Laura Miller

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

  At first, I searched for loopholes, but the Catholic Church had had almost two thousand years to anticipate this very tactic, and my eight-year-old’s ingenuity was overmatched. I was impressed to learn that the Church had already worked out a policy on sins that were interrupted by forces beyond the sinner’s control (guilty!). Doctrine, surprisingly enough, turned out to be much more vulnerable to full-frontal attacks on its moral legitimacy. The fate allotted to newborn babies and other blameless people who die without the chance to be baptized turned out to be the ideal test case for my personal campaign to invalidate the authority of the Church. Why, I demanded of the nun teaching our catechism class, should innocents be condemned to Limbo simply because of an accident of birth or misfortune?

  On the day we discussed the exclusion of unbaptized babies from heaven, I was only one among several children who protested. The nun replied with a boilerplate defense of the sacraments; these were the rituals that God required, administered by the one true Church, for the eternal salvation of our souls. But, we replied, he was God, wasn’t he, and if he couldn’t be expected to make exceptions to his own laws, couldn’t he have come up with a system that wasn’t so manifestly unfair?

  There was a whiff of desperate improvisation in the whole idea of Limbo, I remember thinking. It had so obviously been cooked up as an afterthought because someone hadn’t properly worked through the baptism rule. Limbo was a quick and dirty fix, and if God really were responsible for this mess, he could hardly be as wise or as loving as the Church made him out to be. On the other hand, if (as seemed likely) it was really human beings who’d come up with the sacrament system, then who was to say that human beings hadn’t invented all of Catholic doctrine?

  Skepticism, like faith, is more a matter of temperament than indoctrination. Any one of a half-dozen serious flaws in any theological worldview can undermine the beliefs of someone who doesn’t much want to believe in the first place. (One man I know says his moment of disillusionment came when he looked at a map depicting the distribution of all the world’s religions and realized that which one you belonged to depends more on where you were born than on the irresistibility of divine revelation.) On the day we discussed Limbo in catechism, I was already looking for an out. The sacrifice of Jesus had not impressed me as especially meaningful or moving. The tedium of Sunday Mass had not become any more endurable with age and an English liturgy. I hated church. I bridled at the ritual of confession and was suspicious of the idea of original sin. Above all, I was bored by all the stories of men in beards and sandals endlessly gabbing on about mustard seeds, fishes, and vineyards.

  In short, I was a lot like Lewis as a child, and in more ways than one. He disliked the trappings of his father’s faith, but he also resisted it out of what he later called “my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness.” We are each the product of different nations and historical moments, however. The individualism Lewis calls “monstrous” is a quality Americans admire, and no more so than in the 1960s and ’70s, when I was a kid. I grew up with a lot of ambient encouragement to rebel against authority, and with few incentives to reconcile myself to a hidebound institution like the Catholic Church.

  While the Narnians’ obedience to Aslan irks some adult readers, for me it was essentially different from the docility demanded by the Church. First and foremost it wasn’t founded on self-denial. The Narnians did as Aslan asked because he was strong, kind, warm, and lovable, and because his requests always led to that most desirable of ends: the continuation of Narnia as it should be, the most wonderful country imaginable. Christianity instructed me to comply with a list of dreary, legalistic demands because Jesus, whom I had never met, reportedly loved me and had redeemed me from the guilt of a sin I had never committed by dying before I was even born. The proof of his love was his suffering; I owed him, and he expected to be paid in kind. Narnia and Aslan made me happy. Jesus wanted me to be miserable.

  Perhaps most important, however, I shared with Lewis the bookish child’s stubborn insistence on retaining some ultimate privacy. I did not take kindly to being told how to think and feel in my deepest self; the order to love God whether I liked him or not made me dig in my heels. Wrote Lewis, “I wanted some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, ‘This is my business and mine only.’” For me that sanctum was Narnia, and Narnia was so incompatible with my understanding of Christianity that it never would have occurred to me to connect the two.

  Narnia was the transport Lucy experiences when Mr. Beaver first mentions Aslan’s name, “the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.” Narnia was liberation and delight. Christianity was boredom, subjugation, and reproach. For all the similarities between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the New Testament, and for all Lewis’s evangelical intentions, I don’t think I was that grievously mistaken. The Christianity that I knew — the only Christianity I was aware of — was the opposite of Narnia in both aesthetics and spirit. More than just opposite, really, since the Church was a major part of the lackluster world I sought refuge from in Lewis’s books. For me, Narnia was Christianity’s antidote.

  Chapter Nine

  The Awful Truth

  By the time I turned thirteen, I’d become pretty adept at searching out my kind of book — the ones “with magic” — at the local branch library. An enormous, musty-smelling used bookstore downtown, the shrine at the end of an hour-long pilgrimage by bus, had a more promising selection, but it was less organized and more difficult to plumb. I was always on the lookout for clues that might lead me to further treasure.

