Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I picked up Laura Miller's The Magician's Book with high expectations. Fans of Narnia know that Lucy reads a story in Coriakin's book on the Island of the Voices, and this story becomes the standard by which she judges all books. Miller makes the case that each of us book-lovers has a Magician's Book, the one book we read in childhood that impressed itself firmly on our young minds and shaped who we are today. I've blogged about a similar theory, calling it a haunting. Certain books we read as children never leave us. Savoring this splendid conceit for the title, I settled down to enjoy Miller's collection of essays on Narnia and its creator, C. S. Lewis. Within a few pages I was starting to feel uneasy. There were some decent discussions on what it means to be a "bookish child" and why Lewis' Talking Animals are so popular with young readers (it is because children are "immigrants" from the realm of non-language). But after that, the essays steadily declined in quality. Miller's arrogant tone was hard to enjoy; at one point she claims that the Chronicles taught her nothing as a child; she merely recognized "her better self" in them (page 172*). In the section where Miller is discussing herself as a "bookish child," the air of self-congratulation is very off-putting. The book's subtitle -- "A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" -- is rather misleading. The bulk of the essays in this book start with one idea from the Chronicles as a launching point for a discussion of Lewis rather than of Narnia itself. Miller's offhand assumption that A. N. Wilson is Lewis' "most distinguished biographer" is highly suspect; that claim isn't established in the least (page 39*). If distinguished biography consists of taking everything the subject wrote and contradicting it with the biographer's own specious theories, Wilson may indeed be the best at this game. But his work has been roundly denounced as inaccurate, highly conjectural, and even blatantly untrue on several counts by other scholars and people who knew Lewis. Miller betrays her own personal scorn for Lewis as a person in several passages, writing in one chapter that "It was via that late-night talk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 that he'd [Lewis had] converted (or at least that is what he chose to believe)" (page 216*, emphasis mine). I believe Lewis would know the circumstances of his own conversion a little better than a biased critic writing over 70 years later. Miller also admits that she is sure she would not like Lewis if she met him. Approaching an author with a preconceived and personal dislike is no way to start biographical work. This authorial prejudice is yet another problematic element in an already questionable book. Miller's dislike of Lewis seems to stem from her overarching dislike of Christians, whom she insults often. In the introduction, she writes that one area she was just going to "fly over" in this book is Lewis' Christianity (page 14*). If by "fly over" she meant "fly over and drop all the bombs I can," that's an accurate description of her methods. I found her insensitivity and intolerance disturbing. A very mild example of this is on page 126*, where she is writing about a former atheist named Francis S. Collins. She writes that Collins was given Lewis' Mere Christianity by a Methodist minister, taking unfair advantage of Collins who must have been "ripe for the plucking." It's interesting how Miller's invective shows especially when discussing people's conversions to Christianity, as with Lewis' own conversion (see above). A cruder jab is found on pages 166-167*, where Miller writes that sexual sadomasochism and religion are the same thing with different trappings, and that religious people are really just nonsexual sadomasochists looking for that particular relational dynamic. Another issue is Miller's fawning compliments to Philip Pullman, well-known for his vicious and unbalanced criticism of Lewis and especially the Chronicles. There may or may not be merit in Pullman's basic arguments, but his abusive style makes it difficult for an intelligent reader to take him seriously. Flattering him as a man whose "intelligence, curiosity, and good humor" should be emulated is simply transparent propaganda (page 305*). One wonders if there is some literary back-scratching going on. I don't think Miller understands that if all the many things she personally finds offensive -- especially Lewis' Christianity -- were expunged from the Chronicles, Narnia would become the insipid fantasyland of so many modern imitators. If modern readers recreate Narnia in their own image, it will cease to be Narnia. Miller's writing style is of mixed quality; sometimes she puts things very succinctly, but other times the dependent clauses make the prose awkward and difficult to read. I am a professional editor and I found myself trying to fix Miller's sentences in several passages. This carelessness extends to the content as well; for example, she refers to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as a "trilogy" on several occasions (pages 98, 235, 238*). A trilogy is a set of three books that are related in theme but that can stand independently of one another as three individual stories. This is obviously not the case with The Lord of the Rings, which is one story originally published in three volumes because of the cost of paper after the war. The work is most emphatically not a trilogy, and it pains me to see a literary critic misapplying such a basic term. In the end, Miller brings nothing new to the discussion on Lewis and Narnia. She trots out all the usual objections critics make to the Chronicles, and essentially finds new ways to restate them without adding anything original to the literature. Readers searching for scholarly work on Lewis would do better to look to the original sources rather than Miller's lackluster summation. And lay readers who enjoy the Chronicles won't find much insight here. I was looking forward to reviewing this book in response to the publisher's gracious request, but unfortunately it was a great disappointment. Not recommended. *Please note all quotations are taken from the Advance Reader's Copy of the book.