Hello

Welcome to the new website for The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and its author, me, Laura Miller. Chances are, you're admiring the beautiful design for this site, which is the work of that reclusive and mysterious genius, Mignon Khargie. Thank you, Mignon, wherever you are. (And if you'd like to see what Mignon can do without a capricious author bossing her around, visit her web site.)

Only some of what I plan to post here will pertain to C.S. Lewis, Narnia and The Magician's Book. I've been thinking of it as a glorified commonplace book, a catch-all for quotes, stray thoughts and other odds and ends. But we shall see...

Medieval gardens

I decided to take advantage of a spell of balmy weather to visit the Cloisters in uptown Manhattan. This museum of medieval art features several rooms that recreate period chapels and cloisters, embedding authentic architectural fragments in a neo-medieval building.

The Unicorn Tapestries are here, but I'm especially partial to the gardens, which, on the right day, can make you feel as if you've been transported to Italy. Unfortunately, March is way too early for there to be anything but brown, dried-up husks and leaves in the Cloisters' gardens, but in the internal cloisters, the gardeners have done their best to brighten things up with some potted plants.

While waiting for the real spring, you can visit the museum's horticultural blog, The Medieval Garden Enclosed, and read about such pleasant subjects as turf benches, boxwood and books of days. The gardens at the Cloisters are themselves museums; one contains all the plants represented in the Unicorn Tapestries, others exhibit traditional methods of cultivation and herbs.

There's a passage in The Magician's Book about the image of the walled garden in Medieval allegory and, by extension, in the Chronicles of Narnia. Because even the tiniest aspects of the world were regarded as elements of God's plan, Medieval art often depicts everyday flora and fauna, as well as ordinary activities like harvesting and cooking, with reverence and meticulous attention. Hundreds of years later and minus the religion, I still find these images immensely tender and touching.

"Lost" and Narnia

I admit that when a character called Charlotte Staples Lewis turned up on the ABC television series "Lost" last year, I was excited. The puzzle-like show is full of literary references, planted here and there, to give its most cultish fans even more mysteries to investigate. A lot of them are red herrings.

Charlotte, who spent her early girlhood on the mysterious island where most of the action is set, was later exiled to the mainland and told by her mother that she'd imagined the whole experience. That allusion to Lucy's first visits to Narnia, as well as the fact that time is inconsistent between the island and the mainland, appeared to be the only real similarities between "Lost" and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." It almost didn't seem worth remarking on them here.

But now that the final season of the series has started, the resemblance has become more striking. Jacob, the ostensibly benevolent presiding authority of the island, has been killed, not by his age-old adversary, the Man in Black (AKA, the "smoke monster"), but by the merely human Ben, an inveterate schemer who the Man goaded into stabbing Jacob because, for all his powers, he was unable to do it himself.

Ben had developed the same set of complaints about Jacob that my friend Lev Grossman has voiced against Aslan in the Chronicles: If he is so powerful and beneficent, why has he allowed so many terrible things to happen? (This line of thought is known as theodicy.) The Man convinces Ben that he has been slighted and abused by Jacob, working him up into a homicidal (or theocidal) rage.

In this season's premiere, Jacob appeared to another character, the likable Hurley, explaining that he's already been killed and making Hurley promise to perform a difficult task.

The conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black, like that between Aslan and the White Witch, is governed by rules that they, for all their powers, are not able to violate. Their key moves against each other are carried out by human beings. The Man is able to manipulate Ben's resentment in the same way the Witch takes advantage of Edmund's jealousy of Peter. "What about me?" Ben asks of Jacob at the fatal moment. "What about you?" Jacob answers, which is a just the sort of thing Aslan says to the children when they're being whiney or self-centered.

The producers of "Lost" have pointed to Stephen King's pop epic, "The Stand," as an important influence on the series. That novel and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" have a similar theme -- supernatural forces of good and evil duking it out via human intermediaries. At the moment, though, the resemblance to Lewis' book seems even more pronounced than the resemblance to King's.

Beware of ghost trains

Yesterday I took Desmond and Nini to MOMA, where they seemed underwhelmed by everything except the promos for the Tim Burton exhibit (which was sold out). However, our journey uptown was not without event. Instead of the D train we were waiting for, a strange train of what looked like ordinary subway cars, minus the windows, drove without stopping through the station. I told them that this was a ghost train, taken only by ghosts.

Laura: Ghost trains don't stop at the regular stations.

Nini: No, they only stop at haunted stations, at bridges and tunnels.

Laura: True.

Nini: Where are the ghosts on the ghost train going?

Laura: I don't know.

Nini: Probably to a party, a big party with cake.

Laura: Do ghosts eat cake? I didn't think ghosts could eat food.

Desmond: It's ghost food. Probably cake that somebody else has already eaten

...

