The second half of this great work is not as great as the first. It tells the hero's tale on the way home from his adventure to the world's end's well. It is more upbeat, less mysterious, and the author attempted (and perhaps succeeded) at stretching a sense of triumph for a volume's length. But it doesn't have the strange mystery and power as the first volume.

I am not alone in thinking this. C. S. Lewis asked, rhetorically, how one could write a book as good as the title to this one! And he noted that the greatness of the first half is in the yearning and the mystery, while the second half had a humbler cast. And this, he wrote, was almost allegorical in and of itself, for the second half mirrors the first, but after the revelations have happened. And then there is a certain lack of luster, because the dim sight, in glass, is more tantalizing than reality. The book thus is structured as "a mirror of the truth."

The Lewis quote is at the back of this edition, but its full context is given elsewhere. ( )