Laura Miller Read online

  Copyright © 2008 by Laura Miller

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: December 2008

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04026-6

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Order of the Chronicles of Narnia

  Part One: Songs of Innocence

  Chapter One: The Light in the Forest

  Chapter Two: Animal-Land

  Chapter Three: The Secret Garden

  Chapter Four: Boxcar Children

  Chapter Five: Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Chapter Six: Little House in the Big Woods

  Chapter Seven: Through the Looking-Glass

  Part Two: Trouble in Paradise

  Chapter Eight: Forests and Trees

  Chapter Nine: The Awful Truth

  Chapter Ten: Required Reading

  Chapter Eleven: Garlic and Onions

  Chapter Twelve: Girl Trouble

  Chapter Thirteen: Blood Will Out

  Chapter Fourteen: Arrows of Desire

  Chapter Fifteen: The Other Way In

  Part Three: Songs of Experience

  Chapter Sixteen: Castlereagh Hills

  Chapter Seventeen: The Far Country

  Chapter Eighteen: Northern Lights

  Chapter Nineteen: The Builder and the Dreamer

  Chapter Twenty: The Second Love

  Chapter Twenty-one: Marvelous Journeys

  Chapter Twenty-two: A Too-Impressionable Man

  Chapter Twenty-three: The Old Religion

  Chapter Twenty-four: Riches All About You

  Chapter Twenty-five: The Third Road

  Chapter Twenty-six: A Formula of Power over Living Men

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Further Up and Further In

  Acknowledgments

  For Wilanne Belden

  On the next page she came to a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit.” The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I’ll read it over again.”

  But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn’t turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.

  “Oh, what a shame!” said Lucy. “I do so want to read it again. Well, at least I must remember it. Let’s see … it was about … about … oh dear, it’s all fading away again. And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill. I know that much. But I can’t remember and what shall I do?”

  And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.

  — C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

  Introduction

  In one of the most vivid memories from my childhood, nothing happens. On a clear, sunny day, I’m standing near a curb in the quiet suburban California neighborhood where my family lives, and I’m wishing, with every bit of my self, for two things. First, I want a place I’ve read about in a book to really exist, and second, I want to be able to go there. I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me. For the rest of my life, I will never want anything quite so much again.

  The place I longed to visit was Narnia, the setting for a series of children’s novels by C. S. Lewis. There are things about these books that I, at age nine, did not yet understand and did not even realize were there to be understood. My relationship to Narnia would turn out to be as rocky as any love affair, a story of enchantment, betrayal, estrangement, and reunion. A few years after the day I’m remembering, when I discovered some of the more obvious “secret” meanings in C. S. Lewis’s children’s books, I felt tricked, and for a long time I avoided even thinking about Narnia.

  Eventually, warily, after I became someone who reads books and writes about them for a living, I decided to revisit the Chronicles of Narnia. I was thinking about origins. I’d been given an assignment: describe the single book that had most influenced me, that had changed my life. I could have written about Jane Eyre, the first “grown up” novel with which I fiercely identified as a teenager, or Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first literary monument that was made to breathe and bleed and yield up its splendor to me by a gifted professor. That’s the sort of title most writers would choose when presented with this question. If you’ve ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with so much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you’re even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly — or the ones we’d most like other people to think we read over and over again.

  I vowed to be scrupulously honest about this assignment, and that meant acknowledging that the most momentous passage in my reading life came when I was in second grade. A teacher I idolized handed me a copy — her copy — of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was this book that made a reader out of me. It showed me how I could tumble through a hole in the world I knew and into another, better one, a world fresher, more brightly colored, more exhilarating, more fully felt than my own. This revelation really did make a new person out of me. I reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its six sequels countless times. I became one of those children who haunt libraries, checking out the maximum number of titles every week, scouring the shelves for signs that this one or that one would spirit me away to a place almost as marvelous as Narnia. I was notorious at school for sneaking a library book into my lap during class and becoming so mesmerized by it that I wouldn’t hear the teacher when she called my name. I read through recess and lunch hours, deaf and blind to whatever was going on around me.

  This aspect of my story isn’t unusual, although I did have the good fortune to find a way to make a living writing about books. Still, being a literary critic isn’t really very much like being a ten-year-old girl, dead to the world in the corner of a playground as she turns the pages of The Dark Is Rising. A critic has to write as well as read, and while the process of writing about a book can reveal things you’d never get from simply reading it, it can also make reading a less immediate and visceral experience. I began the long task of learning how to read in this new way not long after I first discovered Narnia.

  A lot of people remember the bliss of their earliest reading with a pang; their current encounters with books offer no more than faint echoes of what they once felt
. I’ve heard friends and strangers talk about the days when they, too, would submerge themselves in a story, surfacing only to eat and deal with the minimal daily business of childhood. They wonder why they don’t get as much out of books now. If you dig deep to the roots of what makes someone a reader, you’ll usually find the desire to recapture that old spell. But as we get older we acquire another set of reasons for picking up a book: because reading is “good for you,” for example, or because it was assigned by a teacher. People read to fend off the boredom of long flights, to find out what kinds of books get published nowadays, to stay abreast of what’s new, to catch up on what they should have learned in school, to hold their own at a cocktail party, to be able to say they’ve read Moby Dick.

  No wonder we pine for the days when we read only for ourselves. Many years after I first opened The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I learned that C. S. Lewis, too, was a literary critic, and that he, too, was interested in readerly pleasure. He had the eccentric notion that the delight people take in a book might give us some clue as to its worth. In a slender volume entitled An Experiment in Criticism, one of the best books about reading I have ever found, Lewis suggested that the literary preferences of children are significant because “children are indifferent to literary fashions. What we see in them is not a specifically childish taste, but simply a normal and perennial human taste, temporarily atrophied in their elders by a fashion.”

