Sherry Chandler » The Narnian
The Narnian
Alan Jacobs has come out with a well-timed new biography of C. S. Lewis: The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis . Here is a snippet of a review from The New Republic by Richard Jenkyns:
Why Lewis wrote the Narnia books at all is a puzzling question. The best writers for children have been, like Lewis, disproportionately childless (Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson) or the parents of only children (Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne), and their books have often originated from stories invented to give pleasure to real children: Carroll, Grahame, and Milne again, as well as Kipling’s Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Puck of Pook’s Hill. But Lewis hardly knew any children at the time and he does not appear to have liked them much. He seems to have been puzzled himself: he had simply felt, he said later, that a fairy tale for children was “exactly what I must write — or burst.”
The sort of story that he wanted to tell was more unusual at the time he was writing than it may seem now. The theme of the otherworld — the tale of a child transported into another order of existence and usually returning home at the end — was originally created for stories meant for quite small children. The current superstars of children’s literature, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have taken this theme and used it in books intended for a somewhat older market. Adolescents today read a lot of fantasy, but at the time that Lewis was writing this was not so. Fantasy was for small children, and older children moved on to supposedly realistic stories of adventure — the sort of story of which Treasure Island is the supreme example. The combination of otherworld fantasy with a kind of moral ambition that we meet in Pullman and in the later Harry Potter books originated with Lewis.
I didn’t discover the Narnia stories until I was in my late twenties, when my husband and I were reclaiming our lost childhoods together. I had already devoured all of Tolkien and I found the world of Narnia brighter, simpler, and just as charming. I wasn’t overbothered by allegory in either fantasy world.
Later on, I tried to read The Screwtape Letters and I did read some of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) but I was disappointed. In these books, I did find the allegory much stronger than the story.
A decade later, when I began to read them to my own children, I pulled back from both authors. Tolkien I found uncomfortably classist and Lewis preachy. I found that I didn’t want to raise my children on stories of the great battle between good and evil. Interesting how having children makes you define your own values.
My kids didn’t let my disapprobation stop them from enjoying the books and like many kids I think, they read about Narnia blissfully unaware of any specifically Christian allegory. They loved “Star Wars,” too.
I have no desire to see any of the movies based on these books. I am not much dazzled by the wonders of computer animation, and I prefer to keep my fantasy concepts my own. I don’t plan to see the new “King Kong” either, just to show what kind of a humbug I am. I figure three versions of that movie is two too many, and besides, all the fun is in the campy old Kong of the 30s. “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
Lewis valued allegory as a literary form and spend his entire academic career studying such works as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. He was also a very influential religious writer. Interesting that this new biography seems to treat the Narnia series as the pinnacle of his accomplishment. Or maybe it’s just being hyped that way.
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