Till We Have Faces still seems flawless, and leaves me in awe. With the Chronicles, I can still suspend my scepticism and enjoy the ride, sledding over the flaws. Asimov's roboticist Susan Calvin is the only fictional scientist I can think of whose brains don't come with 'but it's OK, she's still a woman because she's beautiful'.) Her pre-Homeric society is far more convincing than the cosy monarchy of Narnia. (When science fiction later started to admit women as scientists instead of just trophies and secretaries, they still looked like pin-ups, and still do.

Her face is ugly, to herself and others, and she handles that with honesty and courage. There is no Christianity in Till We Have Faces the gods are multiple, and deadly dangerous the narrator is a woman whose strength (including the sword, but her brain and political/economic sense is more important) exceeds any male in sight. What surprised me most about the book, as it engaged with Lewis and fantasy, was the complete absence of the most powerful, adult fantasy he wrote. (Whether skinny princesses are a Good dream is quite another question.) (I got Eagle, my sister got Girl.) It is as easy to dream yourself slender-legged as that you are a princess, and a change in status is more likely: the narrative point is to allow the dream, not to condemn the dreamer. True, she is contrasted to the 'dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs', but in this she just resembles the ballet dancers and so on of girls' magazines of the time. I can't agree with the idea of cruelty - as distinct from prejudice - in the liberation/destruction of Gwendolen's school. The film kept only the parts that make me shudder.

I have lived outside England since 1972, living among many kinds of people with many beliefs, and his class/race/country narrowness gives me the creeps: it bothers me, just as it does Laura Miller, but the sense of widening my world in other directions is still there, and makes a joyful read. I am a sceptic since age 12, and allergic to Lewis's parochial Christianity in particular - he was quite unable to separate universal morality from the mores of the class he (and I) grew up in. I found them immensely powerful then, and was pleased how well they still work for me, in my sixties.

The article and the book prompted me to re-read the whole Narnia sequence, which I originally read as they came out, starting about eight years old.

The weirdstone of brisingamen review