The New Yorker

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PRISONER OF NARNIA
by ADAM GOPNIK
How C. S. Lewis escaped
Issue of 2005-11-21
Posted 2005-11-14

The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and
children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures—Churchill is the
other—whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in
America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different
men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly
beatified—more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who
was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of
doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on
stained glass—truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a
church in Monrovia, California—and remains, for the more intellectual and literate
reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly
in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England,
he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made
joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very
good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A
former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of
his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an
admirer.)

The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and
that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing. But
the double vision of the man creates something of a transatlantic misunderstanding.
If in England he is subject to condescension, his admirers here have made him
hostage to a cult. “The Narnian” (HarperSanFrancisco; $25.95), a new life of
Lewis by his disciple Alan Jacobs, is an instance of that sectarian enthusiasm.
Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while
his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in
its effects from derision. Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too
obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to
yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are
so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the
rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on
the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.

In England, the more representative biography of Lewis is the acidic though
generally admiring life that A. N. Wilson published some fifteen years ago. It
gives Lewis his due without forcing stained-glass spectacles on the reader.
(Wilson is quite clear, for instance, about Lewis’s weird and complicated sex
life.) While William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands,” in all its play, movie, and
television versions, shows the priggish Lewis finally humanized by sex with an
American Jewish matron, it actually reflects the British, rather than the
American, view: Lewis as a prig to be saved from priggishness, rather than as a
saint who saved others from their sins.

None of this would matter much if it weren’t for Narnia. The seven tales of
the English children who cross over, through a wardrobe, into a land where
animals speak and lions rule, which Lewis began in the late nineteen-forties,
are classics in the only sense that matters—books that are read a full
generation after their author is gone. They have become, to be sure, highly
controversial classics: the wonderful British fantasist Philip Pullman has
excoriated their racism (the ogres are dark-skinned and almond-eyed), their
nasty little-Englandness, and their narrow-hearted religiosity. But they are
part of the common imagination of childhood, and, with the release of “The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as the first of a series of film adaptations,
they are likely—if the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is any indication—to become
still more deeply implanted.

The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American
saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about
Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a
place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life
and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete,
three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind
of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith
was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between
his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a
record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and
staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open
all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he
discovered only at the end.

The early, appealing part of Lewis’s life is extremely well
told in his own 1955 memoir, “Surprised by Joy.” He was born in 1898, into a rough
and ready but pious Ulster Protestant family in Belfast; his father was dense
and eccentric—a man with “more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact
wrongly than any man I have ever met,” his exasperated son wrote much later—and
his mother, who died before Lewis turned ten, was warm and loving and simple.
The key relation in his life was with his older brother, Warnie, with whom he
shared a taste for reading and even a private language and mythology, and to
whom he remained close throughout Warnie’s long, unhappy, and, later, alcoholic
life.

Above all, the young Lewis, often in company with his brother, read and
walked. He was the sort of kid who is moved to tears every day by poems and
trees. He loved landscape and twilight, myth and fairy tale, particularly the
Irish landscape near their suburban home, and the stories of George MacDonald.
Now too easily overlooked in the history of fantasy, MacDonald’s stories (“At
the Back of the North Wind,” “The Princess and the Goblin,” and, most of all, “Phantastes”)
evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure—a kind of shining sense of
goodness and romance and light. Lewis called this emotion, simply, the “Joy.”
With it came the feeling that both the world and the words were trying to tell
him something—not just that there is something good out there but that there is
something big out there. The young Lewis found this
magic in things as different as Beatrix Potter and Longfellow, “Paradise Lost”
and Norse myth. “They taught me longing,” he said, and made him a “votary of
the Blue Flower,” after a story by the German poet Novalis, in which a youth
dreams of a blue flower and spends his life searching for it. The Christianity
he knew in childhood, by contrast, seemed the opposite of magic and joy: dull
sermons and dry moral equations to be solved.

This loving and mother-deprived boy was sent to a series of nightmarish
English boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied and traumatized
beyond even the normal expectations of English adolescence. Lewis’s own words
about the places are practically Leninist. (One headmaster raced down the
length of a room with his cane to beat a lower-middle-class boy, enraged by his
social pretensions.) Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such
length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about
serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time
of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual
result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs,
calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend,
he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private
letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”

A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a
warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual story. What
was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he kept an inner life. Joy
kept him alive—and it is possible that the absence of happiness allowed an
access of joy. When he served on the Western Front, in 1917, he got what every
soldier wanted—an honest wound honestly come by but bad enough to send him
home. Still, he saw the trenches as they really were, and though he chose
largely to forget, and tried to deprecate the importance of “the horribly
smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles,” he admitted, in later
years, that he had had nightmares about it for the rest of his life.

