Laura Miller had a problem. When she was young she was absolutely captivated and enthralled with the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. Given a copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by a school teacher she dove in an entered a new world. Things would never be the same.
But eventually she grew older and began to find out things about Lewis and Narnia that changed her relationship with the series: the Christian underpinnings of the story, Lewis’s world view and political opinions, etc. But as she pursued a career as a literary critic she decided to return to these books and she found there was still much about them that she loved.
The road that had once seemed to lead to free and open country had in reality doubled back to church. Now I was trying to explain why my damning adolescent assessment of Chronicles wasn’t entirely sufficient, either. As an adult, I’d discovered that I could follow Lewis pretty far without feeling obliged to return to Christianity, and that the old sensations of freedom, of wilderness in Narnia, remained.
She sets out to make sense of this journey. The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is her answer in book form.
I guess you would have to put Magician’s Book into the category of creative non-fiction. Good thing too, because otherwise it would be hard to categorize. Part memoir, literary criticism, biography, and current events reporting it frequently slides between childhood memories, academic criticism, Freudian analysis, personal opinion, and interviews with other authors.
Sometimes this manages to flow and hold together in a coherent way and at others the transitions are a little rough. I found the sections dealing with Lewis’s faith and politics were the least convincing – but perhaps that is my bias – but the book as a whole remains an insightful and engaging look at Lewis and Narnia.
