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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
I’m a sucker for literary criticism. I mostly enjoyed the first two thirds of this book, though there were times that it seemed more like Eat, Pray, Love, (a book I utterly despised) than anything the Last Action Hero of Literary Criticism, Harold Bloom would have written. For those who do not know me, I found that . . . off putting.
As a founding member of Salon.com, Miller has had a rare opportunity to talk to authors who have wrestled hard with C. S. Lewis over the years. Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Franzen, and Susanna Clarke all get fawning shout outs through the book. Gaiman’s story The Problem of Susan helped me put my thumb on why, the more I thought about Narnia over the years, the less I liked it.
There are lots of little gems in this text. I have heard rumors of Lewis’s sado-masochism over the years, but this is the first that puts it squarely into his story. I never realized Lewis was Irish, which makes Tolkien’s frustration with him converting from Atheism to High Church make more sense. I was amused to learn that he “repudiated [T.S. Eliot] as ‘a very great evil.’” (224). While I don’t share her sense of betrayal when she realized that Narnia was a Christian allegory, I had a similar moment of anger when I realized just how racist and sexist the text was.
This book was at least as much about Tolkien as it was about Lewis, which made me feel like the book needed a different title (I know authors rarely title their own books, so I try not to hold it against them). Lewis and Tolkien had an intertwined literary life, at least for a while, after all, and I had not realized until I read this book just how frustrated Tolkien was at Lewis for being so darn syncretic.
Then I hit this passage:
“I finally tackled The Lord of the Rings, burning through it over the course of a summer . . . By that point, I recognized that, as much as I liked it, Tolkien’s freakishly prodigious powers of invention could not supply the book with what four years of studying English literature had led me to expect from a great novel. I relished The Lord of the Rings, and have reread it several times since then. I awaited each installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part film version with excitement and even delved into the ‘mythological’ texts collected in The Silmarillion – the province, really, of the hardcore fan, the geek. But by the time I left college I had read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Absalom, Absolom! And Crime and Punishment – to name just three books with related themes – and knew they sounded depths that Tolkien never touched.” (214)
And I’m left open mouthed and grumpy. Miller presents this unprovoked slam on Tolkien as self-evident and worthy of saying. She might even be right, though it is not at all evident to me that that is so. I too had four years of studying English Literature, for what it’s worth. I too have read Hardy, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. I mark a book’s depths by how deep it goes when I think hard about it. I have not reached the depths of any of these.
Miller does not make similar slams on the living authors whose work she evokes (who she might run into at dinner parties and perhaps professionally as a book critic). It’s like she needs to show us that she is A Serious Literary Critic by dissing a seminal text of genre fiction, but she doesn’t have the cojones to do it to someone she might need to interview some day.
That passage and similar ones (she takes the time to compare Tolkien’s characters unfavorably to Jane Eyre and his style unfavorably to Lolita, for example) really soured me on this book. It’s like she really needs to make sure I know she’s not a fellow geek and has contempt for my tribe. Good to know.
As a founding member of Salon.com, Miller has had a rare opportunity to talk to authors who have wrestled hard with C. S. Lewis over the years. Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Franzen, and Susanna Clarke all get fawning shout outs through the book. Gaiman’s story The Problem of Susan helped me put my thumb on why, the more I thought about Narnia over the years, the less I liked it.
There are lots of little gems in this text. I have heard rumors of Lewis’s sado-masochism over the years, but this is the first that puts it squarely into his story. I never realized Lewis was Irish, which makes Tolkien’s frustration with him converting from Atheism to High Church make more sense. I was amused to learn that he “repudiated [T.S. Eliot] as ‘a very great evil.’” (224). While I don’t share her sense of betrayal when she realized that Narnia was a Christian allegory, I had a similar moment of anger when I realized just how racist and sexist the text was.
This book was at least as much about Tolkien as it was about Lewis, which made me feel like the book needed a different title (I know authors rarely title their own books, so I try not to hold it against them). Lewis and Tolkien had an intertwined literary life, at least for a while, after all, and I had not realized until I read this book just how frustrated Tolkien was at Lewis for being so darn syncretic.
Then I hit this passage:
“I finally tackled The Lord of the Rings, burning through it over the course of a summer . . . By that point, I recognized that, as much as I liked it, Tolkien’s freakishly prodigious powers of invention could not supply the book with what four years of studying English literature had led me to expect from a great novel. I relished The Lord of the Rings, and have reread it several times since then. I awaited each installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part film version with excitement and even delved into the ‘mythological’ texts collected in The Silmarillion – the province, really, of the hardcore fan, the geek. But by the time I left college I had read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Absalom, Absolom! And Crime and Punishment – to name just three books with related themes – and knew they sounded depths that Tolkien never touched.” (214)
And I’m left open mouthed and grumpy. Miller presents this unprovoked slam on Tolkien as self-evident and worthy of saying. She might even be right, though it is not at all evident to me that that is so. I too had four years of studying English Literature, for what it’s worth. I too have read Hardy, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. I mark a book’s depths by how deep it goes when I think hard about it. I have not reached the depths of any of these.
Miller does not make similar slams on the living authors whose work she evokes (who she might run into at dinner parties and perhaps professionally as a book critic). It’s like she needs to show us that she is A Serious Literary Critic by dissing a seminal text of genre fiction, but she doesn’t have the cojones to do it to someone she might need to interview some day.
That passage and similar ones (she takes the time to compare Tolkien’s characters unfavorably to Jane Eyre and his style unfavorably to Lolita, for example) really soured me on this book. It’s like she really needs to make sure I know she’s not a fellow geek and has contempt for my tribe. Good to know.
Nothing wrong with this book. I just can't seem to find the mental stamina for lit. crit. when there are other things to be reading...
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I got halfway through this book, but I stopped because I don't remember enough of the Chronicles to be able to really understand the discussion. Maybe I will come back to this in the future.
"I'd always assumed that I could never recapture the old enchantment I once found in books, especially the complete and total belief that I'd felt while reading the Chronicles. I know too much now: about Lewis's personality and intentions, about literary sources he'd raided, about his careless reflection of the world's injustices. But what if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive 'somewhere at the back' and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side." (175)
What a wonderful reflection on the magic of storytelling and the books we fall in love with.
What a wonderful reflection on the magic of storytelling and the books we fall in love with.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
The structure of this book expertly mimics Laura Miller's own experience with CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. In addition to her own textual readings, Miller discusses the framework of ideas behind both Lewis's and JRR Tolkein's major works; in essence, their worldviews and varying emphases on the Middle Ages, literature at large, and even their adherence to their pedigrees and national identities inform their works and their stormy friendship in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I knew essentially nothing about CS Lewis's life before I started, but Miller uses his biography to expand on all aspects of his writing, along with the basic tenets of reader response literary theory (what a reader brings to a text is very important and cannot be discounted). This is a wonderful book.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Whew! I finally finished this! I have to say that I was largely disappointed by the second half. Miller spends the first half of the book focusing a keen eye on all things Narnia, weighing and comparing, putting the books into context, and examining in which ways the series is a disappointment or alternatively transcends Lewis' stated goals. Then it's like she realized that she only had the pages for a half a book and had to find some filler to stuff in, so she talks a great deal about the much wider context, i.e. his relationship with his frenemy Tolkien, how Narnia tied to his scholarship, and possible geographic ties to the real world. I won't say that the greater context isn't thoughtfully considered, but it's pretty boring and much less relevant than what came before. Can you recommend someone read half a book? I guess I am.
4/5, 5 stars for the first 50%, 3 stars for the second.
4/5, 5 stars for the first 50%, 3 stars for the second.