Laura Miller (3 page)

I am no longer young, and I can’t read the Chronicles the way I once did, with the same absolute belief. Some of what I find there still moves me profoundly, but other bits now grate and disturb. I began
The Magician’s Book
hoping to explain not only why but
how
it is still possible for me to love these books, despite the biases and small-mindedness they sometimes display, despite often feeling that I wouldn’t have much liked the man who wrote them, despite the proselytizing that most adults assume is their only real content.

I don’t believe that my appreciation amounts to mere nostalgia or a yearning for my own lost innocence. At the very least, that would be a betrayal of the child I once was.
She
would have had no patience with such mopey sentimentality; one of the reasons she prized the Chronicles was her belief (correct, I still think) that they educated her on the nature of evil as well as good, and that she was the better for it. I like to think that in the end, I’ve kept faith with her.

A Note on the Order of the Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia have been numbered by their publishers in two different orders. The first, and the order in which I originally read them, is the order of their publication:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Horse and His Boy; The Magician’s Nephew;
and
The Last Battle
. In recent years, citing a letter C. S. Lewis wrote to a child in 1957, Lewis’s estate (which is managed by his stepson, Douglas Gresham) has specified that the books be numbered according to the chronological sequence of the fictional events they describe:
The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Last Battle
. Feelings run high on this matter. Lewis expressed the intention of one day going back to the Chronicles to correct various problems, and perhaps he would have revised them to make the current order more consistent with the content of the books themselves. However, he never got around to this, and as is, some lines in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
don’t make much sense if you presume that its readers are already familiar with
The Magician’s Nephew.

Most of the people I’ve talked with about Narnia are old enough to have read the books in the original order and, like me, they can’t imagine discovering them in any other sequence, for reasons of art as well as logic. I remain unconvinced that Lewis himself had any definite opinions on the proper order in which to read the Chronicles (he was probably just being kind to his young correspondent), and even if he did, I would still recommend that they be read in the original configuration. Accordingly, throughout this book, I will discuss all seven books as if the original ordering still prevailed.

Part One

Songs of Innocence

Chapter One

The Light in the Forest

L
ong before I learned of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne’s parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover each time, she could have a copy of her own.

This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
(then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins’s magic ring).
The Hobbit
is long for a children’s book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family’s manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores.

There is no reader more devoted than a bookish child who has found the story that suits her perfectly. Thirty years later, Wilanne would turn me into one of those children when she handed me a slim hardcover bound in gray fabric with the image of a little stag stamped on the front, and said, “I think you’ll like this one.” It was her copy; she’d had the book for a while, but I was the first of her second-grade students that she’d tried it on. “You were a child who needed to read C. S. Lewis,” she said firmly when, not long ago, I asked her why.

“How did you know? How can you tell something like that?”

“I can’t explain. It’s just one of those things that happens.”

Even today, this intuition strikes me as slightly supernatural, in the same way that Narnia seemed to emerge, by some miracle, out of my own unspoken self. “When you brought the book back,” Wilanne remembered as we sat in her cozy apartment, surrounded by books, knitting, and cats, “You told me, and this I have always remembered, that you didn’t know that there were other people who had the kind of imagination that you did.”

Wilanne and I were not, I think, unhappy children. I grew up in a comfortable American home, in a big, intact family, with a lawyer father and a homemaker mom, and she still remembers feeling fortunate that her father had a steady job when so many others didn’t. But we were neither of us, I suspect, entirely satisfied with that.

“You were automatically one of
my
kids,” Wilanne said when I asked her what she remembered about first meeting me forty years ago. By this, she means one of those children “interested in the imagination and in the relationship between the real and the unreal. They are entirely capable of telling the difference between truth and falsehood, but they prefer the falsehood occasionally.” Nothing exciting had ever happened to me, was how I saw it, and I was convinced that nothing exciting ever could, as long as I was stuck in a world of station wagons and jump rope, backyard swim classes and spelling tests. Then Mrs. Belden handed me a book.

I’ve read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
so often since then that I no longer have a distinct recollection of the first time. What was it like to be genuinely
surprised
when Lucy Pevensie’s fingertips brushed against branches instead of fur coats as she first walked through the wardrobe and into the snowy woods? That sensation is lost to me. What remains is a dim recollection of how life was shaped before I knew about Narnia, and a more distinct sense of what it was like afterward. I had found a new world, which at the same time felt like a place I’d always known existed. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to be wistful about the fact that I’d never read this perfect book for the first time again. All I wanted was more.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? Once I began to confer with other people who had loved the Chronicles as children, I kept hearing stories, like my own, of countless, intoxicated rereadings. “I would read other books, of course,” wrote the novelist Neil Gaiman, “but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books.” Later, when I had the chance to talk with him about the Chronicles in person, he told me, “The weird thing about the Narnia books for me was that mostly they seemed true. There was a level on which I was absolutely willing at age six, age seven, to accept them as a profound and real truth. Unquestioned, there was definitely a Narnia. This stuff had happened. These were reports from a real place.”

