Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  “Lewis had to get a few token adventures out of the way, but now he’s come to the real story. There is something visionary about it”

  Poor Caspian has to stop and turn back with the ship, because he finally realises his duties still lie in Narnia; but the children and Reepicheep go on in a smaller boat. What happens? Surely it will be an anticlimax. Well, no: there’s a huge wave at the end of the world (not a waterfall over a cliff, as I remembered) that Reepicheep mounts and disappears, and beyond the sun (what a stirring concept) lies a barely glimpsed realm of impossibly high mountains that is Aslan’s country. The children meet Aslan for the last time, he tears a hole in the sky for them, and they return to their own world. All they remember of Aslan’s country is a sound and a smell, and Lucy says of it, ‘It would break your heart.’ Why, was it so sad? ‘Sad! No.’

  “I find this extraordinary: all the yearning after something so ineffable, and descriptions of the indescribable, that I can scarcely believe exist in a children’s book.”

  I find this extraordinary: all the yearning after something so ineffable, and descriptions of the indescribable, that I can scarcely believe exist in a children’s book. I’m reminded strongly of two things I also find very moving. One is the end of a film, The Truman Show, when Truman sails off in his little boat across the sea until he gets to the sky, and a godlike voice offers him a choice, and he chooses to walk through the door in the sky to the real world. The other is Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’, in which the king is about to set out on one last voyage:

  And this gray spirit yearning in desire

  To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

  Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.

  Tennyson’s Ulysses is old, and he’s sailing west, which suggests a movement towards death. But the Dawn Treader voyagers are young, and they are sailing east, perhaps to a new birth. And as I write this, I discover I’ve got it the wrong way round. It isn’t the Dawn Treader that has reminded me of Truman and Tennyson. It was Truman and Tennyson, when I first encountered them, who reminded me of the Dawn Treader.

  What does it all mean? With the piper at the gates of dawn scene in The Wind in the Willows, it’s anyone’s guess. But with Lewis, we do have some knowledge of what he intended, though I find myself reluctant to confront it. Suppose someone had told me, when I first read The Chronicles of Narnia, that the series was a Christian allegory for children? What would I have felt? Utter astonishment and disbelief. Or perhaps disappointment and anger, as if all these wondrous tales were just sugar on the pill. Fortunately, it was many years later that I found this out.

  The Christian didacticism of the Narnia books delights some and annoys others, notably Philip Pullman, who was inspired to write his Dark Materials series because he wanted to create an atheistic fantasy. And yet the references aren’t obvious, unless you go looking for them. They are probably clearest in the first book Lewis wrote, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Aslan is sacrificed to the White Witch’s knife, and then comes back from the dead. Aslan makes only rare appearances in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but he intervenes at just the right moment, to warn characters against temptation or to give them courage or to save them (there’s a great sequence when Eustace the dragon is gingerly trying to scrape off his skin, and Aslan gives him a deep painful rip with his claws, and off comes the dragon hide to reveal the raw boy). At the end of the world, Aslan is a lamb who becomes a lion, and he tells the children: ‘In your world I have another name… You were brought to Narnia that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.’ But that’s the only clear Jesus-Aslan link in the book, and it went right over my head the first time round.

  “The Christian didacticism of the Narnia books delights some and annoys others”

  I’m curious about the author’s state of mind when he wrote the series, so I turn to C. S. Lewis, A. N. Wilson’s splendid biography. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was begun in 1939, but Lewis really got going on it a decade later, and the six books that followed were all completed by 1953. At that time Lewis was an English don at Magdalen College, Oxford, in early middle age, already well-known as a formidable intellect, vigorous theologian and literary critic, reaching a wide adult audience through his books and radio broadcasts about Christianity. But it sounds as if he wasn’t in a good place in the late 1940s to early 1950s. The people who shared his home and his life were failing. His beloved adoptive mother Mrs Jane Moore (also possibly his one-time lover, Wilson speculates) was slowly dying; his equally beloved brother Warnie was sinking further into alcoholism; and his important friendship with another Oxford don and great fantasy writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, was cooling.

