Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  Had anyone quizzed me further about the kinds of books I liked, I would have said that I wanted to read about adventures, and those didn’t happen when parents were around. The presence of Mother and Father guaranteed that children were stuck being children. Without their parents, Narnia’s young visitors finally get the chance to try out all the practical knowledge they’ve acquired over their years of reading what Lewis, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, refers to as “the right books.”

  The Pevensies know all about jungle explorers and buccaneers and questing knights, and they can keep their heads in a crisis; they belong to a long tradition in British fiction of what the novelist and critic Colin Greenland calls “competent children.” I admired both their wherewithal and the delicacy of their scruples in a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which all four of the siblings have finally made it through the wardrobe and debate what to do next. They decide to put on the fur coats from the wardrobe before venturing on into the snowy woods, reasoning that because they’re not actually taking the coats out of the wardrobe, they won’t be stealing them.

  The second Chronicle, Prince Caspian, of which a goodly portion is a wilderness adventure yarn, begins with the Pevensies magically yanked back into Narnia and stranded on a desert island. They are made castaways without the preliminary grief of a shipwreck, but as usual they’re not at a loss. I was especially impressed when Peter announced to his thirsty siblings, “If there are streams they’re bound to come down to the sea, and if we walk along the beach we’re bound to come to them.” I stowed that tip away for the future. As the oldest child in my own tribe of brothers and sisters, I thought this was exactly the sort of thing I ought to know in the event of an emergency — though how, exactly, we might be lucky enough to get shipwrecked together I didn’t consider. Likewise, Susan keeps the two younger children from abandoning their hot, heavy shoes after a wade in the surf because “we shall want them if we’re still here when night comes and it gets cold,” and Edmund suggests exploring the woods: “Hermits and Knights Errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest. They find roots and berries and things.”

  Later in Prince Caspian, under the influence of the Narnian air, the Pevensies will begin to recall all of the skills — archery, sword fighting, the composition of a formal challenge to single combat — they acquired in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, during their time as kings and queens. At first, however, their points of reference are strictly literary. From Defoe and Stevenson, possibly Walter Scott, and any number of less exalted authors, they have acquired this idea of adventure, and they don’t consider themselves to be excluded from it simply because they’re children. Play has girded them for action, and initially Narnia itself has to be distinguished from a game of make-believe. “We can pretend we are Arctic explorers,” suggests Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the siblings set off through the woods. “This is going to be exciting enough without pretending,” Peter points out. Narnia is a place so thrilling that you can finally stop imagining you’re somewhere better. It is the place where adventures are transformed from something you read about in books to something you actually get to do.

  Still, the Pevensies never stop reading adventure stories in our world just because they have experienced real, live adventures in Narnia. Practically speaking, reading the wrong books would leave them unprepared, making them the kind of children who wouldn’t know that you should kick off your shoes if you happen to fall into deep water with your clothes on, as Lucy does at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Chronicles are full of such advice, some of it very useful, even if in the first book Lewis archly parodied the mother-hen tone of other children’s authors by repeatedly warning of the dangers of shutting oneself up in a wardrobe. In The Silver Chair, we learn that midday is a better time to sneak out of a house than the night (you look less suspicious if you get caught) and that a good way to keep your companions from realizing you’re afraid is to say nothing at all; otherwise, your quavering voice will probably give you away.

  The Chronicles, then, become the same kind of adventurers’ handbooks that stand their own characters in good stead. I can remember thinking that I’d gotten plenty of invaluable information from them, although strictly speaking most of it was only helpful if you also happened to be a character in an adventure story. Eustace Scrubb, in the early chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, manages to get himself turned into a dragon largely because the books he has read have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” Eustace’s prosaic taste in reading matter is of a piece with more serious personal failings, of course. His selfishness and sloth also lead him to the dragon’s lair, and only an ordeal will give him back his humanity.

  For some adults, “Narnia” has become shorthand for an excessively, impossibly safe fantasyland. In the novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, a character out of the young heroine’s past telephones from a posh sanitarium she describes as “a Narnia kind of place,” by which she means an artificially sustained shelter that bears no resemblance to the real world. But however cozy the land of Narnia might look from the vantage of adulthood, now that memory has mingled it with nostalgia for childhood itself, it is not especially secure. The place seems to be under perpetual threat, and the course of action required to save it is invariably difficult, physically as well as psychically.

