Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  The heroine was called Lucy. Not enough books, to my mind, had heroines called Lucy. Since reading Catherine Storr’s Lucy and Lucy Runs Away, I had not really seen that there was any argument for calling any heroine anything else. Now, at last, here was another one, and I couldn’t have asked anything more of her.

  She was brave yet sensible – pushing through those fur coats yet being careful not to close the wardrobe door behind her in case she got trapped – and I knew I shared at least one of these characteristics with her. She was a beleaguered underdog – who isn’t? – who nevertheless endures and emerges triumphant, just as I planned to do one day when I was really old, probably about twenty.

  Her siblings Peter, Susan and Edmund all eventually follow her through the wardrobe and into the snowy lands of Narnia where it is always winter and yet never Christmas, thanks to the evil spell cast over all by the White Witch. But Edmund has been enchanted by her too, thanks to his greedy acceptance of her proffered Turkish delight (never take sweets from strangers and/or majestic allegorical satanic figures on a sled, kids!) and harbours treacherous intent in his bosom.

  On her first visit, Lucy meets a talking lion called Aslan who fills her heart with love and she promises that she will return to help him. But her brothers and sister do not believe her (though Edmund is lying – oh, Edmund! The hate I felt for you then may never fully leave me) and she almost has to go on without them. At the last minute, Aslan becomes visible to them – he exists! In your FACES, arrogant older siblings! – and the stage is set fair for an epic battle between good and evil, sacrifice and selfishness, courage and cowardice played out amongst an array of characters – including Mr Tumnus the faun, Mr and Mrs Beaver, a wish-granting white stag and other talking beasts, unicorns, dryads, dwarves, naiads and centaurs – as the children and Aslan fight to end the reign of the White Witch and restore Narnia to its people. Who will then be ruled over by the four children who will sit as kings and queens at the castle of Cair Paravel, but a benevolent monarchy still beats monstrous dictatorship, so all is well. Their adventures play out against backdrops drawn from the medieval poetry, fairy tale, folk tale, Celtic, Norse and classical myths, legend and scholarship that Lewis loved and had immersed himself in all his life.

  Interwoven with these, and providing the overall spine for all seven of the chronicles, is a version of the Christian story, and this aspect has caused some controversy over the years, best summarised by an exchange I had a few years ago with the friend of a friend. I was flicking through the bumper Christmas Radio Times at a party, like the vibrant social butterfly I am, when the hostess looked over my shoulder and told me (I don’t know why; I hadn’t asked her. But that’s people for you, always yapping) that she would let her children watch The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe film that was being advertised as that year’s big festive centrepiece but would never buy them the books ‘because of the Christianity in them’. She also objected to their snobbery and misogyny – I should have left a set of Enid Blyton behind and listened to the screams all the way home – but apparently trusted the celluloid version to have been run through more modern moral filters and be less injurious to infant psychic health.

  I’ll be honest with you. I do have one friend who got about halfway through her first perusal, at the age of nine or ten, of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, turned to her mother and said: ‘This is about Jesus, isn’t it?’ But she was the offspring of two vicars (long story) and I suspect at that time was probably seeing Jesus in her cornflakes.

  Me? I was about fourteen and ploughing through the very last pages of the final volume in the Narnia series, The Last Battle, when the Pevensies return to stay for ever in the magical land after they are killed in a train crash. It was only then – after the biblio-equivalent of being hit over the head with a claw hammer – that I began to feel the semblance of a shadow of an inkling that something funny was going on.

