can you feel the love tonight?
I recently bought a book called The Magician's Book by Laura Miller, which I read about at The Friends of English Magic (I would link to the post, but something strange seems to have happened to the site and it isn't there anymore). It has some Susanna Clarke Content, The Magician's Book does. While I would, in general, be delighted to luck into the opportunity to read Clarke's grocery lists (OMG! "2 DZ. EGGS"! BRILLIANT!!!!), I am now going to save you the $27 you might be tempted to spend on this crapfest by quoting you all of the Susanna Clarke parts:
PAGE 130-131: Gaiman's friend, Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thinks that both men interpret this passage [Ed. The Susan-is-a-twat part I quoted later in the post.] too freely. "Lewis's critics tend to reduce it all down to a question of sex," she said when I had the chance to ask her about it during a visit to England. "I've seen convincing arguments that what Susan was guilty of in the end was not so much growing up as vanity. I think there are strong reasons to think that's probably true."
"I see what you mean," I replied, "but even so, I believe Lewis did think that women are more prone to that sort of trivial vanity than men are." I told Susanna about a story Lewis wrote, "The Shoddy Lands," in which a man's friend becomes engaged and somehow the narrator finds himself briefly transported into the fiancée's mind. Everything in the world becomes blurry and flimsy, except for the clothes and merchandise in shops, which is clearly all this silly woman really cares about.
"I'm still not sure I agree with you," she replied. [Ed. I love her more than Peeps.] "It really depends on whether you just look at the books themselves, or whether you look at his character and his other writings as well. I don't see from the books, the Narnia books, that he thought trivial vanity was a female thing."
"What other examples are you thinking of?"
"Well, you've got Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew, who goes off and dresses himself up in his best clothes. And there's also the horse Bree in The Horse and His Boy. [Lewis] makes it clear that Bree is vain and socially insecure and worried about what will happen to him in Narnia."
PAGE 192-194: During my travels in England, the closest approximation to this mental image [Ed. Of Narnia] I found wasn't in Oxford at all. It was a view of the park at Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where I had stopped off to visit Susanna Clarke and her partner, Colin Greenland, on my way to Ireland. Susanna had also loved Narnia as a girl, and I wanted to talk with her about how it might have influenced her own work, particularly her witty, opulent [Ed. !!!] fantasy [Ed. !!!!!] novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, set in early nineteenth-century England.
Driving back from the train station, Colin and Susanna suggested a stop at Chatsworth. We'd already begun talking eagerly about the Chronicles, and as we stood just behind the enormous seventeenth-century mansion and looked out over the grounds, I was startled to find that here, at last, the right balance had been struck. I asked Susanna if she agreed that Chatsworth's park resembled Narnia.
"Yes, I think it does," she replied. "In the same way that Narnia was an idealized view of the English countryside, this is, too. Of course, it's man-made, you know."
"What do you mean, man-made?"
"Well, for one thing, originally, you could see the village of Edensor from here." She pointed to a notch between two slopes in the near distance. "One of the dukes had the entire village moved in the 1800s. To 'improve the view.' There was a famous eighteenth-century landscape architect called Capability Brown who had the river straightened and changed a lot of other things. Back then, they had an ideal landscape in mind. They got it from French landscape painters who were painting their idea of a Greek landscape, but of course they had that all wrong."
"Actually, the word that springs to mind when I look at it is 'Arcadia,' and that was supposedly in ancient Greece, wasn't it? But having been to Greece, I know now that it never could have been as lush as this. It's much too dry there." [Ed. I want you to know that when I read this part, my face almost turned inside out. If she had said something about unstirring the pudding, I probably would've exploded.]
"Right, it doesn't look like this at all! With the eighteenth-century English ideal, what you want is a series of very gentle green hills with occasional stands of trees. Of course, Capability Brown would have rather that it be deer under the trees instead of those cows over there."
"So, right now, we're admiring a landscape that's been overhauled to look like paintings from another century that were meant to depict still another country that doesn't remotely resemble them. And what you and I are both reminded of by all this is a fictional country. But, tell me, do you remember that Lewis describes Narnia as almost entirely forested?"
"Does he? That's not how I imagined it."
