Laura Miller

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

  Narnia, like the unreachable Castlereagh Hills, is elusive even in the Chronicles themselves. One book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, never sets foot there. Two more, The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair, merely pass through. The Magician’s Nephew shows us Narnia’s creation, but doesn’t linger afterward. Of the three remaining Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe takes place in a Narnia that is cursed and frozen for most of the book; in Prince Caspian it is occupied by the disbelieving Telmarines, who have driven all the magical creatures into hiding; and, finally, The Last Battle gives us a corrupted Narnia slouching toward Armageddon.

  The important thing to understand about Joy, Lewis insisted, is that “it is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In some ways, it resembles the lethal nostalgia A. E. Housman described in A Shropshire Lad:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  Perhaps Lewis had these verses in mind when, in a 1929 letter to Arthur Greeves, he described A Shropshire Lad as a “terrible little book … perfect and deadly, the beauty of the Gorgon.” But even then, Lewis would have made a distinction: Housman writes of “content” that’s been lost; Lewis’s Joy was the desire for something he had never had, and probably never could have had; it was also the desire for desire itself.

  I can’t read the words “yon far country” without experiencing a Narnian twinge. Even now, when trying to picture the place, the image that usually comes to mind is a distant prospect, green hills amid small groves of trees, with tiny, tantalizing figures moving here and there, impossible to make out in any detail, and the sea glinting at the horizon. If there’s one thing you can be sure of about Narnia, it’s that wherever you are, it isn’t here. So perhaps it was quixotic to try to find the real places that inspired it. Nevertheless, Lewis’s landscape descriptions are anything but gauzy and fantastical; you can feel them with all of your senses. This is one aspect of the Chronicles that calls to me now just as powerfully as it did in my childhood, perhaps even a bit more so. Narnia was a breeze on my face, the “sweet, rustling, chattering noise” of a stream (in The Silver Chair), the smell of the sea. It had to have been at least partly based on the real world, on places that Lewis knew intimately. If I couldn’t get to Narnia, why not look for those?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Far Country

  In the first chapter of The Horse and His Boy, set in Calormen, the foundling Shasta meets the warhorse Bree, who unbeknownst to the Calormen noble who owns him, is actually a talking Narnian beast. Bree persuades Shasta to escape with him by rhapsodizing about “Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of Dwarfs.”

  Adam Gopnik, in an essay about Lewis for The New Yorker, calls the landscape Bree celebrates “clearly a British composite.” Those might be taken as fighting words in some quarters, if it were more generally known that Lewis regarded Ireland as the inspiration for Narnia. He is so closely associated, though, with Oxford, where he lived for nearly fifty years, that most people assume that Narnia is essentially English. Perhaps Lewis would have quarreled with this notion (he would surely have identified “deep forests ringing with the hammers of Dwarfs” as a Germanic image), but even he admitted that, as much as he’d detested “this hot, ugly country” the first time he saw it as a schoolboy, by the early 1930s England had begun to feel like home. “I suppose I have been growing into the soil here,” he wrote to Arthur Greeves. Lewis called himself Irish when it suited him, but otherwise passed for English, and in some ways Narnia is the same; Irish on the inside, because Ireland was the longed-for countryside of his childhood (his “land of lost content”), but English, too, because for Lewis England was immediate — touchable, smellable, audible, visible.

  Narnia lay all around Lewis. There is a germ of the thaw in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a passage from a letter he wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1945: “It is bitter cold this morning but lovely to see the green earth after all the snow and to hear the birds singing. I have just seen the first celandines.” He spotted them along Addison’s Walk, a footpath surrounding an island meadow on the grounds of Magdalen, named for the early eighteenth-century writer, editor, and politician who favored it when he was a fellow at the college. It was on Addison’s Walk, late one autumn night in 1931, that Lewis engaged in the hours-long conversation with Tolkien and another don, Hugo Dyson, which led to his conversion to Christianity. The Walk’s connection to Lewis’s religious life makes it a pilgrimage site for his Christian devotees, but its celandines and crocuses were what captivated me the first time I strolled there on a raw day in early spring.

  Lewis’s own backyard was Narnia, too. He and Warnie decided to pitch in with Mrs. Moore to buy the Kilns even before they set foot in the house itself; for the brothers, the cottage’s main attraction was the nine acres of sylvan land that came with it, climbing up the northern side of Shotover Hill. A path from the back of that land leads to the southern slope of Shotover, where a former royal forest has been converted into a country park, including, to the east, the four-hundred-year-old oaks of Brasenose Wood.

  Not long after moving in, Lewis recorded sightings of gregarious “bright-eyed robins,” squirrels, owls, and even a badger’s burrow (which thrilled him to the bone) on the grounds behind the Kilns; all these creatures would eventually find their way into the Chronicles as talking beasts. Lewis made a habit of walking in his “little wood” in all seasons, and observed it with a care that never seemed to diminish with familiarity. “We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it,” he wrote to Arthur, “and then the rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening — for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white — the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead.”

