Completely persuasive | Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis

In a word, brilliant | Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis | Michael Ward

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	• Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis Michael Ward Oxford University Press, USA, 2010 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Intriguing Perspective

I found this book fascinating and eye-opening! It puts Lewis in a different light, helping his fans understand him better. I wish I could sit down with Lewis and discuss the ideas in this book with him personally. By reading this book I feel I have come closer to my understanding on how Lewis thinks!

Completely persuasive

I'm stingy with 5-star reviews, thinking there's always room for improvement, but I would have a time of it figuring out how this surprising study could have been improved. I was really quite skeptical when I read about a newly-discovered, comprehensive theory underpinning the Narnian Chronicles. The first chapter was a little slow going, I admit, but the further I went, the more completely I was persuaded. I re-read both the Chronicles and the Ransom Trilogy to see how Ward's arguments held; they held up astonishingly well. In fact, I am enjoying both sets even more, now that I can "contemplate" them as well as "enjoy" them.

Works about Lewis are often tiresome or disappointing. In contrast, I recommend Planet Narnia without reservation, for any fan of Lewis' fiction, any admirer of his scholarly work, any devotee of his devotional and apologetic works.

Well done, Michael Ward. Well done, indeed.

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In a word, brilliant

Planet Narnia is, in a word, brilliant. His use of Lewis' poety, of The Discarded Image, the Ransom trilogy, and Lewis' own literary criticism to illuminate the Narniad was beautifully done. He even found some external evidence in the letters and earlier drafts which is important. It had the feel of a very competent source-critical scholar of the quest for the historical Jesus school. He even had to make up his own word (though not in German) to describe his theory. He anticipated and answered all of my initial objections.

I think I'd call myself almost convinced. Lewis' own cautionary advice in his address to the divinity students ("Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism") makes me still reticent to wholeheartedly buy in. Given his space limitations, Ward understandably does not give much time to considering possible counter-examples in the texts. I'd like to see a competent scholarly attempt at refuting his thesis. But I would be rooting for Ward to prevail.

That said, I don't think that this book should be given to undergraduates generally speaking. They should be given The Discarded Image, the Ransom trilogy, the poetry, to be sure. But this book should wait until they have lived with the Narniad as part of their mental landscape for some time. If given too early, it could stunt rather than enrich their reading. Instead of allowing the "Donegality" to work on them (as Lewis intended if Ward is correct), they would be distracted by looking for instances of it. The Narniad should first be Enjoyed, preferably starting in early childhood, before it is Contemplated in this way.

Similarly, the Narnia movies should most definitely be forbidden to children lest the special effects of the moviemakers art quite replace the richer but necessarily less detailed images that Lewis himself invokes.

Incidentally, this book also had a pleasant and entirely non-literary effect on me. The effort when reading it to mentally inhabit the medieval cosmos that Lewis loved so much made me much more aware of the planets in the night sky. From earth they are just as lovely now as they were when men believed them to be gods or angels dancing through the heavens rather than dead rocks hurtling through the frozen emptiness of space.

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Serious - but enlightneing

When I found out about this book, I pictured a thoughtful, but accessible work that interpreted the Narnia stories from a new, thought provoking perspective. As I began reading I realized that this is a serious, academic study of the 7 books, and it required much more careful reading. Although this was initially discouraging, as I read I realized there were profound insights to be gained, not just into the Chronicles of Narnia, but into Lewis' intellectual life, his theology and worldview, as well as the character and nature of reality.
This book is not a must-read for every fan of Narnia since it may dispel the magic for some of it's fans, but for me, I deeeply appreciate the insights it gave, and I look forward to re-reading the books and immersing myself in the world C.S. Lewis created.

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An overall success with a few glitches

When you finish this book you will have no doubt that Michael Ward has cracked the secret of one of the most-beloved sets of (children's) novels in the world. The mountain of evidence is tremendous. Ward has clearly left no stone, however small, unturned in Lewis's massive oeuvre. But this doesn't overwhelm the reader. Instead, Ward connects the dots in his argument so painstakingly that the generic differences between Lewis's fictional prose, poetry, and his academic work are almost elided.

This is not to say that the book is perfect. Ward is usually a concise and skilled writer. Sometimes, however, chapters begin to feel like lists, rather than arguments with arc. It's the danger with a book like this, but Ward, thankfully, never bores the reader too long in this mode. The second criticism I would lodge against the book is that Ward sometimes continues on with a chapter after he has already made a strong case for his thesis. He moves from strong evidence, and firm ground, to tenuous arguments and thin ice. Despite promises to the reader not to do so, he looks for anything in a chronicle that can be related, at however great a remove, to the book's presiding deity. I can only assume that Ward didn't feel he had sufficiently made his point, or that perhaps he was trying to rebut possible counterarguments or prove the case beyond all doubt. In any event, Ward's larger argument isn't damaged by these weaker sections, but an editor would have done well to remind Ward that 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar', and sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Overall, this is an excellent book. It takes some of the mystery away from the Chronicles, but should repay that loss with readings of the books that are enhanced by a newly found depth, or dimension.

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Hailed as "an outstanding guide not only to Narnia, but also to Lewis's thinking as a whole" by Books and Culture and as "absorbing...serious...rich...a brilliant work to be savored, read often and kept at hand when re-reading Lewis's novels" by The Catholic Register, this superb book argues convincingly that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated C.S. Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to understanding the seven Narnia novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward shows that the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets--the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn--planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation." Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that the story-line in each book, countless points of ornamental detail, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality.

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