  On my own, I’d discovered Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Cheap paperbacks with dragons and unicorns printed on their covers began to appear on the racks at our neighborhood newsstand. Among them I found a book with a strange cover illustration. Against a background of leaves and flowers was an opening shaped like a woman’s head and neck, revealing a vista with a castle, a knight in armor crossing a bridge, and a unicorn. The unicorn and the arch of the bridge formed the woman’s eyes, a butterfly was her nose, and for a mouth she had … a mouth, floating in midair. The picture was both pretty and creepy, evocative of the alarming hallucinatory art of the hippies who had settled in our beachside neighborhood. The book was called Imaginary Worlds.

  Lin Carter, author of Imaginary Worlds, was a novelist who served as editorial consultant for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, the publishing imprint responsible for most of the dragon- and unicorn-bedecked paperbacks I’d seen at the local newsstand. But Imaginary Worlds was not itself a novel; it was a history of fantasy, a genre that had only just been so identified, on the heels of the success of The Lord of the Rings. Carter, one of those inexhaustible autodidacts who flourish at the margins of American culture, wanted to inform all the bright-eyed, Johnny-come-lately Tolkien buffs that a long tradition of “imaginary-world romance” had preceded the Oxford professor’s trilogy; Ballantine hoped to capitalize on their hunger for more.

  Imaginary Worlds was the first literary criticism I ever read. It was exciting to learn that a label had been devised for the sort of stories I liked, but Imaginary Worlds left me unsatisfied for a couple of reasons. Carter was not himself a particularly good writer, and he enthused over books that even I could tell were mediocre, notably the sword-and-sorcery pulp genre founded by Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the barbarian. Strangest of all, I had never before had the experience of reading someone else’s calm, equable opinions of stories that felt as though they were written on my own heart.

  People read criticism of works they already know well because they hope to expand their understanding, perhaps even to relive the experience through someone else. Great critics show us new dimensions of a book or a film, but they also articulate what it feels like to encounter the work, a sensation many of us can’t adequately capture on our
own. Imaginary Worlds didn’t do much of either for me. On a less exalted level, however, there’s always the juvenile gratification of seeing a book you love (or hate) being praised (or denounced) by a writer who is swathed in the authority of print, a pleasure I’ve never managed to outgrow even though by now I really ought to know better. I kept reading Imaginary Worlds partly for leads to other books, but also because I wanted to see Lewis and the Chronicles celebrated by someone, a real author, more important than myself.

  What I discovered instead was that Aslan’s death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was really a “blatantly symbolic Crucifixion-and-Resurrection scene,” which Carter deemed “beautifully and simply written” but “very out of place on these pages.” His criticism troubled me less than the revelation itself. Lewis, Carter explained, was famously Christian, a fact I’d somehow managed to miss. I was shocked, almost nauseated. I’d been tricked, cheated, betrayed. I went over the rest of the Chronicles, and in almost every one found some element that lined up with this unwelcome and, to me, ulterior meaning. I felt like a character in one of those surreal, existential 1960s TV dramas, like The Prisoner or The Twilight Zone, a captive who pulls off a daring escape from his cell only to find himself inside another, larger cell identical to the first.

  Here was a moment of truth. If the Chronicles had worked according to Lewis’s plans, and in the way many of his Christian admirers believe them to, I would have reassessed my attitude toward my religion. I would have realized that Narnia and Aslan represented another face of Christianity, a better one than the Church had ever shown me, and that in turn would lead me back to the faith. “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia,” Aslan explains to Edmund and Lucy at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in a scene whose heavy-handed imagery (a lamb, a meal of fish) had gone utterly over my head, “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

  Can a book win over a soul who is fundamentally disinclined to believe? If any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these, yet I didn’t budge. Lewis makes a great deal, in Surprised by Joy, of having been “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” when, in his rooms at Magdalen in 1929, he realized that he really did believe in God, after all. He was, he insists, dragged through that portal “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting [my] eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.”

  This strikes me as a case of protesting too much, for as A. N. Wilson has pointed out, myriad factors in Lewis’s life and environment had long been pushing him back to the Church. Lewis himself half admits as much when he writes, also in Surprised by Joy, that “everything and everyone had joined the other side.” His closest friends were all Christians; the writers he admired were Christians; the medievalism he found so appealing was saturated with the stuff.

  Why the Chronicles didn’t “work” as intended on me is a tricky question. I was, of course, young and on the verge of the most rebellious and discontented stage of life, rather than just settling into a life well suited to me, as Lewis was when he converted. But there is, I believe, more to it than that. I lacked — and still lack — the disposition to believe. Like Lewis, I hankered after the ineffable and the sublime, but the story of Jesus had never spoken to that part of my imagination. Christianity was too monolithic, comprehensive, and established. Temperamentally, I preferred uncertainty, slippery boundaries, little neglected corners of the world where magic lurked unnoticed, and strangeness.

