The Magic of Narnia

Before my student days, I knew C.S. Lewis merely as the author of The Screwtape Letters, which were read out at morning assembly in my school. And very whimsical and condescending I found them, feeding you Christianity by pretending to speak as the devil--though I had to admit this was a very good idea.

Judge my surprise when I went up to Oxford and discovered that this devil's advocate was a small pear-shaped man with a rolling voice and quite formidable learning. His lectures were called Mediaeval Prolegomena--a title, you might think, to put anyone off. In fact, he filled the largest lecture hall to overflowing every week, discoursing from memory about the underlying beliefs in the Middle Ages with such vision, humor, and total clarity that his audience became excited enough almost to cheer.

The books are all surprisingly short, but an immense amount happens in each, apparently leisurely. Yet with all the crowding action you are never in doubt as to what is going on. You can see the action and the land it happens in, so that quite young children (one of mine was only two) can understand every incident. This is despite the fact that Lewis mines material from his own huge learning, drawing on theology, Renaissance geography, myth, folktale, most medieval texts, and even early children's books, and that, through all this, he contrives to talk about the obscurer movements of the human mind in the face of faith. I marveled and learned from him.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis said, started with his vision of a faun walking in the snow beside an old-fashioned streetlight. It begins a little stiffly (and this stiffness never leaves his child protagonists), because he is feeling his way, and does not really take off until the advent of the lion, Aslan, with whom Lewis discovered how he could tap into a deeper tragedy and triumph. For me this was a major discovery: that you can invoke the whole range of human thought and feeling by starting with one simple, clear scene. But Lewis himself asserted it was the talking animals that fascinated him, and he has a field day with those in Prince Caspian. By this book he is totally assured, and the pace and scope of the story are breathtaking--myths mingle, alternate worlds clash, and you get a profound sense of the changes history brings.

That was almost my children's favourite book, but the one they put top was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lewis plunders medieval and Renaissance travel tales to give a limpid, episodic account of Caspian's journey to the ends of eternity. Their favourite episode was where Eustace gets turned into a dragon, because he gets what he deserves.

This is a major theme in all the Narnia books: You get what you earn. If your misfortune is undeserved, than you can overcome it with help from Beyond. The Silver Chair is all about this, but the only thing my children liked in it was gloomy old Puddlegum. They were uncomfortable with the almost overt expression of sexual seduction and they did not get the other point Lewis is trying to make here: that the moral and physical dangers you have been warned about are not always easy to recognize when you actually meet them.

My favorite is The Magician's Nephew. This is how to write a prequel. I admire the way Lewis contrives an explanation of that solitary streetlight in Narnia by shamelessly borrowing from E. Nesbit--and improving on her--to do it. I am utterly overwhelmed by The Wood Between the Worlds, including the way the kids nearly forget to mark their home pool, and by the sheer magical invention of things like the toffee tree, which arises purely from logically following through the magical premises. This taught me how magic should work. And The Horse and His Boy is a lesson in how to slot a sequel in at right angles, as it were. This happens during the time of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but it starts from another country and works back to Narnia.

I never could get on with The Last Battle, though. Reading as an adult, I recognized Antrichrist and the Apocalypse and too readily knew everyone was dead. But this was my nephew's favorite of them all, because--as he told me at length--it is so exciting and, when you think everyone is dead, they all come alive again. No, not in Heaven, he insisted. For real. Well, this is the magic of the Narnia books for you.

Diana Wynne Jones published her first book in 1973. Since then she has written over 40 more, including Witch Week and her latest, Year of the Griffin . She lives in England