50 Books in 50 Years: Book #1

I read a book! Seven children's books, actually, which I'll count as one adult book.

All the fuss about the Narnia movie inspired me to check out the Narnia books from the library and re-read them. I hadn't looked at them since I was in college, though they'd been great favorites of mine as a child. I read them in order of publication, not in the Narnia-chronological order that the publisher has, for whatever misguided reason, declared canonical.

Some recent discussion of these books (in the New Yorker and at Salon) has pointed out that they tend to be thinly plotted. This is, I think, true only of the first two (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian). Lion moves amazingly quickly; to borrow Fitzgerald's phrase, it has no second act. It's all introduction and climax, with hardly any development in the middle. Caspian's plot is more engaging, but the title character hardly has a chance to develop as a person. And he's not much of a hero: all his problems get solved by someone else, either by Aslan (the series' lion Jesus) or by the Pevensie children from England.

Still, these first two books do a lovely job of introducing the land of Narnia itself, and that's an accomplishment worth praising. I have the feeling that a lot of children would love to live in Narnia, or at least visit it like the human characters. Lewis was very good at mingling the fantastic with the ordinary: it's funny that he spends so much time describing homey meals of bacon and potatoes and mushrooms that are cooked by dwarves and talking badgers.

The third and fourth books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, are my favorites (plus the sixth, The Magician's Nephew). Dawn Treader takes the characters to places that are outlandish and magical even for Narnians, and it introduces Eustace Scrubb, who seems to have had special significance for Lewis — he's the most interesting human character in this book, and also in The Silver Chair and the final one, The Last Battle. In his adult Christian writing, Lewis put great emphasis on human self-loathing as the path to salvation through Christ; and that's certainly the story he's telling in the case of Eustace, who is magically transformed into a dragon and has to be returned to human form by the series's God character, Aslan.

Eustace is also one of only two characters who are depicted at school. He and his friend Jill Pole are students at "Experiment House," which is Lewis's attempt in The Silver Chair to mock modern educational environments. But Lewis himself was deeply traumatized by his time at a thoroughly traditional public school (he later called it 'Belsen', which in the English context is like calling it 'Auschwitz'), and his jabs at "Experiment House" are mild compared to his depiction of school bullies (who can, of course, be found at any school). The rest of The Silver Chair takes Eustace and Jill to the far north in search of a lost prince; they are accompanied by a large, depressive frog-like character named Puddleglum, whose perpetual gloom is quite funny (to me, anyway). This is one of the best books in the series, provided you skip over the poor attempts at apologetic argument once the prince is freed from his enchantment.

The Horse and His Boy is a great yarn, except that Lewis is at his weakest in depicting the Calormenes, recently described (by Adam Gopnik) as "oily cartoon Muslims who live in the south, wear pointed shoes, and talk funny."

The Last Battle is probably the weakest of the series simply because it's overloaded with theological allegory in place of magic and adventure. Most of the last third (or so) of the book is Lewis wrapping up the series with thinly veiled religious explanations. Nonetheless, the first two-thirds are still quite effective, particularly as Lewis depicts the dreadful events of Narnia's conquest.

The Magician's Nephew is, by contrast, one of the best books in the group. Some of the scenes in this book stuck quite deep in my imagination when I first read them: the creation of Narnia, for example, and Digory's quest for the magic apple, and especially the children's visit to the dead city of Charn.

The overall spirit of this book is optimistic and loving, as befits a creation story; and Lewis gets some little details just right. (For example, when Aslan creates vegetation, the new grass spreads out from his feet as he walks. And the "toffee tree" in a later chapter is a charming idea, and nicely described.)

Reading it as an adult, I also had a much better conception of just how nasty and manipulative Digory's uncle was — as a child, I just took for granted that the main characters weren't going into mortal danger. But as an adult, and a parent, well —! To send children into another world, into who knows what danger! Unthinkable.

The series as a whole holds up pretty well, though I'm much more conscious of (and less patient with) the theological elements than I was as a child. It's nice to see how seriously Lewis took it, for example taking the trouble to make sure that the children's means of getting to Narnia are different in each book. And almost all of the books have elements that should excite the imagination of almost any reader: the rediscovery of the palace treasury in Prince Caspian, for example, or the entry into Narnia in Dawn Treader, or the underground world in The Silver Chair, or the dead city of Charn that I mentioned earlier. I'm glad I took the time to look at these books again.