Nini : I want you to promise me something.

Laura: What is it?

Nini: If you go into a subway station, and a ghost train pulls in, I want you to promise me you will NOT get on it.

Laura: All right, I promise I won't get on a ghost train.

Nini: Not even if the doors are wide open?

Laura: Not even then.

Patti Smith and Louisa May Alcott

I recently reviewed a new memoir by the rock singer and poet Patti Smith, and found in it this passage about a surprising influence in her childhood:

I drew comfort from my books. Oddly enough, it was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny. Jo, the tomboy of the four March sisters in Little Women writes to help support her family, struggling to make ends meet during the Civil War. She fills page after page with her rebellious scrawl, later publishing in the literary pages of the local newspaper. She gave me the courage of a new goal, and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister. From that time on, I cherished the idea that one day I would write a book.

A few readers have asked me about my girlhood antipathy for Little Women. I've never entirely gotten over it, I'm sorry to say, and for some reason all I managed to take away from the novel was the sweet, passive, self-abnegating ideal of Victorian womanhood that I found so irksome. I knew Jo was meant to be an alternative, but she was never quite enough for me. Partly, I think, I had a hankering for journeys and I just didn't like the fact that the Marches were stuck in the house.

Nevertheless, I always like to hear about how other children responded very differently to it. It's a reminder of how a book is re-imagined every time a new reader (or the same reader at a different age) reads it. If Little Women inspired a woman as original and fearless as Patti Smith, then obviously there was more to it than met my 10-year-old eye.

A radio interview about The Magician's Book

I very much enjoyed doing an hour-long radio interview with Doug Fabrizio on the University of Utah's public radio station, KUER, on a show called Radio West. It was fantastic getting the chance to talk about Narnia in so much depth with such an informed interviewer.

The link will be retired in about 6 months, so if you'd like to listen, grab it now.

The Magician's Book makes the New Yorker's best-of list

An early Christmas treat came in the mail earlier this week, when I learned that the New Yorker selected The Magician's Book as one of it's favorite titles of 2009. (Technically, it was a 2008 book, but it came out in December and as a result missed the cut-off.) You can see the whole list here.

While I'm at it, if you'd like to hear me (plus David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times and Carol Besse, co-owner of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky) talking about the best books of 2009 on the public radio call-in show, "On Point," you'll want to follow this link.

The paperback of The Magician's Book is out

I haven't posted anything here in ages, mostly because I've been writing more for Salon, where I've been doing commentary about such subjects as the viability of collective storytelling via Twitter and vanity book awards.

However, I just received a copy of the paperback of The Magician's Book, which is just as beautiful as the hardcover (yet lighter, and an excellent Christmas gift, I might add!). It includes the Q&A that I did with my Salon colleague Rebecca Traister and one of those suggested question lists for reading groups. (I can't quite figure those out. If you can't think of anything to say about the book you've just read, why be in a book club?)

Someone recently asked how the reality of publishing the book compared to my expectations, and I had to think hard. I have a more realistic sense of the sausage-making than most authors because of my day job, so everything good that happened seemed miraculous and I had few illusions to lose. Still, you never know how actual readers are going to respond, and a couple of things seem worthy of note.

First, by far the most common response was an impulse to share childhood reading experiences with me. This was a bit of a surprise, since I tend to think of the book as more literary criticism than memoir. Nevertheless, the first-person element was the book's center for many people. Suddenly, total strangers were confiding in me, and I wasn't prepared for that! Soon, though, it became one of the nicest things about doing publicity.

Second, I had anticipated more and fiercer objections from C.S. Lewis's Christian admirers. True, a few did accuse me of "hating" or being the enemy of Christians and Christianity, but far more of the Christians who read The Magician's Book approached it with open and curious minds. I had thoughtful, respectful, enlightening conversations about religion with several believers, a reminder that the fiery ad hominem debates we hear so much about these days are just that -- the ones we hear about, not the only ones that are going on. I was especially pleased by all the Christian readers who said something along the lines of, "I don't feel the same way you do about the religious element of the Chronicles, but your descriptions of the other things you loved about them resonated for me and made the book well worth reading." That's how I feel about the Chronicles themselves.

One thing I don't seem to have communicated well enough was my adult understanding of Christianity. I didn't want The Magician's Book to be about religion, since there are scores of books about that aspect of Narnia, and to be honest, as a nonbeliever the subject doesn't interest me that much. It was really only my understanding of Christianity as an adolescent that significantly affected how I felt about Narnia, so that's all I wrote about. The result is a snapshot, frozen in time, of attitudes I'd eventually grow out of. I went out into the world, read a lot of literary masterworks grappling with Christian themes, learned about the many permutations of the religion and above all met Christians who really did try to live by the values espoused by Christ (one college roommate in particular -- Nancy Billica, where are you?), so I do grasp that the version of the faith I was raised with is not all there is to it.

