Jewish Narnia?

Here's an interesting review essay by Michael Weingrad. In the course of his piece Weingrad asserts that fantasy as a genre has attracted few Jewish writers, and ponders why that might be. Of course a number of people beg to differ about his premise (ie, Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series might be a counter-example, though I guess it's technically science fiction.) Over at his New York Times blog, Ross Douthat provides some thought-provoking commentary. He quotes Abigail Nussbaum at length; her equally thought-provoking post on Weingrad's essay is here. I'd recommend reading all four of the above posts/articles; I think they all make good points.

Turning to a more specific topic, one of the books Weingrad reviews is Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Grossman, if I remember correctly, is the journalist who wrote an article in Time asserting that the total absence of religion in Harry Potter (as opposed to Narnia) illustrated the triumph of secularism in the modern world. Of course, that was before the final Potter book was released... which had all that stuff in it about Harry, the saviour of wizards and witches, sacrificing himself for his friends and being resurrected. It was 'round about the chapter entitled "King's Cross," if you've forgotten.

Anyways, apparently Grossman has since written his own fantasy story, satirizing both Narnia and Harry Potter. Weingrad writes of the novel:

...its goal is to ask the question of whether fantasy and adulthood are mutually exclusive, as the process of becoming an adult means accepting the reality principle rather than “looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life,” as one character puts it. Of course, such an either/or does not do justice to fantasy literature, which, at its best, confronts loss, pain, and frustration. Grossman does not, for instance, turn his satirical sights on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which after all is a world saturated with failure and loss, and his send-up of Narnia’s divinely incarnated lion Aslan falls short of grappling seriously with Lewis’s actual theology. Moreover, his overeducated, young, single protagonists—like Whit Stillman characters thrown into a Harry Potter novel—can offer only a thin slice of what it means to be an adult. Nevertheless, Grossman’s experiment of placing real, urban, early twenty-somethings in a Hogwarts-and-Narnia-like environment is often dazzling. What he shows is the extent to which medieval magic cannot make our human unhappiness disappear.

PS: In passing, Nussbaum's post points out this blog post from Martin Lewis about Arthur C. Clarke's story The Star. In the comments a bunch of people, including Lewis, John Kessel, Adam Roberts and Paul Kincaid (all, I think, identifying themselves as atheists) engage in a spirited discussion about the theological meaning of the story and of SF's roots more generally. Meanwhile, over at this post some of the same players discuss The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Gene Wolfe more generally. Kessel seems to be a fan of Wolfe's.)

Robert Randall

Here's a tidbit I found among Dani Zweig's "Belated Reviews:"

"Also noteworthy is "The Shrouded Planet" by "Robert Randall". (Robert Randall is the name Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett used for their collaborations.) The Shrouded Planet is the cloud-covered planet of Nidor, home to a stable, low-tech culture -- and the only other intelligent beings discovered by Earth. For reasons of its own, Earth decides to set Nidor, willy nilly, on the road to science and technology. Playing the emissaries-from-above gambit, they open a school. Of theology. With a bit of science and engineering thrown in."

The book was first published in 1957. Randall Garrett is better known for his Lord Darcy stories. According to Wikipedia, he belonged to the Old Catholic Church and was ordained in that denomination. According to this witty article by Robert Silverberg, however, Garrett was an Anglican. (As I understand it, Old Catholics are in full communion with Anglicanism, so perhaps both statements are correct.)

The Silverberg article is well worth reading, as he explains his long-time desire to become Pope Sixtus the Sixth, and what sorts of things he would do as Pope. He discusses the intriguing book that first sparked this ambition, a strange 1904 novel entitled Hadrian the Seventh, in which an obscure English layman unexpectedly becomes the Pope and sets about fixing the world.