  Lewis believed profoundly in the existence of another world beyond our own. He had a religious conversion at the age of thirty-two after a conversation with Tolkien, who had argued that the story of Christ is simply a true myth. But he had a debate on this subject with the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe at about the time he began the Narnia books, and was soundly beaten. Wilson thinks this reawoke his boyish fears of a bullying witch-like woman denying him his other world. It all goes back to Lewis losing his mother at the age of nine, and it gets psychologically complicated and murky. So maybe there was a better way to tell the truth, as Lewis saw it, than by argument? You don’t have to be Freud to realise it might be a relief and a liberation to get into a small dark place, push your way through a tunnel of furs and come out somewhere quite different, into that other world the grown-ups say you can’t have; and then just see what happens next. Perhaps you can defeat the witch after all.

  “Lewis believed profoundly in the existence of another world beyond our own.”

  Lewis seems to have begun quite tentatively, but ‘Aslan came bounding into it’, pulled the story together, and then pulled the six stories in after him. Certainly they were never windows onto a vast, meticulously created universe of the kind that Tolkien devised with his Middle-earth. Narnia is impressionistic and eclectic, borrowing from one mythology here, another there, and although Lewis certainly knew his sources, the reader doesn’t have a sense of a solid iceberg lying beneath the little peaks that break the surface. For children, it doesn’t matter, any more than the theology matters. The books were instant hits and have since sold more than 100 million copies in 47 languages.

  There is one more thing I must do. I’ve read about the end of the world in geography, which I love, and now I must read again about the end of the world in time. So I pick up The Last Battle, and after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader it feels several points up on the Richter scale of strangeness. Here is an uneasy Antichrist-meets-Animal Farm fable with a good god, an evil god, a fake god and some refreshingly down-to-earth talking beasts. Like the Dawn Treader, the story seems to want to get the small-scale stuff out of the way and go on to the mind-boggling stuff: an apocalypse, a last judgement and a journey where all the children who have visited Narnia at various times discover that they have died, somewhat improbably, in a railway accident in England, and are now together in heaven, though nobody uses that word.

  The apocalypse and last judgement seem a bit per-functory and rushed to me now, and also remote: they are seen through a doorway, so it’s like watching a disaster movie. The Narnian heaven is a larger, better version of Narnia; there’s also a larger, better England; and beyond them are yet larger and better places. As one of the dead people says: ‘It’s all in Plato!’ But I remember all too well that as a child I wasn’t having it. I was very eager to go through the wardrobe, but I wasn’t ready to die and go to heaven, even in a story.

  “Reading now, it staggers me that Lewis is so determined to present such a vast metaphysical concept to children, and I can only admire his imagination and his zeal.”

  Reading now, it staggers me that Lewis is so determined to present such a vast metaphysical concept to children, and I can only admire his imagination and his zeal.

  But I’m bothered by his ethics, and not just with the
momentary qualm I feel reading about the Calormenes, the Narnians’ old enemies, ‘smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.’ No, what gets me is that you can’t get into this heavenly place unless you believe. So a band of sceptical dwarfs are stuck in their own dark illusions, and poor Susan (who is still alive) doesn’t get to the Narnian heaven at all, and perhaps never will. Her sin is that she grew up too fast – we’re told she’s ‘interested in nothing but nylons and lip-stick and invitations’ – and doesn’t believe in Narnia any more.

  “The Narnia books are thrilling and precious to me still because they opened up a golden realm I longed to believe in”

  Oh, Clive Staples Lewis, how can you be so mean? I sense Louisa Alcott–style finger-wagging; and this time, there’s no redemption in sight. I am not alone: the problem of Susan, I discover, has bothered Narnia readers such as Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, who wrote a story about it.

