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This is a very strange book—for different reasons. In the story monstrous animals appear and disappear. But they are not animals, at least not all of the time. They represent various thoughts we have in our minds, but more than that, more than just thoughts. As far as the story is concerned, they become existing entities. They are not just ideas in our mind; They occupy space and time. If one of them is a dinosaur, you, or at least the people next to you are in danger. Now there are people in the story who are just bystanders, they just watch what’s happening. The thoughts that turn into, say, lions or eagles, are not in their heads, but they can be inspired to think them, and then the thoughts are in their heads, and other people in the story are endangered. 

The story is full of such strange things, and I don’t think I would have finished reading it if were not that the writer is a highly honored and close friend of C.S. Lewis, In fact, the writer is sometimes included in the membership of THE INKLINGS. (Look them up.) Williams also was close to Tolkien, but nothing in the Fellowship of the Ring comes anywhere near a monster lion or a monster eagle that forces itself into your living room and threatens your life. Although there are strange things in Tolkien: the Hobbits are saved by the Ents. It took Gandolf to withstand Sauron, and then there is Gollum lurking around.  

There is one magic scene in Williams’ book. The Phoenix has gone up in fire—as Phoenix do: “Forever new; forever old”,  then “the red glow changed to a soft white light in the midst of which there grew the form of a Lamb, and for a moment which lasted for eternity, the Lion and the Lamb played together.

I do not have the powers to critically judge this book. I leave that to better minds, and there are many of them, but I can pass on to you some quotations. “He loved; yet not he, but Love living in him.” “Such was the inmost life of the universe, infinitely destroyed, infinitely recreated, breaking from its continual death into continual life.  “The outer with the inner. The inner with the outer.” “The Ephemera of eternity.”