  Lewis was an atheist who became a devout and publicly proselytising Christian. By the time The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published he was already famous for his faith and for his accessible prose and radio broadcasts about aspects of his belief, which gave succour and strength to a nation during and after the Second World War. Even as a child there had been times when a profound sense of the ineffable had moved through him. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he tells the story of how as a boy his older brother Warnie once constructed a miniature twig-and-moss forest for him on a biscuit-tin lid, and the young Jack (as Clive Staples Lewis was always known by friends and family) was overcome by a mixture of longing and elation: ‘an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction’. That was before his mother died in 1907 when Jack was nine. ‘With my mother’s death,’ he says, ‘all settled happiness … disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’

  Almost immediately afterwards he was sent, by his loving but grieving and misguided father, to a boarding school in England that was run along strange and – even for a child who hadn’t just been bereaved and, in effect, abandoned – unsettling lines by a headmaster who was later declared insane. Jack retreated into the Norse myths and legends whose ‘pure Northernness’ – bleak, wild, cruelly magnificent – was both purgative and balm for a boy in mourning. Out of that came a career at Oxford and then Cambridge, as an English and medieval scholar. He was involved for thirty years from the age of twenty with a woman called Mrs Moore, the mother of his friend Paddy. The young men had met during officer training and had promised to take care of the other’s single remaining parent should one of them die in the war they were about to go off and fight. Paddy was killed in action in 1918. Lewis lived with and loved Mrs Moore – certainly as a second mother, probably as a lover – until she died in 1948.

  Maybe without that great motherless void to fill he would have been satisfied with myths, legends, an ‘ordinary’ wife and an ordinary academic life giving us another scholarly tome or two to add to the Bodleian shelves. As it was, he found God, Mrs Moore and writing for children, and gave us Narnia instead.

  At the time, however, I did not know all this heartbreaking stuff and I was simply furious at the deception. Sneaking this God stuff in without telling me! Turns out Aslan, with his rightful-kingness and his infinite-wisdom-and-forgiveness schtick and willingness to sacrifice himself for sinful Edmund was Jesus! The Pevensies are his disciples, Edmund a bit of a Judas, and the White Witch the Devil! Narnia’s heaven! Gerroutofit!

  But eventually my rage subsided. It was still a very, very good story after all. As were all the others. The Magician’s Nephew (the one with the magic rings and the hero Digory’s dying mother, miraculously restored to health – as building your own fantasy world allows – by Narnian fruit), was written after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but forms a prequel to it. Prince Caspian is the Lion’s sequel, written by Lewis while the Lion was going through the process of acceptance and publication in 1949/50 and, according to a letter from Lewis to an American reader, is about ‘the restoration of the true religion after a corruption’. For oblivious me, it was simply an even more potent rendering of and deeper immersion in the Narnian landscape. The Pevensies return to the magical kingdom to find that hundreds of years have passed, civil war is dividing the kingdom and the Old Narnians (many dwarves, centaurs, talking animals, the dryads and hamadryads that once animated the trees, and other creatures) are in hiding. The children must lead the rebels against their Telmarine conquerors. The warp and weft of Narnian life is seen up close, in even more gorgeously imagined detail than the previous books. Lucy, awake one night in the thick forest that has grown up since she was last in Narnia, feels that the trees are almost awake and that if she just knew the right thing to say they would come to Narnian life once more. It mirrored exactly how I felt about reading, and about reading Lewis in particular. I was so close … if I co
uld just read the words on the page one more time, bring one more ounce of love to the story they told, I could animate them too. The flimsy barriers of time, space and immateriality would finally fall and Narnia would spring up all around me and I would be there, at last.

  Alas, it never quite happened. Nevertheless, despite this betrayal, Prince Caspian remains my favourite of the Narnia stories. Although if you ever confront me I will deny it to the ends of the earth because my first loyalty must always be to my dad and the piece of his heart he handed to me with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the third to be published, in 1952) finishes Prince Caspian’s story with his quest to find the seven lords who were banished from Narnia when Miraz took the throne. It’s too good. In fact, on the days when Prince Caspian isn’t my favourite, this is. Unless it’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which, let’s face it, it always is. Even when it’s Prince Caspian. Yes.