"I didn't either, but it's true. Chatsworth might look like Narnia to us, but it doesn't match the descriptions in the books, so add that to the general confusion."
Eventually, Susanna and I determined that our picture of Narnia had come as much from Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of all seven Chronicles, as it had from Lewis. It is Baynes's Narnia we saw in Chatsworth, the low hills carpeted with green grass and studded with oaks and pine, laid out under the hooves of Fledge, the winged horse on the cover of The Magician's Nephew. Lewis's landscape descriptions bewitched me as a child, but I grew up in a desert, and for images of much that he describes -- snow, heather, even a genuine spring -- I had to rely on Baynes. Her illustrations showed me how Narnia looked, and it looked like no place I'd ever been to myself.
As a child, it would never have occurred to me that the illustrations for any book could be at odds with the text. To me, the words and pictures were inextricable, each as true in its own way as the other, so I never noticed the discrepancies between Baynes's Narnia and Lewis's. In my mind, I suspect, the pictures almost always won out. (Susanna, however, maintains that from an early age she had serious reservations about Caspian's "stupid-looking" haircut in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: proof, for her at least, that Baynes's illustrations were not infallible.)
PAGE 197: British folklore attaches great significance to trees, but (as Susanna Clarke assured me) rarely suggests that they contain anthropomorphic spirits or that a tree might also be a person.
PAGE 242: The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are evil, but they are also unmistakably alluring; Susanna Clarke, in response to complaints about the "misogyny" in those depictions, says, "I see it as [the witches] being too attractive, as if he were saying, 'If someone were to tempt me to do bad things, it would be a woman like this.'"
PAGE 258: Lewis's magpie aesthetic made Narnia a grab bag of every motif that had ever captured his fancy. Susanna Clarke told me that she'd once heard Narnia called just that, a "fancy," in comparison to Tolkien's fully articulated "fantasy." The distinction, she said, originated with an academic critic of contemporary genre fiction, Gary Wolfe, author of the book Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship.
PAGE 275: [Ed. Go grab a ping-pong paddle or a tennis racket or something so you can slap your eyes back in your head once they come flying out after you've read this next deeply articulated item of complete retardation.] [After blabbering at length about fairies, witches, and their intersections in Narnia, Miller discusses the maleficence of a character called The Lady of the Green Kirtle, who is calculating if illogical in her cruelty. Miller notes that if this character had been a true fairy, she'd be more whimsical in her schemes and random in her kidnapping plans.] This is how the capricious "gentleman with the thistledown hair" in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell collects certain choice Londoners, exceptionally attractive human specimens whom he forces to attend exhausting nightly balls at his decrepit castle. The rest of humanity doesn't interest him much. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is deliberately, rather than incidentally, wicked. [Ed. DON'T LET THOSE EYEBALLS GET AWAY!]
Now go put that $27 in your bank-deposit can and buy yourself the Ladies of Grace Adieu audiobook (which is very coincidentally on sale for $14 @ iTunes right at this very moment) and, I don't know, some comics and a big pack of tooth-cleaning gum or something.
The Magician's Book is just really bad, insofar as it basically involves this random dope shoe-horning in her own "ideas" about Narnia betwixt the opinions of many famous authors on the same topic. I don't need you getting all up on my Susanna Clarke quotes, assface. I have few enough of them as it is.
Narnia, of course, became a popular modern topic of conversation when Philip Pullman, whom I actually really like despite his total inability to end any of his stories appropriately, declared that he thought Narnia was kind of lame and also tools-only. He also objected to what he sees as C.S. Lewis's misogyny, as exemplified by this quote [about Susan]: "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
Now, those of us of the XX persuasion know that if Lewis was indeed a sexist pig, this is not the most illustrative example of the fact, since:
1.) Anyone who is obsessed with "nylons" needs inpatient care,
2.) Anyone who is obsessed with being popular is a fuckwit,
3.) Susan was a fuckwit who needed inpatient care, not to mention a good beating, and,
4.) That had nothing to do with her gender. Plus,
5.) Creating a female character who is a fuckwit who needs inpatient care and a good beating does not necessarily render one a misogynist. If that were the case, Jane Austen would be recognized as the most notoriously woman-hating author who ever lived. Oh, wait.
