On the fiftieth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death, Lev Grossman has a consideration of Lewis over at Time. Grossman has been deeply influenced by Lewis’s Narnia books, most obviously in his Magicians series, and reading him on the pleasures of discovering Lewis as a child and the felicities of his prose is a delight.

Especially interesting is Grossman’s take on the reckoning that any fan of the Narnia books must make with Lewis as an adult, when one discovers his idolization and appropriation within the conservative evangelical community, and the possibly religious agenda of his books for children. Here’s Grossman:

I’m not among those who are bothered by Lewis’s Christian apologetics: I was raised in a household virtually without religion, so I don’t really have any nerves to touch on that score. I was more troubled by Aslan’s role in the Narnian cosmos. Why does he allow so much evil to befall his people? Why, for example, in Prince Caspian, does he spend so much time playing peekaboo with Lucy while Narnians are suffering and dying?

That tension — the fact that Narnia is a world with a living, present god in it, and a world with evil and suffering in it — didn’t cause me to give up on Lewis. It made me want to talk back to him, through my own novels, as Pullman does, and any number of other writers besides. It’s a sign of Lewis’ greatness that, although he’s been dead for a half a century, people still need to talk to him: to ask him questions, to air their grievances, to share his sense of wonder, and to tell him stories the way he told us stories. If there’s any Deeper Magic in this fallen, Aslan-less world, that is it.

Lovely.