Laura Miller announces her nonbelief right in the subtitle of her recently published The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. And the explicit premise of her book is that an avowed non-Christian can love The Chronicles of Narnia despite their Christian sub-text.

So I must confess that I opened Miller’s book with some skepticism about her skepticism: as I wrote in my Christmas Day post, my reading the Chronicles as an adult was my first experience of a Christianity I so longed for that soon afterwards I was on my way to baptism.

But I want to be fair to Miller’s book. It is thoughtfully structured, gracefully written, and exhibits a commendable openness of mind. She is not writing an anti-Christian tract. Rather, she is genuinely exploring a question that has passionate importance for her: after loving the Narnia Chronicles as a child, then feeling betrayed as an adolescent when she learned that they were “Christian” and hence kin to the Catholicism that she was raised in and hated to the core, why as an adult agnostic is she loving the Chronicles anew?

Miller’s method of exploring this question is to embark on a major research project into C.S. Lewis’s life and other writings. The report of her researches is the only part of the book I found tedious, but as a fellow writer I’ve committed the same fault myself. You find out lots of stuff that’s new and exciting to you, and you want to share every detail of your excitement; you can’t bear to leave any bit out. So, for instance, Miller has many more chapters on the Tolkien-Lewis relationship than are necessary for her argument, and the lit-crit analysis of Lewis’s literary sources is overdone.

But this analysis does lead her eventually to her main point, to her understanding of what characterizes the Narnia Chronicles as great literature. Despite Lewis’s racism, sexism, and elitism (and I concur in Miller’s critique of these unfortunate qualities of the Chronicles), and despite what Miller sees as an artificially imposed Christian agenda, she finds the books’ greatness lying in their eclecticism of genre and of mythologies. Rather than being simply, reductively, a Christian story—a re-telling of a privileged Christian myth—Miller’s Chronicles embrace a range of myths without privileging any.

And her additional reason for valuing the Chronicles so highly is that they create a world of infinite possibility, of openness where anything can happen.

This last point is a fine one, I think, and helps all Narnia lovers—Christian or not—to understand a key dimension of the books’ lasting attraction. Miller is very good at explaining how Lewis, “a medievalist at heart,” infused Narnia with “meaning-drenched images” and “layered symbolism”(45).

She also offers the helpful insight that many of the Narnian characters “are liminal, that is charged beings inhabiting the slippery territory between day thoughts and dreams, and in that sense they’re not really ‘people’ at all, but forces within the human soul. The places where the action transpired are dirt and grass and stone, and at the same time the interior of the self”(47).

Miller is also good on characterizing Narnia as a place of “desire,” a world where all that we long for—consciously and unconsciously—comes true. Yet this is precisely why I’m disquieted by her distaste for the final scene of the final Narnia book, The Last Battle. She has no objection to what I find most objectionable in The Last Battle and throughout the series: the glorification of warfare. Rather, what Miller calls the “mistake”(302) of the close of the Chronicles is that the place where Aslan finally leads the good Narnians is “perfect.” Yes, yes, it is of course meant to be perfect: it is what Christians envision as the world transformed after Christ’s Second Coming.

When I first read this final scene over 30 years ago, as an agnostic adult reading the Narnia books aloud to my eight-year-old son, I was moved to tears by its expression of what I instantly recognized as my heart’s and soul’s desire. I longed to join the Narnians who were joyously racing behind Aslan into his newly transformed world whose story would go on forever, with each chapter better than the one before.

Laura Miller is uncomfortable with this vision of an eternity in God’s bliss. All I can say is that I’m sorry for her discomfort. I’m sorry she’s missing this joy.