On this particular topic, I can say that I myself am somewhat obsessed with cosmetics (if you'll notice, they're actually socially-sanctioned finger-paints for grown-ups), but I haven't worn pantyhose in about 13 years and never liked them when I did wear them. What sort of diseased creature would like wearing pantyhose? Also I loathe my fellow man acutely. Especially whomsoever among my fellowmen may be extending me an invitation to attend something. How offensive! I am much too good for you. Also, if it came down to the talking lion and the accrual of pantyhose and lipstick, the contest is, I must confess, already won without even being started. Talking Animals > Sephora.
I really liked Narnia when I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure I read all the books, but I don't remember what happened in any of them. I got a big bound volume of the reissued versions a couple of years ago so that I could relive the past, but whenever I try to read it Lewis's crummy, condescending prose crawls up through my eye sockets and turns off the YOU'RE AWAKE! switch in my brain. Very efficiently. So, having said that, here's what I remember about loving Narnia:
1.) I utterly despised all of the human characters. I don't think I had any idea that they were all supposed to have died in the end, because if I had known, I would've thrown myself a party. Or at least put a birthday candle in a cupcake. Something.
2.) I like(d) talking animals.
3.) I loved the talking lion. I often felt aggrieved that he had to go to such terrible lengths to maintain such a worthless cadre of 100% useless fools. I felt they should've all known better in the first place, and spared him the trouble. I would have, for example, shoved the Turkish delight up the kid's ass and left him to die in the evil lady's ice castle. And considered it a day's work. And good riddance.
4.) I liked the Marsh-wiggle, but I can't remember his name.
5.) I wanted to date Mister Tumnus.
6.) I had strong reservations about Lewis's intelligence if he thought that wolves would be willing to work for an evil queen. Wolves aren't evil, and more than that they aren't subservient, especially to creatures who aren't wolves (I was quite a connoisseur of wildlife documentaries as a child). I believed that Maugrim would've died rather than become a servant of secrecy and darkness. Wolves live in the dark and the cold because they have to, and their lives depend on their discretion, especially where people are concerned. That's not a flaw in the wolf, it's a flaw in the bastard with the rifle -- or the longbow, as the case may be. I suspect, thinking about it now, that Maugrim was probably my favorite character. I'm like that.
Here's what I have to say about Narnia after watching the movies as an adult:
1.) In the last few years I have somehow acquired a shorter attention span than I had when I was 11.
2.) I utterly despised everybody. Especially Susan.
3.) I could kind of see the White Witch's point.
4.) The talking lion was sort of hot.
5.) I am way, way, way over stories about World War II.
As a child, I wouldn't have recognized British class-snobbery if it had slapped me in the mouth, and I also didn't understand racism in real, practical terms. I knew it was a problem some people had; I didn't know it had anything to do with me. The occult power of Christian arcana would've been as lost on me as excerpts from the Aeneid transcribed in the original Latin. I was completely safe from Lewis's pantheon of personal flaws. I didn't know they existed, and so I couldn't see them. Because I couldn't see them, they couldn't hurt me. I appreciate Philip Pullman's concern that damaged books can vandalize unfinished minds, but I'm afraid he may be philandering beside the point.
The lesson I took from Narnia and carried with me into adulthood is the concrete and unvarnished certainty that god is far more likely to speak, and to speak truthfully, through the mouth of a lion than through the mouth of a man. As a vain, lipstick-coated, nylon-encased grown-up, I know that in the world outside the wardrobe, lions can't talk -- and so the eternal debate over the will of god is settled in a single roaring silence.
P.S. 3 DAYS LATER I'm not suggesting that Lewis wasn't misogynistic; from what I've read, in his own life he was what my great-grandma Maudie would've called a "sex pervert," and that couldn't help but inform his writing to some degree. All I'm saying is that Lewis -- and to an extent Tolkien as well -- were, despite their overwhelming intellects and spectacular educations, weirdly fragile and almost innocent. To me, their writing feels like a coping mechanism. The Chronicles of Narnia is an elegy to childhood far more than a simplistic exercise in Biblical redux, if you ask me, and one which was written by a man who came of age in a world where children were so thoroughly segregated from reality that the jarring transitions of adolescence and adulthood must have almost felt like experiencing your own death. So when I encounter Lewis's Septuagint wankery, I am less inclined to dislike him and more inclined to pity him. This may be, as I said, because he never did me any harm.
