One of Lewis' personal qualities particularly resonated with me: "Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life" (p. 42). I wouldn't call myself a "great reader," but I well understand the power and draw of that sort of solitary, imaginative experience. Miller writes,
The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair... The author who can make a world for a reader—make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings—that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? (p. 11)By sketching out the framework of Lewis' upbringing and other life experiences, Miller makes the more disturbing aspects of Narnia—its author's suspicion of female sexuality, his elitism, his casual racism and his dislike of things foreign—seem, if not less repugnant, then certainly more intelligible. And through her discussion of Lewis' literary criticism, particularly his work on the medieval romance, Miller suggests a different way of understanding the form of the Narnia books.
She also helped me see more clearly the delightfully promiscuous way in which Lewis cobbled Narnia together out of elements gleaned from his own favorite books. The fastidious and meticulous Tolkien regarded this practice as shoddy craftsmanship, but it is in fact central to the appeal of the Chronicles. These are books made of books, Miller tells us:
A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. This world is enormous, yet it all fit inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to another world. It goes on forever and ever... (p. 303).In addition to the other pleasures of her own book, Miller does her readers a final kindness by providing us a list of both some of the books that inspired Lewis, and other world-opening books that might appeal to fans of Narnia. What could be more delightful than finishing one wonderful book, only to discover a whole new universe of books to explore?