  The Silver Chair is great but it has none of the Pevensie quartet in it, so must regretfully be relegated to the second tier of favourites, wherein also languish The Horse and His Boy (fifth to be published – in 1954 – but third in reading, which is to say Narnian chronological order) because it has no children or animals from the real world at all and goes far too nearly the full Tolkien for my comfort and, of course, The Last Battle.

  For anyone worried, like mine hostess, about their children being secretly indoctrinated into Christianity, let me just say this: no child ever has or will be converted to Christianity through reading about Cair Paravel, Aslan, naiads, dryads, hamadryads, fauns and all the rest. If they notice it at all, they are far more likely to be narked than anything else. And they probably won’t notice it at all. They are relatively literal creatures. At most, they will spend a few days tapping the backs of wardrobes hopefully (yes, I did – well, only the old wooden one in the spare room. All the others in the house were white melamine-covered chipboard, which was inimical to mood), but they are unlikely to go up to the nearest cleric and say: ‘I’m looking for a saviour analogous to a fierce but benevolent lion who died on a stone table to free his people from tyranny – do you have anyone who might do?’

  The tale of Lucy Pevensie discovering the secret world beyond the wardrobe door is a story about courage, loyalty, generosity, sacrifice and nobility versus greed, conceit, arrogance and betrayal. You can call the former Christian virtues, or you can just call them virtues, let the kids concentrate on the self-renewing Turkish delight, magically unerring bows and hybrid man-beasts and relax.

  I should have told my interlocutor over the Radio Times that she could probably relax about the ‘snobbery’ too. Just because Lewis refers to ‘whatever grapes your people may have’ doesn’t mean the modern child feels crushed beneath the weight of interwar class distinctions. They haven’t even noticed – there’s a bacchanalian rite going on at the time, for a start. Sanitised for juvenile consumption but still – trees are dancing.

  As for misogyny, this charge always seems to be based on a disdainful reference in The Last Battle to elder sister Susan succumbing to the lure of face powder and stockings. But her brother adds regretfully, ‘She always was in too much of a rush to grow up.’ This is not an objection to femininity – it is the author sorrowing over the passing of innocence, making the point that to wish childhood away is, Christian or not, a terrible sin.

  Oh, and the films are perfectly acceptable, denatured, deracinated pabulum, filtered through Disney’s bean counters instead of the roving imagination of one of the greatest masters of English fantasy fiction. I should have broken every DVD I could find in that wilfully impoverished house.

  English children’s literature is considered a treasure trove of high fantasy, but Narnia was as far as I wanted to go. I liked – still like – my flights of fancy firmly rooted in reality. I needed to be able to get back through the wardrobe, or out from under the floorboards. The Borrowers were welcome to share my world but I did not want to be a visitor stranded in someone else’s universe entirely.

  Which means, of course, that I have never got to grips with Tolkien. I just can’t. The mere thought of that maniacally detailed world exhausts me. I got through The Hobbit – or ‘Bilbo bloody Baggins’ as I still quietly refer to it, despite the world filling over the last ten Peter Jackson-infused years with diehard fans of the whole thing – under duress at secondary school, but a) it never took, and b) The Hobbit is to the rest of the saga as a jog around the block is to back-to-back Tough Mudders. If the first nearly kills you, you don’t go looking for more pain. And I feel very bad about this, not just because I have body-swerved a major literary landmark but also because I feel, obscurely, that I have let C. S. Lewis down.

  He and Tolkien were, with Charles Williams, the Inklings – a part club, part literary society that met in Lewis’ or Tolkien’s college rooms at Oxford, or less formally at the Eagle and Child pub nearby, to read and discuss their latest (not-yet-published) writings. The likes of G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald and Roger Lancelyn Green used to swing by too. So did Dorothy L. Sayers, though she was never allowed at the college gatherings because she was A Girl.

  (Top tip: if reincarnation is a thing, you really should try and get reborn as a white, male Christian in the vicinity of 1950s Oxford. Nothing will go far wrong for you after that.)