Tolkien is a horse of another, more exhausting, and less precise feather. I don't want to talk about him yet.
PAGE 130-131: Gaiman's friend, Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thinks that both men interpret this passage [Ed. The Susan-is-a-twat part I quoted later in the post.] too freely. "Lewis's critics tend to reduce it all down to a question of sex," she said when I had the chance to ask her about it during a visit to England. "I've seen convincing arguments that what Susan was guilty of in the end was not so much growing up as vanity. I think there are strong reasons to think that's probably true."
"I see what you mean," I replied, "but even so, I believe Lewis did think that women are more prone to that sort of trivial vanity than men are." I told Susanna about a story Lewis wrote, "The Shoddy Lands," in which a man's friend becomes engaged and somehow the narrator finds himself briefly transported into the fiancée's mind. Everything in the world becomes blurry and flimsy, except for the clothes and merchandise in shops, which is clearly all this silly woman really cares about.
"I'm still not sure I agree with you," she replied. [Ed. I love her more than Peeps.] "It really depends on whether you just look at the books themselves, or whether you look at his character and his other writings as well. I don't see from the books, the Narnia books, that he thought trivial vanity was a female thing."
"What other examples are you thinking of?"
"Well, you've got Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew, who goes off and dresses himself up in his best clothes. And there's also the horse Bree in The Horse and His Boy. [Lewis] makes it clear that Bree is vain and socially insecure and worried about what will happen to him in Narnia."
PAGE 192-194: During my travels in England, the closest approximation to this mental image [Ed. Of Narnia] I found wasn't in Oxford at all. It was a view of the park at Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where I had stopped off to visit Susanna Clarke and her partner, Colin Greenland, on my way to Ireland. Susanna had also loved Narnia as a girl, and I wanted to talk with her about how it might have influenced her own work, particularly her witty, opulent [Ed. !!!] fantasy [Ed. !!!!!] novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, set in early nineteenth-century England.
Driving back from the train station, Colin and Susanna suggested a stop at Chatsworth. We'd already begun talking eagerly about the Chronicles, and as we stood just behind the enormous seventeenth-century mansion and looked out over the grounds, I was startled to find that here, at last, the right balance had been struck. I asked Susanna if she agreed that Chatsworth's park resembled Narnia.
"Yes, I think it does," she replied. "In the same way that Narnia was an idealized view of the English countryside, this is, too. Of course, it's man-made, you know."
"What do you mean, man-made?"
"Well, for one thing, originally, you could see the village of Edensor from here." She pointed to a notch between two slopes in the near distance. "One of the dukes had the entire village moved in the 1800s. To 'improve the view.' There was a famous eighteenth-century landscape architect called Capability Brown who had the river straightened and changed a lot of other things. Back then, they had an ideal landscape in mind. They got it from French landscape painters who were painting their idea of a Greek landscape, but of course they had that all wrong."
"Actually, the word that springs to mind when I look at it is 'Arcadia,' and that was supposedly in ancient Greece, wasn't it? But having been to Greece, I know now that it never could have been as lush as this. It's much too dry there." [Ed. I want you to know that when I read this part, my face almost turned inside out. If she had said something about unstirring the pudding, I probably would've exploded.]
"Right, it doesn't look like this at all! With the eighteenth-century English ideal, what you want is a series of very gentle green hills with occasional stands of trees. Of course, Capability Brown would have rather that it be deer under the trees instead of those cows over there."
"So, right now, we're admiring a landscape that's been overhauled to look like paintings from another century that were meant to depict still another country that doesn't remotely resemble them. And what you and I are both reminded of by all this is a fictional country. But, tell me, do you remember that Lewis describes Narnia as almost entirely forested?"
"Does he? That's not how I imagined it."
"I didn't either, but it's true. Chatsworth might look like Narnia to us, but it doesn't match the descriptions in the books, so add that to the general confusion."