Oxford always seemed like joy to escapees from public schools; add the
Western Front, and it must have seemed like something close to paradise. After
Lewis’s first long residence there, upon his departure from the Army, in 1918,
he never left Oxford again, except, at the end, for Cambridge. He took a first
in classics, and then made a decision, slightly daring in those days, when
teaching English literature seemed as swinging as teaching media studies does
now, to become a tutor in English; he soon became a fellow in English at
Magdalen College. (He also took up with a much older married woman, with whom
he had a long affair that may have had a sadomasochistic tinge.)

Jacobs is a bit touristy about Magdalen’s charms; Wilson is much better,
tartly and accurately describing how the system of tutorials, seemingly so
seductive—an essay delivered each week by the pupil, and analyzed and critiqued
by the tutor—helps turn the tutors, from sheer exhaustion and self-protection,
into caricatures of themselves, rather as the girls in a lap-dance club take on
exotic names and characters. Lewis, the sensitive and soft-spoken young hiker,
took on the part of a bluff, hearty Irishman, all tweed and pipe. It is this
Lewis who became an Oxford legend, smoking in darkened rooms and holding “Beer
and Beowulf” evenings in his rooms. He held to the narrow anti-modern
curriculum then in place at Oxford, and befriended a young philologist named J.
R. R. Tolkien, whose views on teaching English were even more severe than
Lewis’s: Tolkien thought that literature ended at 1100.

Lewis had a reputation as a tough but inspiring teacher, and, reading his
letters, one can see why. His literary judgments are full of discovery; his
allegiance to a dry, historical approach in the university didn’t keep him from
having bracingly clear critical opinions about modern books, all of them
independent and most of them right. He got the greatness of Wodehouse long
before it was fashionable to do so, appreciated Trollope over Thackeray, and
could admire even writers as seemingly unsympathetic to him as Woolf and Kafka.
He was a partisan without being a bigot.

It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled
Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox
Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous,
walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to
early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the
inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been
ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be
converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had
come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the
intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of
poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming
distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of
timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one.
Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One
had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was,
ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that
the liberal humanism in which they had been raised
failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led
them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted
on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of
gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you
made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought
to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By
the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.

This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for
millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth
and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness
of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in
the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal
Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the
Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace
Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he
thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s
own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered
that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this
tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still
does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and
imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our
physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an
important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact,
it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do
not take a controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot
point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal
history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith as the
means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather
than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that
either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be
true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right.
(He liked this argument so much that he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia
books; either Lucy is lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what
she claimed to see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual
path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest
reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by the funny
coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the
established religion of his own tribe, supported by every institution of the
state, and reinforced by the university he works in, the “God-fearing and
God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as Gladstone called it. But perhaps his
leap from myth to Christian faith wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop
in place. Many of the elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are
the pagan mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its
pre-Christian sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and
Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien
much resented.

If believing shut Lewis off from writing well about belief,
it did get him to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales.
The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together. His
first important book, and his best, is “The Allegory of Love,” a study of epic
poetry that Lewis began writing soon after his conversion. It is full of
enthusiasm for and appreciation of the allegorical epics of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser,
et al.—but it also makes a profound historical argument about the literary
imagination. Until the time of Tasso and Ariosto, he points out, writers had
two worlds available to them: the actual world of experience and the world of
their religion. Only since the Renaissance had writers had a third world, of
the marvellous, of free mythological invention, which is serious but in which
the author does not really believe or make an article of faith. In Ariosto,
Lewis found the beginnings of that “free creation of the marvelous,” slipping
in under the guise of allegory:

The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact,
the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the
post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton were born to. . . . But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back
to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning
the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. . . . The old gods,
when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as
devils. . . . Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within
paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they
could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern
Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining. . . . The gods must be, as
it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the
urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them,
before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to
spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a
marvelous that knows itself as myth.

When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and
wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most
urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and
serious.

Yet, if these words are a declaration of faith, they are also a document of
bad conscience. For, throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always
trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a
writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous
sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the
marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief.
He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it,
so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say.