  But the schism between childhood and adult reading can’t be entirely written off to vanity and trendiness. Although I miss the childhood experience of being engulfed by a story, I would not willingly surrender my adult ability to recognize when a writer is taking me someplace I don’t want to go. In my early teens, I discovered what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism and that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers a parallel account of the Passion of Christ. I’d been raised as a Catholic, but what faith I’d had was never based on anything more than the fact that children tend to believe whatever adults tell them. As soon as I acquired any independence of thought, I drifted away from the Church and what I saw as its endless proscriptions and requirements, its guilt-mongering and tedious rituals.

  So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the Church in disguise. I looked back at my favorite book and found it appallingly transfigured. Of course, the self-sacrifice of Aslan to compensate for the treachery of Edmund was exactly like the crucifixion of Christ to pay off the sins of mankind! How could I have missed that? I felt angry and humiliated because I had been fooled.

  Part of the purpose of learning to read critically is to alert us to an author’s hidden intentions and unconscious biases. Once you realize that a good story has the power to deceive you, it’s impossible to wholeheartedly embrace the ignorance that is always a part of innocence. I was sorry, very sorry, to lose Narnia, but I always would have chosen to know the truth.

  For reasons like these, most of us, somewhere along the line, are taught to read with an intellectual distance. At school, we graduate from simple book reports to writing essays in which we’re expected to ferret out the symbols and themes of stories we once might have believed to be the stuff of actual life. We learn who authors are and how to detect what they’re really up to. But that’s not the end of the judgments we learn to apply. Later still, we will realize that some books are in better taste than others, and that our own favorites might not number among the acknowledged best.

  The critic Clive James has written with chagrin of what he eloquently calls “the radiant books of our youth”; his boyhood enthusiasm for Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction embarrasses him now. Fifty years later, he still remembers the “heft” of a volume entitled The Complete Professor Challenger Stories — remembers it so clearly, in fact, that he thinks of it every time he picks up a book of the same weight. Yet when James reads Doyle now, he finds only a rummage sale of callow, long-discarded fantasies, “superseded daydreams of glamour, sex, bravery and deductive brilliance,” which “are always funny when they are not shameful.”

  The novelist Graham Greene is another who marveled at the now-alien world of his boyhood reading. “Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives,” he wrote. “In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already… . But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future.” The books we happen to latch onto as children help to furnish our imagination and, to a certain degree, our identity. But if we return to them as adults, we sometimes find, as Clive James did, that the décor is garish or uncomfortable. It’s not a place to which we’d care to invite our friends.

  Ever since I reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for that assignment over a decade ago, the Chronicles of Narnia have presented me with a puzzle, one that would eventually prompt me to write this book. When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this, I am not like Clive James; the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulity that Greene describes. Then again, I am like James in that I’m sometimes dismayed by the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of the Chronicles’ author, and in a way I am also like Greene, in that I reread these books partly to find what is already in my mind. Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough.

  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 and scholars who pay any kind of sustained attention to Lewis’s work are Christians themselves, and their faith is the motivation for that 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 Chronicles are merely religious “allegory” (the term most often — and erroneously — used to describe them in the general-interest press) and about as interesting to the nonbeliever as a cruise ship sales brochure is to a man determined never to leave dry land.

  Besides, the Chronicles are children’s fiction. They belong to a class of literature that, in the opinion of many, doesn’t merit serious critical consideration. I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for. Nevertheless, I go on thinking that there is something significant in the Chronicles of Narnia, something more or less apart from their thinly concealed theological messages. I’m unwilling to resign myself to accepting a fathomless gap in the early part of my life, between the reader I was as a child and the reader I am now.

  Lewis himself liked to read children’s books occasionally, both the ones he’d loved as a child growing up in Ireland in the early twentieth century, and others that he discovered later; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was a particular favorite. “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story,” he once remarked. Lewis was an Oxford don, a bachelor pushing fifty who had very little real-world experience with children, when he wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Unlike his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who told an early version of The Hobbit to his children, Lewis had to rely on memories of his own childhood tastes while writing his books. Evidently, those memories lay close to hand; his facility at writing for children has ever since offered his biographers cause to describe him as a man who never entirely grew up.

>   Lewis always maintained that he chose to write a “fairy tale” because he had something to say which could only be expressed in this way. He didn’t offer much detail as to what that something was, but he did once write that he had fallen in love “with the form itself: its brevity; its severe restraints on description; its flexible traditionalism; its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and ‘gas.’” To my mind, these are all ways of describing one variety of good writing, whether for adults or children, and when the Chronicles are well written — which is often — the quality is not age-dependent. Lewis, however, would have found nothing remarkable in this fact, for he also insisted that “fairy tales” (a term he used to include writings that we’d call “fantasy” today) were not meant only for children. Although the Chronicles were patently intended for young readers, they partake of literary traditions that are as old as the act of storytelling itself.

  There is yet another reason to devote the kind of attention to the Chronicles that critics ordinarily reserve for the works of writers like Flaubert or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it may be the most persuasive of all. In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis floats the idea that we can determine how good a book is by how it is read. This was an offbeat notion at a time when most critics judged a book by how it was written, and it would become an irrelevant one a few years later, when deciding how “good” a book was would seem immaterial to most academics. But Lewis — who was, above all else, a passionate, omnivorous, and generous reader — thought that this might be the best way to appreciate a book’s worth, especially since he regarded the literary mandarins of his day as slaves to pernicious intellectual fads.

  A hater of progress, newfanglement, and vulgarity, Lewis was not a notably tolerant man, but reading brought out the populist in him. He worked out a set of criteria for identifying truly “literary” readers; their ranks include people who reread books, those who savor what they read for more than just the plot, and those for whom the first encounter with a favorite book is an “experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.”