Guardian Review

CS Lewis knew few children, yet his Narnia stories know how to give child readers narrative satisfaction. The objections to the covert Christianity of the novels continue, yet rarely is there any analysis of why Lewis's transformation of Christian narrative is so successful. Some have complained that the presence of the apparently divine Aslan guarantees the triumph of good and takes away free agency from the child heroes and heroines. Yet the arrangement of benign fatality is native to much children's fiction (and Shakespearean comedy, for that matter). From early on in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , the talk of Aslan's impending arrival and the prophecies about "two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve" reigning in Narnia assure the reader that evil will be defeated. Lewis's Christian certainty is felt by many readers simply as narrative confidence. The narrator is conducting his characters, as much as his reader, to a happy ending. The narrator's presence is the guarantee of the narrative's benignity, as much as in a novel by Henry Fielding. As Edmund travels to meet the Witch in order to betray his siblings, the narrator tells us that if he had not had a sudden thought about becoming king, "I really think he might have given up the whole plan and gone back and owned up and made friends with the others". The narrator tries to be generous. He will not describe all the monstrous beings who attend the White Witch, "because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book". Pace his anti- Christian foes, this does not mean that Lewis's child characters do not make choices. (The first of his Narnia novels indeed turns on Edmund's mean-spirited and self-deceiving choice to serve the Witch.) It is just that their decisions are sanctioned by some greater power. Lewis's children greet their experiences with the lack of surprise that will become the entry condition for Narnia. The transition from ordinary to magical is brilliantly managed in the famous description of coats giving way to branches as Lucy pushes into the wardrobe. It is not so strange, to Lucy at least. The opening part of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is all about credulity - the truthful Lucy tells her disbelieving siblings about Narnia - and a kind of parable about the book's own method. Lewis has his main characters experience new worlds unsuspi ciously, as if their best bet is to apply the standards they have always trusted. Ordinary things are still around them. There is the intoxicating Turkish delight, of course, but also Mr Tumnus's tea and Mrs Beaver's marmalade roll. The very title of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe emphasises the meeting of the domestic and the magical. Here Lewis learnt most from E Nesbit (just before it was published he told his would-be biographer that it was "in the tradition of E Nesbit"). Nesbit's 1908 short story "The Aunt and Annabel" features a magical world entered via "Bigwardrobeinspareroom". The opening of The Magician's Nephew sets that novel at the time when "the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road" (the Bastables being the family featured in Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure-Seekers and its sequels). Perhaps the most memorable episode in The Magician's Nephew involves Digory and Polly's introduction, by mistake, of Queen Jadis to late Victorian London. This imitates the passage in Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet where the Bastable children accidentally bring the Queen of Babylon back to London. Lewis's sources were many. Mr Tumnus tells Lucy about nymphs and dryads, Silenus and Bacchus, but also about dwarfs and intelligent trees. We encounter every kind of fabulous being: giants, unicorns, centaurs, dragons, winged horses, minotaurs and werewolves. Lewis's friend JRR Tolkien was irritated by the inconsistency of the mythological borrowings. The final straw was the appearance of Father Christmas, jovial harbinger of the collapse of the White Witch's power. Tolkien's own fiction delights in the exorbitant, internally consistent detail of the imagined world he creates, with a fully plotted history and carefully described geography. The precedent for Lewis's selective mingling from different narrative bestiaries (imitated by JK Rowling) was one of his favourite literary works, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene , a veritable kit- box of all mythologies. Lewis's model was inclusive, adaptive, a place for any imagined being. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and CS Lewis's biographer AN Wilson at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA on December 21 for a discussion of the Narnia books. Doors open at 6.30pm and entry costs pounds 7. To book call 020 7886 9281 or email book.club@guardian.co.uk To order a seven-volume boxed set of the Narnia novels for pounds 35.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 Caption: article-Book club.1 CS Lewis knew few children, yet his Narnia stories know how to give child readers narrative satisfaction. The objections to the covert Christianity of the novels continue, yet rarely is there any analysis of why Lewis's transformation of Christian narrative is so successful. Some have complained that the presence of the apparently divine Aslan guarantees the triumph of good and takes away free agency from the child heroes and heroines. Yet the arrangement of benign fatality is native to much children's fiction (and Shakespearean comedy, for that matter). From early on in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , the talk of Aslan's impending arrival and the prophecies about "two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve" reigning in Narnia assure the reader that evil will be defeated. Lewis's Christian certainty is felt by many readers simply as narrative confidence. The narrator is conducting his characters, as much as his reader, to a happy ending. - John Mullan.