I can indeed see the good aspects of Christianity, and certainly don't hate the religion or regard it as an enemy, even if the fundamentalist strain fosters a lot of injustice. As much as I might admire some versions of the faith, however, I still don't believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, which is pretty much of a deal-breaker as I understand things. I doubt that a person embraces a religion through reasoning or by running down a checklist of its good and bad qualities, anyway. You don't decide to believe; rather, people believe first and come up with a rationale for it after the fact. Having read a lot about Lewis's own conversion, I'm convinced that's what happened with him, whatever he might have told himself (and the world) to the contrary.

E. Nesbit and A.S. Byatt

I'm currently reading A.S. Byatt's new novel, The Children's Book. It's based on the life of E. Nesbit (not, as some have claimed -- presumably out of ignorance -- Beatrix Potter), who was one of the primary influences on C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. Nesbit invented the sort of children's story where several siblings embark on a series of adventures (magical or not) free of adult interference. Edward Eager's children's novels (Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, etc.) were patterned after such Nesbit classics as Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet, books that Lewis read as a child and adored. The humor in the Chronicles, and particularly the ever-changing relationships among the Pevensie children, owe a lot to Nesbit.

I wrote a long passage about Nesbit's style and its influence on Lewis, ultimately cut from The Magician's Book, but posted here. It's curious that the two of the writers who affected Lewis most profoundly, Nesbit and William Morris, were both socialists, and irreligious. Nesbit was a co-founder of the utopian Fabian movement and had an open marriage with her first husband, raising his mistress's children as her own. I've only just begun The Children's Book, but so far it depicts the social and creative climate at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a time that produced some of the best children's fiction ever. The characters are deeply interested in fairy tales and folklore, as well as handcrafts and communalism, all aspects of Morris' call for a return to pre-modern ways of life. (Morris felt that a piece of pottery on which you could see the potter's thumbprint was infinitely more beautiful than the perfect china products of industrial manufacturing -- an eccentric opinion at the time, but fairly common now.) Anyone fond of the children's fiction of that time will likely find The Children's Book fascinating.

Home-schooling the twins

Readers of The Magician's Book may be interested to read this article, by my good friend Andrew O'Hehir, who is also the father of Desmond and Nini (Corinne). Andrew and his wife Leslie are homeschooling the twins, a project they more or less backed into when they decided that the schools in their area place too much emphasis on structured, regimented learning.

Many people are curious about how home-schooling works for families who aren't pursuing it for religious reasons, and Andrew's piece should answer many of their questions. I'm impressed to see how well both kids can read at the age of 5, not to mention humbled by their extensive knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, Indian and Egyptian mythology (anyone else ever heard of Hapy, the god of the Nile? Me neither, but he's the real deal, and the twins can tell you all about him.)

The comfortable reader

Every so often, I'm invited to speak to students about my work and someone asks what's the hardest part of my job. I'm not sure what answer they expect, but they always seem surprised when I say that it can be physically difficult.

Except for a bout with repetitive stress injury a few years back (brought on by bicycling in San Francisco), it's not the writing, but the reading that gets to me. A lot of sitting is never good for your body (I get a surprising amount of reading done on stairmasters and elliptical trainers, by the way), and holding up heavy books at eye level for hours on end is harder on your back and shoulders than most people realize. So is fixing your neck at one angle. Our bodies were meant to move around, and mine tends to complain when I don't.

In my quest for tendonitis-free reading, I've exchanged many emails with the writer Laura Moser, who suffers from chronic shoulder pain that interferes with her work. (Laura wrote this story for Slate about traveling to China in search of affordable treatment.) Currently, she's stacking sofa cushions on her lap and putting a table-top book holder on that to lift books to eye level without using her shoulder. I've been there. I own a few book holders of various degrees of usefulness, including the very handy Book Gem, which I take with me whenever I travel. You can use it to prop up and hold open books of almost any size (excellent for transcribing), yet it's small, collapsible and light.

I found my ideal piece of reading technology, however, in the Levo BookHolder stand, which resembles a music stand with wheels and a heavy iron base (to counterbalance big hardcovers). Most important of all, it is easily and fully adjustable in almost every way; I've learned that changing your position frequently is the sine qua non of marathon reading comfort. You can even use this thing to hold an open book face down while you read it flat on your back, which I suppose could come in handy for some invalids, pregnant women on strict bed rest, and the extremely lazy.

I don't do that. Furthermore, I have no plans to purchase a recliner, something a few friends have suggested. While I want to avoid sore muscles, an aching back, a cricked neck and stiff fingers, there's a limit to just how comfy I want to get when I'm reading -- because then I'll just fall asleep.