Macdonald and Lewis

I finished all the Chesterton I'm likely to finish save for a few more pages in his Heretics. After that I really need to read his Orthodoxy, but you knew that already. Blake Edwards said that book nearly caused him to join the Roman Catholic Church (too bad it didn't fully accomplish that goal), so it's gotta be pretty good. I've read his Everlasting Man which I love greatly. His prose in general is like a good thick meal. It is rich prose, rich as plumcake. Yet its imagery is bold and riveting even when it seems opaque as mud.

I made the jump and purchased Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia the other month because I am nineteen and am required to own his septilogy. There is no excuse for a reader of my stature to be without such essential Lewis. His prose is very, very fine and he is a spectacular storyteller as well. The magic of The Horse and His Boy will never lose its charm for me, or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I devoured most of the Chronicles in a few days and moved on to Lewis' inspiration: George Macdonald, who deserves a paragraph all to himself.

Now George Macdonald is a very different author than Lewis or Tolkien. He predated them, for one thing, but you wouldn't (at least I didn't) notice that too much. His prose is a bit more archaic and formal, most recognizable in his adult fiction and the Curdie books, but his writing...oh! his writing! He was an absolute master of the mythopoeic 'genre', or rather: he creates myth, much like the ancients created their myth. Now if anyone truly knows me, he would know that that is the highest compliment I can give a work of fiction, that it be mythlike in nature. Cut short, I believe that myths are one of God's way of revealing himself to his highest creation along with reason, the Greeks, and his own revelations. And Macdonald does this myth writing better than any man I have yet met; his dreamlike, wandering prose so affects me that I plunge into his books like none other. I devoured Lilith in only a few days and I'm absolutely tearing into Phantastes. And they are amazing to me. It's not so much the 'plot' (as a purely literary author, perhaps Macdonald is not even third best in my mind) as the sequence of events, the essence of any myth, not the words. To paraphrase Lewis, if the myth could be told in colors or images, it would hold every bit as much power.

There is my rambling about Macdonald. Now I really need to finish De Anima before I read it in seminar in the fall, and I would like to get through most of the Old Testament - I'm currently in I Samuel (and the 1611 KJV is a real treat, let me assure you). In other words, I have a lot to read, but at least I have time in which to read.

Wish me luck!