".....critics uncomfortable about the religious subtext of Lewis's stories have been launching pre-emptive strikes to alert the susceptible. Stopping short of proposing a PG-13 label ("Parental guidance strongly advised - contains religious content and fleeting Christian imagery"), they have recognized the seven Narnia books as good escapist fantasy but please, please, don't pay any attention to the other stuff....
Commenting on a review by Mr. Gopnic, Steinfels writes "(Gopnic) has posed that, too. For him, "whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters." The believer and the atheist can meet "in the realm of made-up magic," he says, because they both need to register "their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes."....
"Lewis believed otherwise....(for him) ..beauty was not ultimately in the books or music where it was thought to be found. "It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing," Lewis said.
"For they are not the thing itself," he went on; "they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
"This is where the serious religious question lies. It is not a question about Lewis's eccentricities nor about some evangelicals' weakness for preachiness or hero-worship. It is a question about reality."