  To me, the universe didn’t require much explaining. Although I wouldn’t read Keats until much later, I was already inclined toward what he called “Negative Capability … capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Unlike Lewis, I hadn’t lost my mother as a child, and I wasn’t left hungering for an enfolding, benevolent protector and redeemer. I didn’t know death and loss well enough to need the reassurance of an afterlife. For these and no doubt other reasons I was and am very different from Lewis; I’ve never found a good reason to believe, while he was a man who ran out of reasons not to.

  If the Chronicles were not going to save Christianity for me, Lewis’s duplicity (as I saw it) was certainly capable of contaminating Narnia. He had hoped that his child readers, as they got older, would eventually come to see Narnia as filled with Christian meaning; perhaps he even hoped that Christianity might be enriched by Narnia’s magic (though he would never have permitted himself the vanity of suggesting as much). Possibly, if my early experiences of the religion had been better, I would have reacted to my discovery of the books’ “secret” significance with no more than a shrug. But for me, Christianity worked like a black hole, sucking all the beauty and wonder out of Narnia the moment the two came into imaginative contact. I was furious, but I was also bereft; I’d lost something infinitely precious to me.

  Lewis was fond of repeating a conversation that he’d once had with Tolkien, on an occasion when they were grumbling about having their literary interests labeled as escapist. “What class of men,” Tolkien asked, “would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?” The response, also provided by Tolkien, was “jailers.” Tolkien, even more than Lewis, thought it was only natural to want to flee a world increasingly dominated by industry, science, capitalism, modernism, and secularism. Religion, for these men, meant hewing to the good old ways.

  I, too, longed for escape, but as I saw it, Christianity was one of the jailers. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seemed to promise another, better world, one that was wild, merry, enchanted, boundless. And when I could no longer kid myself that Narnia actually existed, it remained the province of my imagination where I felt the most free. What Lin Carter told me about Aslan and Jesus ruined even that.

  I recently ordered a used copy of Imaginary Worlds online, and when the book arrived, I had to look twice at its publication date. There’s no possibility that I could have read the book before my thirteenth birthday. Had it really taken me so long to learn the truth? This got me wondering about the readers who’d responded to my Salon essay on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and about the writers I’d met over the years who’d mentioned the Chronicles as an early influence. When had they found out about the Christian symbolism in Narnia, and how did they react?

  One correspondent I’d never forgotten was Pam Marks, who’d written to tell me how much she’d loved the Chronicles when she was growing up in one of the few Jewish families in a small English village in the 1950s. I decided to telephone her to ask how she’d responded to the Christian element in Narnia.

  Pam’s family wasn’t religious, so for her being Jewish meant little more than occasionally feeling like an outsider. “In England,” she told me, “you had to sing Christian songs in school: ‘Away in the manger no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.’ I wasn’t too sure about that, so I asked my mother, and she said, ‘Well, when you come to that part, just don’t say the word “Jesus.”’”

  As Pam saw it, her real problem was not Christians, but her father, “a harsh disciplinarian, very. He believed in obedience. He thought that I had way too much spirit and that he could beat it out of me.” When they were alone together, her mother would tell Pam that she thought the punishments were unjustified, but she never spoke up against them when her husband was around. For Pam, the moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Edmund betrays Lucy by telling Peter and Susan that he hasn’t been to Narnia after all was particularly piercing.

  “I wanted a place where there was fairness and understanding,” she said. “There wasn’t that in my life. It’s not like I had an adult I could go to, getting through that childhood. When a child is mistreated and told that it’s because they’re bad, they’re left to either think that they’re bad or that their parents are extremely cruel and they’re victims. That becomes such a conflict that there becomes a great need to understand the nature of right and wrong, more so than
with other children. And those books really talked about that.”

  “When did you realize that there was a Christian subtext to the books?”

  “When I read The Last Battle, once I understood that line about the stable that was bigger inside than outside. [Lucy makes a remark about a stable “that once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”] That line really upset me.”

  “Did you go back and read the earlier books after that? And did the lightbulb light up then?”

  “I’d already reread them many times, but yes, I did go back, and I saw it completely.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “I felt betrayed. But then, not too long after that, I decided, Well, I don’t really care what he was trying to do there, this is what I get out of it. Those books communicated really deep, why-we-are-here, life-and-death concepts to me. And I think I perceived even then that they were universal symbols. I had a feeling about the characters and about the writing. Even though I’d never read any of it before, it was as if I knew it. The rhythms of the language and the characters, it was as if I knew them all before I read them.”