I was reading this book on a Brooklyn-bound F train one evening, and could tell that a man a few seats over was staring at the cover. He scrambled for a pen and wrote the title down on the paper shopping bag he was carrying, then stood up at the next stop and stood in front of me and asked what this book was about, how it was, if I’d read the Narnia books, said he loved them. His interest and enthusiasm made me smile, and it was one of those great subway moments, where even heading home with a sore throat and a foggy head, I was glad to be living in this city and not anywhere else.
As for the Narnia books: I read all of them as a child, and thought The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was especially magical and wonderful, but it wasn’t one of the books I read over and over and over again, like A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, or Harriet the Spy. Laura Miller’s experience was different: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was her first literary love, and that’s what this book is about: love, and also disillusionment, and then a reconsideration, an attempt to find some of that old wonder again. It’s conversational and smart and really satisfying.
Miller describes her relationship to Narnia as “a story of enchantment, betrayal, estrangement, and reunion,” which seems a promising start: her own language captures the magic of reading (p 3). A page later, she writes of reading as escape, the idea that books can let us leave this world for “another, better one, a world fresher, more brightly colored, more exhilarating, more fully felt” (p 4). But she doesn’t see the Narnia books as escapist, or if they are, they’re no more so than any other story. She writes of why she loved the book and its sequels:
The youngest part of my child self loved Narnia’s talking animals. The girl I was fast growing into fiercely seized upon the idea of possessing an entire, secret world of my own. And the seeds of the adult I would become reveled in the autonomy of Lewis’s child heroes and the adventures that awaited them once they escaped the wearying bonds of grown-up supervision. (p 25)
She goes on to discuss each of these elements in greater detail in the next several chapters, beginning with the talking animals. And then comes the middle section of the book, “Trouble in Paradise,” in which Miller grows up a bit and feels betrayed by her childhood loves: not only by Lewis’s Christian symbolism, but also by what some see as his sexism, his elitism, and his mistrust of foreigners (which she discusses in the totally great chapter “Garlic and Onions”). I like the way Miller writes about the multiplicity of readings and meanings, and her point that more than one reading can be valid:
[…] the child readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who do not recognize its parallels to the biblical story 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 out all the details, figured out which ones match a pattern we’ve observed before, and discarded the rest. (p 89)
This, coupled with the idea of “the other way in,” the idea that if we can’t regain innocence, we can gain grace through knowledge, leads to the final section of the book, about Miller’s decision “to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read” (175). Sometimes the way Miller recounts conversations with people like Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and Susanna Clarke feels stilted, but mostly I’m pleased by the presence of these other readers and writers in Miller’s book; I’m also especially pleased by the start of the final section, the discussion of Narnia-as-place, the consideration of its landscapes and the landscapes that might have inspired it, or might remind readers of it.
(edited to add: This book was on my to-read list anyhow, so I was delighted to get a free copy of it via goodreads!)
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