  The Narnia books are thrilling and precious to me still because they opened up a golden realm I longed to believe in, and for a while I succeeded. So here’s a new hypothesis: I needed to be transported into another world, whether natural or magical. All the books so far have done this for me. But I needed a choice. I never wanted another world I had to believe in.

  THE SHUDDER AND THE COLD SEED

  Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

  edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise

  This book was my pornography. For a start, it was not a book for children. I found it one day on a high shelf in my parents’ library, a place of vaguely decadent adult classics (Thaïs by Anatole France, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Francois Rabelais’s The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, editions of ‘The Yellow Book’) that in theory were forbidden reading, but the policing was very lax. I used to take these books down and skim them from time to time, but they seemed fusty and dull, and I couldn’t see what there was to get excited about.

  I knew at once this book was different. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before: it was almost as if it had arrived on the shelf of its own will, and sat waiting for me. It was fat, soberly bound in dark grey and blue, and the title was mesmerising. The words ‘Great, Tales’ and ‘Supernatural’ were enticing enough, but the clincher word was ‘Terror’. I loved being frightened and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was my reading rite of passage. I had graduated from the Jabberwock, the Banksia Men, the Ugly-Wuglies and the Dark Island; I was ready to try sterner stuff.

  “This book was my pornography”

  I had no idea how stern it would be. Even today, I have nightmares about this book. Not about the stories themselves, but about reading it; the feeling that I was about to get to something unbearably horrible and nothing could stop me turning the page. And nothing could stop me reading it, in reality. Soon I was in the grip of a ghastly compulsion. I would sneak into the library whenever my parents were not keeping an eye on me and have another furtive read. After a while I took the book up to my room and hid it under the bed. At night, sleep was elusive. My heart beat fast, a sickness rose in my stomach, I went hot and cold, I shut my eyes, monsters swarmed behind my eyelids and something was reaching out from under the bed…

  “I loved being frightened and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was my reading rite of passage.”

  I remember many of the stories well. There were indeed great tales, by people I’d never heard of who were masters of the horror genre: Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft. There were also stories by writers famous for other kinds of writing: H. G. Wells, H. H. Munro (what is it with these men and their initials?). I’d never heard of any of them, but soon I knew their names and initials by heart and many of their sentences too. Those stories were read and re-read, as if I could dispel the horror the second or third or fourth time round, but if anything it made them worse. What was this weird feeling, to love and hate something at the same time? To be prey to almost unbearable excitement and agitation? To swear I would never go near the cursed book again, only to pick it up and devour it once more? It was a feeling that was very close to sexual desire, though it took me a little longer to find that out.

  “At night, sleep was elusive. My heart beat fast, a sickness rose in my stomach, I went hot and cold, I shut my eyes, monsters swarmed behind my eyelids and something was reaching out from under the bed …”

  Many of the people in the stories seemed in the grip of a similar compulsion, though in their case it could lead to madness or death. So many victims were the authors of their own destruction. Images flash before me now, things I could see – or worse, not quite see, not quite imagine: a bed heaving with giant caterpillars, hundreds of rats behind rustling tapestries, a phantom monkey conjured up by green tea, an upside-down head in a bottle, an invisible idiotic creature in love with her victim, a black-tongued corpse speaking in a dead voice, a young woman with a demon’s face, a giant monster made of wriggling tubes and tentacles and half a human face. Every memory, even now, seems dark and stifling and explodes with disgusting force.

  What do I remember in particular? A ghost story, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, by M. R. James. The ghost, or supernatural creature, is summoned, as the title suggests. Like the cliché ghost, it wears a white sheet, but the horror of it is that the ghostly force has twisted and worked the folds of the sheet into something resembling a human body and a human face, but with an alien quality, a mocking imitation. The first thing babies identify, it occurs to me now, is a human face. Everything that seems familiar and comforting is transformed in this story into a sham and a menace.

