Free Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Page B

admire and emulate. Later in the narrative, Elsie even manages to get into a ludicrous doctrinal dispute with her adored father, who orders her to read a secular book aloud to him on his sickbed; it is Sunday and Elsie believes that Sabbath reading should be reserved for the Bible or some other appropriately pious literature.
    Despite hating it so thoroughly, I read
Elsie Dinsmore
all the way through. Part of my reason for persisting with the book was to marvel at the sort of hogwash adults expected me to swallow, and to congratulate myself on knowing better. This was my first taste of the righteous indignation of the abused reader, that strangely pleasurable outrage we experience when we recognize that an author has broken an important trust. As every critic knows, readers relish a negative review, and not simply out of spite. Seeing an author punished by critics for trampling on the compact between reader and writer attests to the fact that the compact was there in the first place. You can’t recognize blasphemy until you hold something sacred.
Elsie Dinsmore
could only be so very bad because
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
was so very good.
    It was precisely the propaganda aspect of
Elsie Dinsmore
that offended me, the subservience of the story and characters, of the entire book, to the task of instructing me morally. I recognized that the Chronicles also sometimes spoke to me about virtue — in fact, I regarded those parts of the books as among their most thrilling and important moments. The difference was, as I saw it, fundamental. The morality of Elsie Dinsmore was the morality of childhood, where the choice was between obedience and naughtiness. The morality of Narnia was grown-up, a matter of good and evil.
    Adult readers, who detect the Christian symbolism of the Chronicles so readily, often can’t see the distinction. In her book
Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter,
Alison Lurie complains, “In Narnia, final happiness is the result not of individual initiative and enterprise, but of submission to the wisdom and will of superior beings.” Edmund’s treachery in betraying the Narnians and his own siblings to the White Witch might seem heinous, but “misbehavior can be forgiven if it is sincerely repented, and Edmund eventually becomes one of the Kings of Narnia.” This is really an objection to Christian faith itself, to its emphasis on obedience to the will of God and its promise of redemption to those who repent of their defiance. But it never occurred to me to look for Christianity in Narnia, and so, in the temptation of Edmund Pevensie, I saw another kind of drama entirely.
    To me, the best children’s books gave their child characters (and by extension, myself) the chance to be taken seriously. In Narnia, the boundary between childhood and adulthood — a vast tundra of tedious years — could be elided. The Pevensies not only get to topple the White Witch, fight in battles, participate in an earthshaking mystical event, and be crowned kings and queens; they do it all without having to grow up. Yet they become more than children, too. Above all, their decisions have moral gravity. In contrast to how most children experience their role in an adult world, what the child characters in these stories do, for better or worse, really
matters,
and nowhere more so than in Edmund’s betrayal. His envy and vanity bring about a cataclysm, the death of God.
    I remember feeling that the Chronicles were full of perilous decisions in which it was all too apparent how easily you could drift onto the wrong path. The White Witch entices Edmund with delicious hot drinks and enchanted Turkish delight, but primarily by flattering his laziness, his conceit, and his rivalrous sentiments toward his older brother, Peter — all very human weaknesses I recognized in myself. I wasn’t alone. One of the people who wrote to me after reading my essay about
The Lion, the Witch and the