Eventually, Susanna and I determined that our picture of Narnia had come as much from Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of all seven Chronicles, as it had from Lewis. It is Baynes's Narnia we saw in Chatsworth, the low hills carpeted with green grass and studded with oaks and pine, laid out under the hooves of Fledge, the winged horse on the cover of The Magician's Nephew. Lewis's landscape descriptions bewitched me as a child, but I grew up in a desert, and for images of much that he describes -- snow, heather, even a genuine spring -- I had to rely on Baynes. Her illustrations showed me how Narnia looked, and it looked like no place I'd ever been to myself.
As a child, it would never have occurred to me that the illustrations for any book could be at odds with the text. To me, the words and pictures were inextricable, each as true in its own way as the other, so I never noticed the discrepancies between Baynes's Narnia and Lewis's. In my mind, I suspect, the pictures almost always won out. (Susanna, however, maintains that from an early age she had serious reservations about Caspian's "stupid-looking" haircut in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: proof, for her at least, that Baynes's illustrations were not infallible.)
PAGE 197: British folklore attaches great significance to trees, but (as Susanna Clarke assured me) rarely suggests that they contain anthropomorphic spirits or that a tree might also be a person.
PAGE 242: The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are evil, but they are also unmistakably alluring; Susanna Clarke, in response to complaints about the "misogyny" in those depictions, says, "I see it as [the witches] being too attractive, as if he were saying, 'If someone were to tempt me to do bad things, it would be a woman like this.'"
PAGE 258: Lewis's magpie aesthetic made Narnia a grab bag of every motif that had ever captured his fancy. Susanna Clarke told me that she'd once heard Narnia called just that, a "fancy," in comparison to Tolkien's fully articulated "fantasy." The distinction, she said, originated with an academic critic of contemporary genre fiction, Gary Wolfe, author of the book Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship.
PAGE 275: [Ed. Go grab a ping-pong paddle or a tennis racket or something so you can slap your eyes back in your head once they come flying out after you've read this next deeply articulated item of complete retardation.] [After blabbering at length about fairies, witches, and their intersections in Narnia, Miller discusses the maleficence of a character called The Lady of the Green Kirtle, who is calculating if illogical in her cruelty. Miller notes that if this character had been a true fairy, she'd be more whimsical in her schemes and random in her kidnapping plans.] This is how the capricious "gentleman with the thistledown hair" in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell collects certain choice Londoners, exceptionally attractive human specimens whom he forces to attend exhausting nightly balls at his decrepit castle. The rest of humanity doesn't interest him much. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is deliberately, rather than incidentally, wicked. [Ed. DON'T LET THOSE EYEBALLS GET AWAY!]
Now go put that $27 in your bank-deposit can and buy yourself the Ladies of Grace Adieu audiobook (which is very coincidentally on sale for $14 @ iTunes right at this very moment) and, I don't know, some comics and a big pack of tooth-cleaning gum or something.
The Magician's Book is just really bad, insofar as it basically involves this random dope shoe-horning in her own "ideas" about Narnia betwixt the opinions of many famous authors on the same topic. I don't need you getting all up on my Susanna Clarke quotes, assface. I have few enough of them as it is.
Narnia, of course, became a popular modern topic of conversation when Philip Pullman, whom I actually really like despite his total inability to end any of his stories appropriately, declared that he thought Narnia was kind of lame and also tools-only. He also objected to what he sees as C.S. Lewis's misogyny, as exemplified by this quote [about Susan]: "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
Now, those of us of the XX persuasion know that if Lewis was indeed a sexist pig, this is not the most illustrative example of the fact, since:
1.) Anyone who is obsessed with "nylons" needs inpatient care,
2.) Anyone who is obsessed with being popular is a fuckwit,
3.) Susan was a fuckwit who needed inpatient care, not to mention a good beating, and,
4.) That had nothing to do with her gender. Plus,
5.) Creating a female character who is a fuckwit who needs inpatient care and a good beating does not necessarily render one a misogynist. If that were the case, Jane Austen would be recognized as the most notoriously woman-hating author who ever lived. Oh, wait.