Most of us persuaded our parents to buy us boxed sets of all seven Chronicles, but I also saved up my allowance and occasional small cash gifts from relatives to buy a hardcover copy of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
one of the few times in my life I’ve ever succumbed to the collector’s impulse. If I hadn’t been able to obtain a copy of the book, I have no doubt that I, too, would have resorted to typing up one of my own. This was not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. I was not yet capable of thinking about it in this way, but I’d been enthralled by the most elementary of readerly metaphors: A little girl opens the hinged door of some commonplace piece of household furniture and steps through it into another world. I opened the hinged cover of a book and did the same.

Why did I fall so hard and so completely, and why was a land of fauns and centaurs and talking animals so exactly what I wanted to read about? Not long ago, a friend told me about her nine-year-old daughter’s infatuation with Narnia. My friend had grown up loving historical novels about “prairie girls,” and while she didn’t disapprove of her daughter’s appetite for fantasy, it baffled her. “I just don’t get it,” she complained.

If you had asked me at the same age why I liked
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
better than, say,
Little Women
or any other story that was about lives more like my own, I wouldn’t have been able to answer; it seemed crazy to prefer anything else. The best analogy I can make is a corny one, to the film version of
The Wizard of Oz
and that famous moment when Dorothy ventures out of the drab, black-and-white farmhouse that’s carried her all the way from drab, black-and-white Kansas and into the Technicolor of Oz. Who in her right mind would poke her head out for just a sec, then slam the door shut, and shout, “Take me back to Kansas”?

Once upon a time, people used to label the kind of book I would come to crave — the kind “with magic,” as I usually thought of it — as escapist. Consequently, readers with this taste often have a chip on their shoulders. Lewis, who enjoyed the occasional H. Rider Haggard adventure or H. G. Wells novel in addition to Anglo-Saxon epics and medieval allegories, wrote several essays defending science fiction and “fairy tales” from the scornful advocates of stringent realism. I, on the other hand, came up in the age of metafiction, postmodernism, and magic realism; realism no longer commands all the prestige. Lewis’s arguments on behalf of fantastic literature feel a bit superfluous to me. Still, I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face. Perhaps this still happens, say, to kids who obsess about Harry Potter. Or perhaps adults are now so thankful to see children reading that they don’t quibble with the books they choose.

Did I use storybooks to get away from my life? Of course I did, but probably no more so than the kids who chose
Harriet the Spy
instead of books about dragons and witches. (For the record, I read and liked
Harriet the Spy,
too.) Insofar as they are stories at all, all stories are escapes from life; all stories are unrealistic, or at least all of the good ones are. Life, unlike stories, has no theme, no formal unity, and (to unbelievers, at least) no readily apparent meaning. That’s why we
want
stories. No art form can hope to exactly reproduce the sensations that make up being alive, but that’s OK: life, after all, is what we
already
have. From art, we want something different, something with a shape and a purpose. Any departure a story might make from real-world laws against talking animals and flying carpets seems relatively inconsequential compared to this first, great leap away from reality. Perhaps that’s why humanity’s oldest stories are full of outlandish events and supernatural beings; the idea that a story must somehow mimic actual everyday experience would probably have seemed daft to the first tellers. Why even bother to tell a story about something so commonplace?

There were particular fantastic elements that drew me to Narnia at that age, and they were not always what people associate with fairy tales. I disliked princesses and any other female whose chief occupation was waiting around to be rescued, but I also had no great interest in knights, swords, and combat. The Chronicles, which are relatively free of such elements, spoke to me across a spectrum of yearning. The youngest part of my child self loved Narnia’s talking animals. The girl I was fast growing into fiercely seized upon the idea of possessing an entire, secret world of my own. And the seeds of the adult I would become reveled in the autonomy of Lewis’s child heroes and the adventures that awaited them once they escaped the wearying bonds of grown-up supervision.

Chapter Two

Animal-Land

O
ne of the first stories I found both true and terribly sad is a chapter that comes in the middle of P. L. Travers’s
Mary Poppins,
an interlude devoted to the infant twins, John and Barbara Banks, in their nursery. (Jane and Michael, the older and better-known Banks siblings, have gone off to a party.) The twins can understand the language of the sunlight, the wind, and a cheeky starling who perches on the windowsill, but they are horrified when the bird informs them that they will soon forget all of this. “There never was a human being that remembered after the age of one — at the very latest — except, of course, Her.” (This “Great Exception,” as the starling calls her, is Mary Poppins, of course.) “You’ll hear all right,” Mary Poppins tells John and Barbara, “but you won’t understand.”

This news makes the babies cry, which brings their mother bustling into the nursery; she blames the fuss on teething. When she tries to soothe John and Barbara by saying that everything will be all right after their teeth come in, they only cry harder. “It won’t be all right, it will be all wrong,” Barbara protests. “I don’t want teeth!” screams John. But, of course, their mother can’t understand them any better than she can understand the wind or the starling.

It’s at age one that we acquire our first words. This story, which made me so melancholy as a girl, is, among other things, about the price we pay for language, for the ability to tell our mothers that it’s not our teeth that are upsetting us but something else. It alludes to what we have given up to be understood by her and all the other adults, our lost brotherhood with the rest of creation. Words are what separate us from the animals, or as Travers would have it, from the elements themselves, from everything that can simply be without the scrim of consciousness intervening.