|
I don't review books I don't like!
*****= An all-time favorite
**** = Outstanding
*** = Above average
** = Enjoyable
* = Good, with reservations
|
****Of Other Worlds
Essays and Stories
by C. S. Lewis
edited by Walter Hooper
Reviewed December 21, 2002.
A Sonderbooks' Best Book of 2002
(#3, Nonfiction Rereads)
A Harvest/HBJ Book, New York, 1966. 148 pages.
Last week I was challenged that as a Christian I shouldn’t be endorsing
the Harry Potter books. As I thought through why I disagree with
that perspective, I turned to this
book, one I bought back when I was a student at Biola University.
I’ll be the first to admit that the Harry Potter books are nowhere near
as spiritually uplifting as C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.
However, part of the reason I thoroughly enjoy the Harry Potter books
is that I love fantasy. It is true that God condemns witchcraft
in this world, but what if there were a world where you could do magic
without going through Satan to do it? (Indeed, the magic in Harry
Potter that is most like the magic of real witchcraft is portrayed as
either silly, in the case of divination, or evil.) To me, the
magic of Harry Potter most nearly resembles the magic of fairy tales,
and that’s why I turned to C. S. Lewis.
I like the essays in Of Other Worlds
the best. It also contains a few stories, mostly science
fiction, that he never published while he was alive, as well
as the beginning of a novel about Troy.
In the essays, C. S. Lewis defends his love
of fairy tales (meaning fantasy stories), children’s books,
and science fiction. He tends to over-intellectualize, but
ends up with the view that it is good, even noble, to like these
things, that sometimes they can communicate better than any other form.
Let me include some of the lines I’ve underlined:
“Good stories often introduce the marvelous
or supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often
misunderstood as this.”
“The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real
life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with
renewed pleasure to the actual.”
“No book is really worth reading at the age
of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the
age of fifty—except, of course, books of information. The only
imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have
been better not to have read at all.”
“[The story] may not be ‘like real life’ in
the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image
of what reality may well be like at some more central region.”
“Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were
blamed when children for reading books too old for us.”
“[The fairy tale] stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment)
with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling
or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.
He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted
woods: The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at
least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.”
“The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some
readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by
the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power to
generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not
concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to
throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can
give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting
on life,’ can add to it.”
“If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort (which
are very much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like
certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our
conception of the range of possible experience.”
“It would seem from the reactions it produces, that the mythopoeic is
rather, for good or ill, a mode of imagination which does something to
us at a deep level. If some seem to go to it in almost compulsive
need, others seem to be in terror of what they may meet there.”
Once I started, I spent my morning reading the entire little
book. I ended up feeling wonderfully refreshed. I also felt
less defensive about my reading habits and recommendations. I
believe that fantasy is a good thing, and C. S. Lewis put his finger on
some of the reasons why.
Reviews of other books by C. S. Lewis:
A Year with C. S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces
The Great
Divorce
Out of the
Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
The
Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of
the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse
and His Boy
The
Magician's Nephew
The
Last Battle
The Last Battle performed by Patrick Stewart
Copyright © 2005 Sondra Eklund. All
rights reserved.
-top of page-
|
Book
Reviews by Sondra Eklund