  I, for one, didn’t experience the Chronicles as a retreat into an orderly playpen populated by sweet-talking animals and a kind, cuddly godhead. I was, of course, being sheltered by the traditional conventions of children’s stories, in which the good are rewarded, the evil defeated, and the ending is at least partially happy. But getting to that happy ending was no picnic; along with the child heroes, I vicariously slogged through trackless forests and snowy wastes, took up arms against monsters, and wrangled with menacing adults. I was stirred by how much was expected of the Pevensies. I wanted to be challenged in the same way. I wanted to be asked to give my all for a cause I could be sure was worthy. (And even at that tender age, I had an inkling that finding such a cause would be the hardest part of the quest.)

  Not all of these sentiments are entirely admirable, but they do represent a mezzanine between the dependency of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood. They’re an imaginative projection, not (quite) a real wish, and Lewis takes some care to remind his readers of the distinction. As Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum enjoy a brief, easy stretch on the moors at the beginning of The Silver Chair, Jill announces that she might just enjoy adventures after all, to which Puddleglum responds, “We haven’t had any yet.” Later on, Jill will get the opportunity to observe that “when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it makes your fingers.” The sort of experience that makes for a good story is seldom a comfy one.

  “Adventure,” then, is what might otherwise be called a hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis’s child characters have learned from reading “the right books.” This is surely the oldest of the many tasks that stories are called upon to perform. The honor that propels the warriors of The Iliad is bestowed in the form of stories, accounts of bravery first passed on by fellow soldiers and later recited by poets long after the hero himself is dead. When Shakespeare’s Henry V rallies his men before the Battle of Agincourt, he tells them that their courage on Saint Crispin’s Day will soon be legendary, offering them a kind of immortality:

  This story shall the good man teach his son;

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered.

  “This is War. This is what Homer wrote
about,” was what Lewis himself thought one afternoon in November 1917 at the beginning of his only encounter with real, life-and-death adventure in France. A bullet had just whined past him, and even then, his mind turned toward books. Afterward, he would write even less about the war than he did about his mother’s death. In Surprised by Joy, he explains that the period is “too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant.” This remark comes just after a sentence that describes, with excruciating vividness, the horrors of the trenches: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [human excrement], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet.”

  Passing references made in the years that followed suggest that the war stuck with Lewis more than he let on. He was lucky enough to sustain a minor wound fairly early in his stint (the shrapnel remained in his shoulder for the rest of his days), and that probably saved his life. The following year, he makes reference, in a letter to his father, of suffering from “nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again. Nearly every one has it.” In 1925, again writing to his father, he recounts a walk with Warnie, during which they overheard a battery practicing nearby, the first gunfire he’d heard since returning from France. His own response startled him: “It seemed much louder and more sinister and generally unpleasant than I had expected.” Later still, he would gratefully note “the stamp of the war” on Hugo Dyson, a new friend, and in one of his few surviving letters to Tolkien, he praises The Lord of the Rings for capturing “so much of our joint life, so much of the war,” which otherwise seemed to be slipping out of immediate memory.

  The lives Lewis and Tolkien led might appear sheltered at first glance, but in this respect they endured more than almost anyone in my own circle ever will; middle-class American intellectuals in recent years have seldom gone to war. Tolkien, in a preface to The Lord of the Rings, wrote that by 1918, when he turned twenty-six, all but one of his closest friends had been killed. The formative trials of his youth, and Lewis’s, the almost incommunicable agonies of the trenches, have become increasingly alien to their readers, who are gradually losing even the ability to understand that they don’t understand them. All the same, although I was only a little girl who knew nothing of real violence, I recognized the ring of truth in Peter’s battle with the wolf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

  All this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all — he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed to be neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.

  Aslan knights Peter after this messy victory (admonishing him, “Never forget to wipe your sword” — more practical advice!) and gives him the nickname Wolf’s-Bane. Peter has not only rescued Susan from the wolf; he has entered a heroic narrative and acquired a title. Lewis dreaded war (especially as his brother became a career officer in the Royal Army Service Corps and was recalled to active duty during World War II), but the literature he studied showed it to be a continuing fact of human existence. He firmly believed that sometimes war was necessary. Religion explains why — sometimes we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves for a greater good — but stories show us how. Stories are what make heroes. You can only become a hero by participating in a story, and stories bestow meaning on what might otherwise look like raw suffering and waste.

  This, of course, is not always a virtue. You can get people to do a lot of difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous things by convincing them that someday a golden story will be spun out of the straw of their mortal lives. Many of these things are not worth doing, and not all Christians agree with Lewis’s views on war. But war is not the only enterprise that requires courage, energy, and will. Another is the perilous adventure of growing up.

