Laura Miller Read Free Page B

this, in the end, is contained in seven children’s novels. These books are far larger than they seem from the outside, and
The Magician’s Book
is an attempt to explore some of their interior terrain. There is one major thematic province, however, that I will do no more than fly over: Lewis’s Christianity. Many, many other writers have dealt exhaustively with this aspect of Lewis’s work, to the point of obscuring other elements in the Chronicles, the ones that appeal to me. Lewis’s theological writings don’t interest me much, and while religion is an unavoidable subject when considering Narnia, my goal has been to illuminate its other, unsung dimensions, especially the deep roots of the Chronicles in the universal experiences of childhood and in English literature.
    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.

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