The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

In The Magician's Book, an attractive stew of biography, critical analysis, reader's notes, and fan mail, critic and writer Laura Miller details her lifelong love affair with the seven novels that make up C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. She also tackles Lewis's Christian themes and his perceived racism, sexism, and elitism head-on, writing that the author's religious views "worked like a black hole, sucking all the beauty and wonder out of Narnia." Traveling to England to absorb the landscap

In The Magician's Book, an attractive stew of biography, critical analysis, reader's notes, and fan mail, critic and writer Laura Miller details her lifelong love affair with the seven novels that make up C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. She also tackles Lewis's Christian themes and his perceived racism, sexism, and elitism head-on, writing that the author's religious views "worked like a black hole, sucking all the beauty and wonder out of Narnia." Traveling to England to absorb the landscapes that influenced Lewis and interviewing fellow writers and imagination-movers Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Lethem allowed Miller to gain fresh perspective on Lewis and his work. Despite some repetitious parts, her gift is her ability to reconcile a child's desire to inhabit the worlds of fiction with the responsibilities of the adult world. Above all, Miller reminds readers what it means to fall in love with literature.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would probably know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.