  Chapter Five

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  At age seven, I believed that I knew sermonizing when I saw it, and I loathed no book more on this count than Elsie Dinsmore. Martha Finley’s 1867 novel had been pressed on me by my grandmother, who, incredibly, claimed to have enjoyed it in her youth. The title character is a weepy Goody Two-shoes, mistreated by her stepmother yet responding with an unflagging, inhuman sweetness and docility that the reader is obviously meant to admire and emulate. Later in the narrative, Elsie even manages to get into a ludicrous doctrinal dispute with her adored father, who orders her to read a secular book aloud to him on his sickbed; it is Sunday and Elsie believes that Sabbath reading should be reserved for the Bible or some other appropriately pious literature.

  Despite hating it so thoroughly, I read Elsie Dinsmore all the way through. Part of my reason for persisting with the book was to marvel at the sort of hogwash adults expected me to swallow, and to congratulate myself on knowing better. This was my first taste of the righteous indignation of the abused reader, that strangely pleasurable outrage we experience when we recognize that an author has broken an important trust. As every critic knows, readers relish a negative review, and not simply out of spite. Seeing an author punished by critics for trampling on the compact between reader and writer attests to the fact that the compact was there in the first place. You can’t recognize blasphemy until you hold something sacred. Elsie Dinsmore could only be so very bad because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was so very good.

  It was precisely the propaganda aspect of Elsie Dinsmore that offended me, the subservience of the story and characters, of the entire book, to the task of instructing me morally. I recognized that the Chronicles also sometimes spoke to me about virtue — in fact, I regarded those parts of the books as among their most thrilling and important moments. The difference was, as I saw it, fundamental. The morality of Elsie Dinsmore was the morality of childhood, where the choice was between obedience and naughtiness. The morality of Narnia was grown-up, a matter of good and evil.

  Adult readers, who detect the Christian symbolism of the Chronicles so readily, often can’t see the distinction. In her book Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, Alison Lurie complains, “In Narnia, final happiness is the result not of individual initiative and enterprise, but of submission to the wisdom and will of superior beings.” Edmund’s treachery in betraying the Narnians and his own siblings to the White Witch might seem heinous, but “misbehavior can be forgiven if it is sincerely repented, and Edmund eventually becomes one of the Kings of Narnia.” This is really an objection to Christian faith itself, to its emphasis on obedience to the will of God and its promise of redemption to those who repent of their defiance. But it never occurred to me to look for Christianity in Narnia, and so, in the temptation of Edmund Pevensie, I saw another kind of drama entirely.

  To me, the best children’s books gave their child characters (and by extension, myself) the chance to be taken seriously. In Narnia, the boundary between childhood and adulthood — a vast tundra of tedious years — could be elided. The Pevensies not only get to topple the White Witch, fight in battles, participate in an earthshaking mystical event, and be crowned kings and queens; they do it all without having to grow up. Yet they become more than children, too. Above all, their decisions have moral gravity. In contrast to how most children experience their role in an adult world, what the child characters in these stories do, for better or worse, really matters, and nowhere more so than in Edmund’s betrayal. His envy and vanity bring about a cataclysm, the death of God.

  I remember feeling that the Chronicles were full of perilous decisi
ons in which it was all too apparent how easily you could drift onto the wrong path. The White Witch entices Edmund with delicious hot drinks and enchanted Turkish delight, but primarily by flattering his laziness, his conceit, and his rivalrous sentiments toward his older brother, Peter — all very human weaknesses I recognized in myself. I wasn’t alone. One of the people who wrote to me after reading my essay about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a musician, writer, and artist I knew slightly named Tiffany Lee Brown. When we met to talk about the books, she described how different Narnia felt from other children’s fantasies.

  “The first novel I ever read was The Magic of Oz in the school library,” she told me. “I loved it, and believed every word of it. So I read all the Oz books. I moved on to the Narnia books after that, when I was about seven or eight.”

  “And how did you think they compared to Oz?”

  “Well, I didn’t spend too much time in Oz. It was kind of wacky and had a lot of things going on, but there was a certain weightiness to Narnia which really appealed to me.”

  “What do you mean by ‘weightiness’?”

  “The fact that people were really being tested. It wasn’t just ‘Are we coming to the end of the adventure? Will we get back to Kansas?’ but, ‘Will we get back to Kansas with our souls intact?’”