Narnia
Shelly and I have been reading The Chronicles of Nania aloud to each other for the past few weeks, so it was with interest that I read a review of Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia.
From the NY Times:
“If the Chronicles had worked according to Lewis’s plans,” Miller writes, “and in the way many of his Christian admirers believe them to, I would have reassessed my attitude toward my religion. I would have realized that Narnia and Aslan represented another face of Christianity, a better one than the Church had ever shown me, and that in turn would lead me back to the faith. ‘This was the reason you were brought to Narnia,’ Aslan explains to Edmund and Lucy . . . in a scene whose heavy-handed imagery (a lamb, a meal of fish) had gone utterly over my head, ‘that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.’ ”
Miller goes on: “Can a book win over a soul who is fundamentally disinclined to believe? If any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these, yet I didn’t budge.” Miller defines herself as a soul instead of a child, a reader. I can’t help wondering: Could it be that a reader can grow a sense of a soul by reading, even if one rejects the religious aspect of such a fanciful figure as a soul? [...]
“The author who can make a world for a reader — make him believe that the people, places and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real immediate surroundings — that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it?