  “Every memory, even now, seems dark and stifling and explodes with disgusting force.”

  And more than anything else in the book, I remember ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’, a story by Conrad Aiken. This isn’t supernatural at all, no ghosts, no monsters, and nothing much happens. A little boy wakes up one winter morning when it’s very quiet: he is excited, sure the whole town has been blanketed overnight in snow. He’s wrong, but he imagines the snow anyway. Gradually it takes over his world. It is very beautiful: all he wants to do is watch it falling. He rejects everyone, shouts at his mother to leave him alone, so he can be one with the snow.

  Why did this story frighten me so much? It seemed so real. I recognised the boy had something wrong with him (we might today diagnose it as autism or schizophrenia or some other mental condition). It was something I seemed to recognise. I was a withdrawn child, much given to solitary daydreaming, and other people sometimes seemed like interruptions. My dad said I was an introvert, whatever that might be; he didn’t imply that was bad, but somehow I knew it was. The moment I read ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’, I knew my fate had been revealed. This was just the beginning for me. I knew that a dream of snow, or something else, it didn’t matter what, was going to take over my life, I would reject my loving parents, I would reject everyone, I would be plunged into a vortex of madness and it would all be my fault. Giant caterpillars, talking corpses and ghostly sheet-faces had nothing on this terror.

  “it left me with a lasting, wary respect for horror writing that no amount of shoddy, schlocky and tongue-in-cheek examples of the genre could ever dispel.”

  As time went on, it must have become apparent that no snowy vortex was waiting to swallow me up. Gradually the terrible book lost its hold. I put it back on the library shelf; I don’t think my parents ever realised it had been missing. But it left me with a lasting, wary respect for horror writing that no amount of shoddy, schlocky and tongue-in-cheek examples of the genre could ever dispel.

  As a child I was fascinated by the cautionary tales in the notorious German children’s picture book, DerStruwwelpeter. Written in 1845 by Heinrich Hoffmann, it contains a collection of luridly illustrated rhyming stories about children who ignore their parents’ advice and, as a result, generally end up either dead or maimed. The book terrified and amused me at the same time.r />
  The horrific consequences and punishments were comically out of proportion to the ‘crimes’. For example, the boy who won’t stop sucking his thumbs gets them cut off by the ‘long red-legged scissor man’ and the girl who plays with matches ends up as a smouldering pile of ashes being wept over by two kittens. This intoxicating fusion of horror and absurdity not only made me fall in love with books but inspired many of my early writing efforts as a child and, I think, its effect can still be seen in most of my books today.

  Andy Griffiths

  My re-reading copy is a hardback – grey, not the original grey and blue – a 1994 Modern Library edition. It’s huge: fifty-two stories by forty-five authors, filling more than a thousand pages with dense type. However did I get through it all? Why was I not once tempted to skim, to skip? It has a dust jacket depicting Fuseli’s famous 1781 painting, showing a maiden swooning upside-down in bed. On her belly squats a small demonic figure; next to it stands a horse with blank white eyes. In a brazen pun, the painting is called The Nightmare.

  I toy with the Introduction. The editors tell us that a fascination with terror is as ancient as the human race. This is not news to me. They speculate that our dread of the supernatural first arose with our ape-like ancestors, with racial memories of an earlier age ‘with its bloody tyrannosaurus’ (a few million years before humanoids, but I’ll let that pass) and the dream-inspired ghosts of dead foe and friend. They quote James Frazer, anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough, who thought that the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion was the fear of the human dead. We gallop through the Greek and Roman times, to the Middle Ages, witches and alchemists and the black arts, to the invention of the horror story in 1764, when Horace Walpole published the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. As for the modern short horror story, ‘it sprang fully developed from the brow of Edgar Allan Poe’. The editors speculate inconclusively about whether ghosts exist and conclude that we believe in the stories through Coleridge’s well-known doctrine of ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’.