A spy in the house of Narnia

Salon's Laura Miller on how the imaginative world of C.S. Lewis inspired her love of reading, as well as her career as a critic.

Editor's note: Read an excerpt from "The Magician's Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia" here.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Interviews, Fantasy, Authors, Books Interviews, Rebecca Traister

Dec. 6, 2008 | When I was about 6, my father was in the midst of reading to me about Aslan the lion in C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Aslan had been shorn and strapped to a stone table and killed, and then miraculously come back to life, when my dad stopped mid-chapter to ask, "Does this remind you of any other story?" I had zero religious training from my mixed-marriage parents, but I had had an elderly Slovak baby sitter who had ignited in me a temporary enthusiasm for the Baby Jesus. "Does this remind you of what happened to Jesus?" Yes! It did, as a matter of fact!

I don't know if it is truly possible to recall moments of cognitive growth from 25 years ago. But the memory of this episode is very strong: the creak and crunch of my brain as it struggled to absorb the idea that this was not just a coincidence or similarity, but an intentional melding of two otherwise unrelated stories. Although this moment of revelation lodged deep and hard in my brain, the Christian message of the Narnia books was ultimately unimportant to me. I was in it for the fauns. Narnia remained for me a place into which I could disappear, like so many of the other fantasy and adventure books I began to seek out.

For Laura Miller, my colleague and a co-founder of Salon, Narnia kicked off a rockier and more intense journey, one that neatly mirrors aspects of children's literature and fantasy arcs. After a teacher set Miller on her path by introducing her to Lewis' books, a world far beyond the wardrobe -- within the walls of a library and the covers of the books she gobbled -- opened for her. The teenage revelation that the founding text of her passion for reading had secretly contained a religious pill left Miller badly disillusioned, but her continuing education, and eventual career as a literary critic, both rooted in the thrill she had found in Lewis' stories, finally led her back to Narnia and her own conflicted feelings about the books.

Miller has recorded this journey in "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia," a lucid and vibrant tale that traces the evolution of her feelings about Narnia, Lewis and reading itself, all the while elegantly reflecting the very kinds of children's adventures -- and experiences of faith -- that so churned her up throughout her life.

Through her research about Lewis, discussions with other readers and writers about their experiences in his imagined land, and observation of young children and how they engage with the stories they're told, Miller discovered that she has lots to say about how we read and how we think about what we read.

How did you first encounter Narnia?

I was given "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by my second-grade teacher, Wilanne Belden, who was someone I kind of worshiped. She is someone I'm still in touch with, and someone I interviewed for the book. When I marveled to her that she had given me this book, which, when I read it, became the whole center of my inner world, she said she gave it to me because, "You were just a kid who needed to read this book." What astonished me was that she had had the book for quite a while, probably around 10 years, before she actually gave it to one of her students to read. I was the first one she tried it on. And it was a huge success. She knew that I had been strongly affected by it, but she couldn't get me to talk about it.

Why wouldn't you talk to her about it?

I wish I could tell you that. One of the strangest experiences [of writing this book] is learning to think of my child self as a completely other person. People say, "You did this," and I don't have any idea why. When Mrs. Belden told me I wouldn't talk about Narnia, well, I don't remember that at all. I remember that my strong feelings about the book were so caught up in my admiration for her. She was the most amazing grown-up I had ever met, and this was something that we shared. What I remember is feeling that she must already know.

The point for me was that it was private. I was building my own self that was independent of other people, which is so important when you're that age. Everyone thinks about forming your identity as a teenager, but that is a much more outward transformation. When you're younger, you develop your own imaginative inner world that you don't have to share with adults or other kids around you. Not every child has a need to do that, but certainly everyone I've met who was a bookish child had that stage.

And you had a teacher who understood not only to give you the book, but to not try to talk to you about it?

What she said to me [as an adult] was, "Maybe if you talked about it, someone could take it away from you." And that was right. We were in a three-bedroom house and we were a family of seven. That was a normal suburban thing back then, not some horrible hardship. But I didn't have any privacy, and she understood that on some level. I needed this to be private, and she didn't push me on it.

That kind of understanding between student and teacher is very typical of children's literature. There's always someone, a teacher or an uncle -- Dumbledore, or Uncle Merry, or Professor Kirke -- who gives you a key to another world, or indicates that he or she understands your travels there.

Yes. When Susan and Peter go to Professor Kirke [in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"] and tell him Lucy's story about finding this secret land through the wardrobe, they expect him to respond the way other adults would -- that she's just being fanciful. Instead, he says, "How do you know it's not true?" He is one of those adults who have that special understanding, even though he's not the kind of grown-up that is conventionally good with kids. So he tells them that it's OK for them to go to a secret other world, and that is what my teacher did for me.

Often children have an adult who's not a parent who plays that role, often aunts or uncles or teachers, who give them a nudge to pursue whatever is special to them. That's why they keep coming up in children's literature. Some children need an adult to come in and give them a nudge in the right direction, and a blessing to go on with their own adventure.

Your obsession with the Chronicles did not stop at one reading?

I became so obsessed with these books and read them so many times that I practically have them memorized. Except for "The Last Battle," because like many people, that is my least favorite one. It's just kind of a bummer. But I saved up my money to buy my own copies. My mother gave me a paperback set, but I wanted the hardcovers. And I'm not a collector; this was the only thing I've ever said, "I have to have it."

Then, when I was in my teens, in the process of trying to track down other books that would give me the same kind of thrill, I discovered [in a book of literary criticism] that there was all this Christian symbolism in the Chronicles, which completely shocked me. I had to have been 13. I was so horrified, because I had been raised as a Catholic -- not a super-strict or super-guilt-heavy Catholic, but nevertheless Catholic -- and I wasn't really a believer. I wasn't into church or religion in any way. For me, Narnia was everything I would want life to be, and none of the things I disliked. And one of the things I disliked was church and religion and the Bible. The idea that this thing I was trying to get away from was secretly lurking in the place I went away to, that was my most private cherished thing -- I remember feeling physically nauseated by this thought in my teens, and deceived, and betrayed. I avoided even thinking of them.

Next page: "It's as if the author of this book had reached into my head and found the things I wanted most"