth' is a romance. 'Little House on the Prarie' is a novel, 'The Wizard of Oz' is a romance.... 'Island of the Blue Dolphins' main character's journey from helpless child to self sufficient adult, a destination reached via a series of often desperate but also exhilirating adventures, makes it a kind of romance, the romance of survival."
* romance in the 19th century novel genre, not how used today. ( )

I made the mistake of checking this book out of the library, renewing it twice, and not delving into until just before it is due. I rather like what I read and want to add it to our Inklings library in more permnet manner. The Narnia series is for all time, and I only discovered it as an adult. But Narnia's appeal is to many religious people of very dfferent stripes, and also to the non-religious as this author shows. ( )

I'd be willing to wager that most readers who prowl these pages fell under the spell of words at an early age, finding both enchantment and release in their power to transport us to a different world. Laura Miller can trace her own bespellment to a particular book, and even a particular moment: the day that her second-grade teacher handed her a copy of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. From that day on, visiting Narnia was something she felt she had to do or die. It's an experience that many of us who encountered Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia in childhood share--I certainly did.

Many may also relate to Miller's painful awakening some years later, when she found out that Lewis had planted Christian themes and motifs in his seven children's books. Raised Catholic but thoroughly disillusioned with the Church, Miller felt betrayed by this intrusion of strangulating doctrine into a world she had considered completely free. She turned away from the Chronicles for many years, until, having become a journalist and critic herself (she is a cofounder of Salon.com), she felt the need to revisit and reconsider a book that, however flawed, indelibly affected her identity as a reader.

The Magician's Book is the result, ranging through the realms of memoir, biography, literary criticism, and a bit of social and political history to explore the mystery of Narnia's compelling hold on the imagination, even for those who do not share Lewis's religious agenda. Miller purposely gives little space to the Christian elements in the Chronicles, which have been exhaustively covered elsewhere. Instead, along with the narrative of her own journey through, away from, and back to Narnia, she explores the roots of Lewis's imagination in landscape, relationships (most importantly his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien), and especially his own life as a reader. She considers those aspects of Narnia which have been labelled sexist and racist, as well as those that make it so enduringly compelling.

As is appropriate in a book devoted to Lewis, a master craftsman of English prose, Miller's own writing is lucid, graceful, and a pleasure to read. She covers a vast amount of territory with ease, skillfully transitioning from one aspect of the Chronicles to the next, and from her personal experiences to a more objective critical view. By drawing on her correspondence and interviews with other readers, including Neil Gaiman, Susannah Clarke, and Jonathan Franzen, she widens the field even further. Anti-Narnians Philip Pullman and John Goldthwaite are also given a hearing.

The particular pleasures of reading in childhood are brief, but indelible for those who have experienced them. Laura Miller's book is a rare opportunity to revisit them with the eyes of an adult, gaining the insights of maturity, while fully respecting the reality and validity of the child's perspective. Her portrait of C.S. Lewis is equally balanced and insightful, giving welcome critical consideration to a remarkable man who has all too often been either white-washed by his partisans or demonized by his detractors.

If you have ever opened the door of a wardrobe with a secret hope of finding something there besides coats and mothballs, do open The Magician's Book. You may find that that elusive magical country is closer than you think.

Originally posted on The Emerald City Book Review
emeraldcitybookreview.blogspot.com ( )