On this particular topic, I can say that I myself am somewhat obsessed with cosmetics (if you'll notice, they're actually socially-sanctioned finger-paints for grown-ups), but I haven't worn pantyhose in about 13 years and never liked them when I did wear them. What sort of diseased creature would like wearing pantyhose? Also I loathe my fellow man acutely. Especially whomsoever among my fellowmen may be extending me an invitation to attend something. How offensive! I am much too good for you. Also, if it came down to the talking lion and the accrual of pantyhose and lipstick, the contest is, I must confess, already won without even being started. Talking Animals > Sephora.
I really liked Narnia when I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure I read all the books, but I don't remember what happened in any of them. I got a big bound volume of the reissued versions a couple of years ago so that I could relive the past, but whenever I try to read it Lewis's crummy, condescending prose crawls up through my eye sockets and turns off the YOU'RE AWAKE! switch in my brain. Very efficiently. So, having said that, here's what I remember about loving Narnia:
1.) I utterly despised all of the human characters. I don't think I had any idea that they were all supposed to have died in the end, because if I had known, I would've thrown myself a party. Or at least put a birthday candle in a cupcake. Something.
2.) I like(d) talking animals.
3.) I loved the talking lion. I often felt aggrieved that he had to go to such terrible lengths to maintain such a worthless cadre of 100% useless fools. I felt they should've all known better in the first place, and spared him the trouble. I would have, for example, shoved the Turkish delight up the kid's ass and left him to die in the evil lady's ice castle. And considered it a day's work. And good riddance.
4.) I liked the Marsh-wiggle, but I can't remember his name.
5.) I wanted to date Mister Tumnus.
6.) I had strong reservations about Lewis's intelligence if he thought that wolves would be willing to work for an evil queen. Wolves aren't evil, and more than that they aren't subservient, especially to creatures who aren't wolves (I was quite a connoisseur of wildlife documentaries as a child). I believed that Maugrim would've died rather than become a servant of secrecy and darkness. Wolves live in the dark and the cold because they have to, and their lives depend on their discretion, especially where people are concerned. That's not a flaw in the wolf, it's a flaw in the bastard with the rifle -- or the longbow, as the case may be. I suspect, thinking about it now, that Maugrim was probably my favorite character. I'm like that.
Here's what I have to say about Narnia after watching the movies as an adult:
1.) In the last few years I have somehow acquired a shorter attention span than I had when I was 11.
2.) I utterly despised everybody. Especially Susan.
3.) I could kind of see the White Witch's point.
4.) The talking lion was sort of hot.
5.) I am way, way, way over stories about World War II.
As a child, I wouldn't have recognized British class-snobbery if it had slapped me in the mouth, and I also didn't understand racism in real, practical terms. I knew it was a problem some people had; I didn't know it had anything to do with me. The occult power of Christian arcana would've been as lost on me as excerpts from the Aeneid transcribed in the original Latin. I was completely safe from Lewis's pantheon of personal flaws. I didn't know they existed, and so I couldn't see them. Because I couldn't see them, they couldn't hurt me. I appreciate Philip Pullman's concern that damaged books can vandalize unfinished minds, but I'm afraid he may be philandering beside the point.
The lesson I took from Narnia and carried with me into adulthood is the concrete and unvarnished certainty that god is far more likely to speak, and to speak truthfully, through the mouth of a lion than through the mouth of a man. As a vain, lipstick-coated, nylon-encased grown-up, I know that in the world outside the wardrobe, lions can't talk -- and so the eternal debate over the will of god is settled in a single roaring silence.
P.S. 3 DAYS LATER I'm not suggesting that Lewis wasn't misogynistic; from what I've read, in his own life he was what my great-grandma Maudie would've called a "sex pervert," and that couldn't help but inform his writing to some degree. All I'm saying is that Lewis -- and to an extent Tolkien as well -- were, despite their overwhelming intellects and spectacular educations, weirdly fragile and almost innocent. To me, their writing feels like a coping mechanism. The Chronicles of Narnia is an elegy to childhood far more than a simplistic exercise in Biblical redux, if you ask me, and one which was written by a man who came of age in a world where children were so thoroughly segregated from reality that the jarring transitions of adolescence and adulthood must have almost felt like experiencing your own death. So when I encounter Lewis's Septuagint wankery, I am less inclined to dislike him and more inclined to pity him. This may be, as I said, because he never did me any harm.
Tolkien is a horse of another, more exhausting, and less precise feather. I don't want to talk about him yet.