Laura Miller Read Free

a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.”
    He is, among other things, describing the way certain children read certain books, with a fervor that can inspire mystification and awe in their adult counterparts. Such experiences
can’t
be merely ephemeral, meaningless, but they often seem entirely inaccessible when we look back on them years later. This, at least, is what Clive James felt upon returning to Professor Challenger, and so he was forced to dismiss the whole situation as merely comical. Still, how could he have failed to be formed as a man and as a reader by Doyle’s adventure yarns? We would not expect any other overwhelming emotional experience from his childhood to have left him untouched. Today, James is a gifted, witty critic. Perhaps there is more to Professor Challenger than meets the eye.
    The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.
    The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader — make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings — that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
    I’ve titled this book after a passage in my current favorite among the Chronicles of Narnia,
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
. It’s the part where Lucy, who has reluctantly agreed to enter the house of an invisible magician, slips into his study in order to read a spell out of his great book. She finds a couple of charms that intrigue and tempt her, and then she arrives at something special, a spell that is “like a story” but that disappears as she reads it, and soon vanishes even from her memory.
    Perhaps Lewis is alluding here to the fleeting enchantment of childhood reading. But that’s not all this passage is about. He also had the idea that certain stories run deep in human nature, deeper than the individual books that tell them, deeper even than words themselves. He tried to tap into that kind of story in his fiction, and he achieved this in his children’s books better than anywhere else. The peculiarly heady effect of the Chronicles on young readers is testimony to his success. Francis Spufford, author of the memoir
The Child That Books Built,
writes of feeling that Lewis “had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy,” in stories that became “the inevitable expressions of my longing.” The Chronicles have bewitched millions of children of vastly different backgrounds in just this way since they were first published in the 1950s.
    Lucy can’t remember any more from the story than “a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill,” but that doesn’t mean she isn’t able to recognize it when she meets it again, even when it appears in a different form. “Ever since that day,” the narrator continues, “what Lucy means by a good story is a story that reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.” I’ve read a lot of great literature since the day my second-grade teacher handed me a clothbound copy of
The Lion, the Witch and the