Marvellous writing in our culture has two homes, children’s literature and
science fiction, and in his forties Lewis began to work in both. His first
effort, the trilogy that begins with “Out of the Silent Planet,” is essentially
science fiction written against science. What is really out there is not more
machines but bigger mysteries. But these books are lacking in vitality, and
seem worked out rather than lived in. They are filled with a kind of easy
Blimpish polemics—the bad scientists are fat and smelly, or atheists. It was
only in the late forties, when he began to write, quickly and almost
carelessly, about the magic world of Narnia, that he began to find a deeper
vein of feeling.

What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with
a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe
itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or
even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences
one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for
kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of
readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes,
encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of
redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in
his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for
less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he
could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his
imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has
known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious
part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully,
allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations
of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is,
after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an
un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four
children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on
the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by
a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking
animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the
lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful
and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding
presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and
succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to
life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the
faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically,
the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that
the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly
uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and
low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures
and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as
humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of
his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion,
starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and
filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and
then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of
Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by
the allegorical impulse. Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there
is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a
Catholic allegory. The Blessed Land across the sea is a retreat for the already
immortal, not, except for Frodo, a reward for the afflicted; dead is dead. The
pathos of Aragorn and Arwen’s marriage is that, after Aragorn’s death, they
will never meet again, in Valinor or elsewhere. It is the modernity of the
existential arrangement, in tension with the archaicism of the material
culture, that makes Tolkien’s myth haunting. In the final Narnia book, “The Last
Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse
is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the
ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the
images just flow.

A startling thing in Lewis’s letters to other believers is
how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief
going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their
beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state
of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not
occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a
belief but a very strong desire to believe. In his extended essay “The Problem
of Pain,” which appeared, propitiously, in 1940, and in his novel “The
Screwtape Letters,” two years later—these are written to a younger devil by an older
one—Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in
progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and
who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has an
easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that
imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared
ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to
explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God
doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a
world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots.
Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run.
This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone
concentration camps.

An old Oxford tradition claims that Bertrand Russell, on being asked why his
concerns had turned so dramatically away from academic philosophy, replied,
with great dignity, “Because I discovered fucking.” So did Lewis, only he was
older. The story of how Lewis came to be seduced by a married woman named—for
fate is a cornier screenwriter than even man is—Joy is so well told in the
“Shadowlands” film that one is almost inclined to imagine it overdrawn. But,
indeed, the real Joy Davidman, a spirited Jewish matron from Westchester who
had been impressed by Lewis’s books, was not delicate and transcendent but
foulmouthed, passionate, a little embarrassing. She drove away his more
bearishly single-minded Oxford friends, including Tolkien. Fierce and
independent-minded (she was played by Debra Winger in the movie but seems more
Barbra Streisand in life), Davidman was a Christian convert who never lost her
native oomph. After she Yokoishly insinuated herself into Lewis’s life, in the
early fifties, she also brought him passion. They “feasted on love,” Lewis
wrote. “No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.” That’s a lot of
crannies for a middle-aged don to be satisfying, but it had a happy effect on
his mind and on his prose.

It is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this story,
becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of salvation through
love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had two kids for him to help
take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems to have happened. Lewis, to the
dismay of his friends, went from being a private prig and common-room hearty to
being a mensch—a C. of E. mensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer,
a few years later, he was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief
Portrayed,” one of the finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without
abandoning his God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of
vacuous bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable?
Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less joblike and
more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather than a querulous
dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the
unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.

“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun
before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other
way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary
world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the
marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic
possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are
in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that
carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and
particularly for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of
the urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street lamp
in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock of crying
white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end in “Voyage of the
Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving Narnian animals in
“Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger hole and part French
Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s description of his lost Northern
home in “The Horse and His Boy,” called Narnia but so clearly a British
composite (“Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the
many rivers, of the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep
forests”)—these are why Lewis will be remembered.

For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite;
they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by
poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed
by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn
out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic.
Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their
light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the
believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and
kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving
Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding
that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our
experience, much less to our hopes.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief,
too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily
straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is,
like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the
snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the
Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in
Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the
darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an
armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

Comments

[riegel.livejournal.com]

больше всего понравилась фамилия автора статьи
добавлю в коллекцию. у меня там уже есть patricia zapor

[guest-informant.livejournal.com]

За Патрисию Запор спасибо, дополнение хорошее. А то у нас уже целая серия прогрессивной литературы подбирается: Алан Труп, Стив Кокаин, Манда Скотт, Адам Гопник, Дэвид Безмозгис, Юджин Поганы, Майкл Корыта и примкнувшая к ним Минетта Уолтерс.