A Reading Life

The looking-glass, closed to traffic

I'm sorry to say that I've pretty much abandoned the idea of one day finding a working amulet or a secret chamber or an entrance to another world. When I was young I spent a lot of time hunting for little doors, tapping on walls, and poking hedges looking for spots permeable to other dimensions. I believe I came close a couple of times, but who can really say? I'm not really concerned with the matter now because of the jadedness that comes with age and because, like most intemperate readers, I have been spoiled by books, the lazy man's portal to other worlds.

But weren't books always that? Yes and no. I suddenly see, thanks to having just read Laura Miller's truly original "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" (Little, Brown, $25.99), how drastically my relationship to books, and perforce the world, has changed since my youth - not because I can't take up even the silliest book now in the most idle way without reaching for a pencil; but because books simply aren't real in the way that they were when I started reading. In those early years, books were an extension of reality, though, to be sure, a liberating one. The portals to other worlds and talismans granting strange powers (such as you found in the best books) seemed likely to exist in the world you walked around in - you just hadn't been lucky enough to come across them yet.

I don't know exactly when the membrane between the reality of books and life closed for me, but for Miller it was when she was in the sixth grade and was introduced to "Animal Farm" and, through it, to the study of literature as something apart from a story in and of itself. In other words, the novel was not about animals, but about totalitarianism, specifically communism. "Up to that point," she and her classmates "experienced stories as truth, if not always as fact. . . . Our limber imaginations let us occupy a world where made-up stories had the same legitimacy as reality. Like real events and real human beings, the characters and events in those stories didn't stand for something else. They were what they were, and it's only with great effort and fairly late in the game that a child can understand them as created rather than simply existing the way that the people and objects in the world around us do."

Miller's book is a wide-ranging consideration of "The Chronicles of Narnia," of their author, C.S. Lewis, and of their readers, critics, devotees, and exploiters. It pivots around her own dismay upon discovering as an adolescent that the books she loved so much as a child were vehicles for inculcating Christianity, the faith she had completely rejected. "I was shocked, almost nauseated. I'd been tricked, cheated, betrayed," she reports. Years later, however, she comes to see that a child's mind, as described above, is essentially impervious to allegory and symbolism, that the books' Christian message is invisible and ineffectual. To which I might add, in passing, that when I cottoned on to Narnia's Christian metaphors, I thought representing Christ as a lion, with its clear connotations of Britain, was a species of blasphemy and hardly likely to set the reader on the right path.

Be that as it may, if the books are not especially effective in promoting Christianity - and, as Miller shows, Christian, family-values proponents had to tamper with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to suit their purposes for the 2005 movie - they do have unfortunate elements of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and "in-group snottiness." Philip Pullman, who has been on the receiving end of righteous blasts himself, has called the Narnia cycle "one the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read." Miller is charity itself by contrast, reprimanding Lewis, yes, but showing his unpalatable views in the context of his own life and times. In the end, her book is a personal engagement with crucial stages in her development as a reader, her changing view of "The Chronicles" serving as a foil. They, themselves, she finally concludes, do not find their unity in Christianity, among other things, but in "readerly desire." "Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers."

Stopped dead in its tracks and covered with ash on Aug. 24, AD 79, by an erupting Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii definitely fills the bill for a secret world. It has fascinated and appalled people ever since it was rediscovered and excavations began in the mid-18th century. The site is a frozen slice of ancient Roman life with abundant evidence for interpreting, and even more for misinterpreting, how it was lived. In "The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found" (Belknap/Harvard University, $26.95) Mary Beard cheerfully dismantles as many assumptions about what we are looking at in the city's remains as she constructs hypotheses.

She shows conclusively that the city was not entirely taken unawares by the eruption; there had been volcanic activity and earth tremors in the weeks or days before serious enough to have set the inhabitants to mending damage to their houses. There is also evidence of partial evacuation. Indeed, much of the evidence upon which historians and archeologists have based their views of ordinary life in the city is, in reality, evidence of flight rather than business as usual. Thus the uncluttered interiors suggest valuables having been carted away; heaps of tools in unlikely places are signs of assembling goods for departure; the infamous noblewoman found in the gladiators' quarters was probably not carrying on with lowborn beefsteak, but rather seeking shelter when the mountain blew.

Though Beard can tell us a good deal about life in Pompeii, mysteries abound in this partly buried world, some having become even murkier thanks to the deterioration of the excavated site by exposure to the elements, some because of inept "restoration." Other mysteries were further shrouded by archeologists scandalized by their findings. Chief among these are the phalluses simply everywhere: phallus lamps, phallus chimes, phallus birds, phalluses over the door, phalluses in the garden. It was as if adolescent boys were running the show - its secrets accessible, it may be, through some lost phallus talisman.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.