  It’s possible that I am actually Inkling-opposed and that C. S. Lewis was in fact an exception to my unsuspected rule. I’ve still not read Chesterton or Sayers, and George MacDonald is a victim of my animus towards all fairy tales bar the ones on the Ladybird library carousel of yore,fn1 and Roger Lancelyn Green was the author of the first book I was ever defeated by despite actually wanting to read it.

  A Tale of The Tale of Troy

  I recently came across the fact – or possibly factoid, but it rings true to me so I am going to consider it so until persuaded otherwise – that we learn the vast majority of our vocabularies by the age of eighteen. After that, you doubtless will accumulate a few more dribs and drabs but they will never become part of your working semantic database or, for the more romantically inclined, your soul. You will not have easy mastery of them, never deploy them as often, willingly or confidently as you do the ones you imbibed before your post-pubescent brain started to calcify.

  What is true for words is, I think, maybe even truer for stories.

  I opened up Dad’s latest offering, Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Tale of Troy, and couldn’t make head or tail of it. So many polysyllabic people (Philoctetes and Neoptolemus? Are you sure?), places, battles to keep track of, and the bit about the hollow horse took an age to turn up …

  None of it would ‘go in’. I felt, reading it at the age of eight, the way I feel when I read about economics now. I simply don’t have enough background knowledge (Special purpose entities? Synthetic collateralised debt obligations? Are you sure?), enough pegs driven sufficiently securely into my mental wall to hang the new information on. I can follow it, just about, as I’m reading, but the minute I finish a chapter or turn a page the whole lot just slips to the floor in an untidy heap.

  Maybe if I had got on with The Tale of Troy – or if, as less mud-turtley children might have done, sought out something that could bridge the gap between those two volumes of Ladybird Famous Legends and Lancelyn Green’s retellings – it would have been my gateway to yet another world. I would have been plugged in to that hidden realm of classical influence and knowledge that still infuses, though most of us barely realise any more, everything around us. I might have become aware of a heritage that was, at least as far as state-educated, 1980s south-east Londonworld was concerned, only being handed down in random fragments now.

  I finally read The Tale of Troy, along with all Roger Lancelyn Green’s other retellings – versions of Arthurian, Norse and Ancient Egyptian stories alongside the various books of classical myths and legends – about ten years ago, and they were as powerful and thrilling as anything I have ever read, a cluster of
potent, intoxicating tales which escaped my prejudice against fairy tales (which I had half expected to envelop them) by being so devoid of whimsy, so detailed and altogether so authoritative and convincing. His King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table was the springboard from which I dived back into the pool of medieval literature I had only dipped a fearful toe into at university – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Pearl in the Myddes, Chaucer, and of course Malory himself. It was a wonderful few months.

  But it was also too late. Not for pleasure – as I say, it was wonderful – and not for gleaning a few reference points with which to orientate myself slightly better as I plough on through my library and, secondarily, life. But it was too late to make the books – and the legends – part of me. They are not and never will be. I had hoped I would feel like Susan Coolidge’s character Katy Carr arriving in Europe. ‘She had “browsed” all through her childhood in a good old-fashioned library,’ writes Coolidge, ‘[and] had her memory stuffed with all manner of little scraps of information and literary allusions, which now came into use. It was like owning the disjointed bits of a puzzle, and suddenly discovering that properly put together they make a pattern’. But in fact what I have is just a few more bits of the puzzle.

  ‘What you’ve never had, you’ll never miss’ they say, and of course we all know this is nonsense. I feel the loss of missing out on the illuminating power of Roger Lancelyn Green’s books quite specifically and acutely. Every volume is a more hardcore version of what Lewis did in each Narnia chronicle – an effective condensation of a country’s folklore and archetypes that are also (centuries of cultural cross-currents being what they are) our own. They should be part of everyone, and that means bringing them together at as early an age as possible so that they are a pattern ingrained rather than a puzzle forever.