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Book Review: Of Other Worlds
Jan. 14th, 2024 10:41 amI went to the library to get E. B. White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat and got ambushed by C. S. Lewis’s Of Other Worlds: Essays & Stories, and fled the essay section before any other books could join the attack.
Of Other Worlds is a posthumous collection, edited by Walter Hooper. It includes essays that cast some light onto Lewis’s process as a writer of fiction, as well as a smattering of short stories not collected elsewhere, and the existing chapters of Lewis’s unfinished final novel, After Ten Years.
( Does anyone care about spoilers for an unfinished novel? I will put it behind a spoiler cut because I did enjoy reading it unspoiled. )
I quite enjoyed the essays, too. They are a little repetitious, as they weren’t originally intended to be collected in this way: Lewis quotes admiringly from Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” in at least three separate essays, which I found endearing. The man was never shy in praise of his friends! But still it’s interesting to learn how his stories grew.
Apparently Lewis’s stories always started with an image: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe began with a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood, Perelandra with the floating islands. He notes that critics sometimes accuse him of starting with the moral, but insists that the stories grew out of the images and the morals out of the stories, as morals sometimes do. Possibly we only assume that the morals are artificially imposed when they are morals we don’t agree with?
There’s one essay that is quite sharp about critics who attempt to criticize the author’s motives. As any writer can attest, reviewers will come up with the oddest suppositions about your state of mind as you wrote, and then criticize the assumption they made up rather than the work itself, so Lewis has quite a point, and I apologize unreservedly for assuming that he wrote The Last Battle because he felt that he had to wrap Narnia up with a proper Biblical apocalypse. Maybe he just had that image of the sun squeezing itself out like an orange and it all grew from there.
Of Other Worlds is a posthumous collection, edited by Walter Hooper. It includes essays that cast some light onto Lewis’s process as a writer of fiction, as well as a smattering of short stories not collected elsewhere, and the existing chapters of Lewis’s unfinished final novel, After Ten Years.
( Does anyone care about spoilers for an unfinished novel? I will put it behind a spoiler cut because I did enjoy reading it unspoiled. )
I quite enjoyed the essays, too. They are a little repetitious, as they weren’t originally intended to be collected in this way: Lewis quotes admiringly from Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” in at least three separate essays, which I found endearing. The man was never shy in praise of his friends! But still it’s interesting to learn how his stories grew.
Apparently Lewis’s stories always started with an image: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe began with a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood, Perelandra with the floating islands. He notes that critics sometimes accuse him of starting with the moral, but insists that the stories grew out of the images and the morals out of the stories, as morals sometimes do. Possibly we only assume that the morals are artificially imposed when they are morals we don’t agree with?
There’s one essay that is quite sharp about critics who attempt to criticize the author’s motives. As any writer can attest, reviewers will come up with the oddest suppositions about your state of mind as you wrote, and then criticize the assumption they made up rather than the work itself, so Lewis has quite a point, and I apologize unreservedly for assuming that he wrote The Last Battle because he felt that he had to wrap Narnia up with a proper Biblical apocalypse. Maybe he just had that image of the sun squeezing itself out like an orange and it all grew from there.