  After books, the natural world is the most frequent subject of the letters Lewis wrote before he became a celebrated apologist. (Once famous, he often exhausted his epistolary energy in theological correspondence with his readers.) He prided himself on his appreciation of all kinds of weather, even those that other people found harsh or dull; he was a connoisseur of skies, classifying for Warnie’s benefit the three types of English overcast: “spring gray — long level clouds of white, silver, pearl, and dove-color … winter gray — ragged and pleated clouds of iron color [and] the hot summer gray or celestial damp blotting paper.” The 1930s and early ’40s were the golden age of Lewis’s informal nature writing, after the conversion that loosened him up imaginatively and before the Second World War and Mrs. Moore’s deterioration made any absences from home difficult. His letters from those years are full of long, vibrant descriptions of the epic walking tours he took in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and western England with his brother or friends. But he could also extract remarkable impressions from the humblest things lying close to home:

  I suddenly paused, as we do for no reason known to consciousness, and gazed down into a little ditch beneath a grey hedge, where there was a pleasant mixture of ivies and low plants and mosses, and thought of herbalists and their art, and what a private, retired wisdom it would be to go groping along such hedges and the eaves of woods for some herb of virtuous powers, insignificant to the ordinary observer, but well known to the trained eye — and having at the same time a stronger sense of the mysteries of living stuff than usual, specially the mysteries twining at our feet, where homeliness and magic embrace one another.


  All that from staring at a ditch! Herbalism notwithstanding, Lewis’s interests were never especially botanical (unlike, say, Tolkien, who used to exasperate the Lewis brothers by interrupting the “ruthless” pace of their country walks to stop and examine plants and trees). For Lewis, the ivies and mosses evoked a way of life — earthy and modest, yet not without enchantment; in other words, medieval — that he found appealing. Nature was a wellspring of moods and reflections, an extension and magnification of his own sensibility and sense of history, not a realm apart from the human or an object of science. He loved to exercise his literary skill in describing those clouded English skies and the subtle shadings of ambience they suggested, but he never cared much about the meteorological factors that distinguished the cumulus clouds from the stratus.

  England is a good place for people of this inclination; few landscapes have been so continuously worked and shaped by human hands, and so it makes sense to see the natural world there as profoundly integrated with human affairs. Stories as well as trees are rooted in the earth of Britain, and every major landmark, it seems, is encrusted with tales and rumors. At Shotover Country Park, on the other side of the hill from the Kilns, I wandered over to a kiosk to pick up some photocopied leaflets from a box, expecting guides to the plants and animals around me. I wasn’t disappointed in that, but in addition to a map of the park and lists of notable trees, I also found a handout called “Myths and Legends on Shotover.”

  The local tales attached to the hill feature an Oxford student who fended off a wild boar with a volume of Aristotle, a fugitive empress who disguised herself as a corpse, highway robbers, Robin Hood, and Oliver Cromwell. Few Britons would find the little leaflet in any way remarkable. But I stood puzzling over it, under a suitably damp blotting-paper sky, realizing that I’d just experienced one of those moments of unexpected cultural dissonance that pop up every so often between Americans and the British. There are many state parks where I grew up on the southwest coast of the United States, most of them much bigger than Shotover, and in none of them are visitors regaled with local “myths and legends.” The original inhabitants of western American parks, if any, were wiped out in the not so distant past, along with whatever stories they might have told about those places. No wonder England seemed almost as strange and magical to me as Narnia did when I was a child.

  One of Shotover’s legends concerns a giant who lived in the forest and was said to be buried in the barrow that once stood on the top of the hill. (The barrow was destroyed by tank-testing operations during World War II.) When bored, the giant played marbles with the small boulders that can still be found scattered over a sandpit at the park’s center. Did Lewis know this story? It seems likely, given that he loved folktales, lived at the foot of Shotover for thirty years, and had regarded giants with a “queer fascination” since childhood.

  It doesn’t seem too great a leap to conclude that the giants Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum encounter on the moors beyond the northern border of Narnia in The Silver Chair owe something to the Oxford giant. Lewis’s giants, idle and stupid, lean with their feet at the bottom of a river gorge, resting their elbows on the edge, “just as men might stand leaning on a wall — lazy men, on a fine morning after breakfast” (or men propped up against a bar in a pub presumably, though that wouldn’t have been a suitable comparison for a children’s book). The giants commence a game, throwing large stones at a nearby cairn. This makes a dangerous situation for the travelers; Puddleglum mutters that they would be a lot safer if the enormous dolts were actually trying to hit them.

  Giant notwithstanding, Shotover Hill, full of picnicking families and strolling couples, is no vast and lonely moor like the one at Narnia’s northern frontier, and however pretty the celandines of Magdalen may be, they cannot persuade you that you are in a forest instead of the grounds of a stately institution. The little wood behind the Kilns (it has, with the addition of a parcel of land from a neighbor, been turned into the tiny C. S. Lewis Nature Reserve), is one of the few places I saw in Oxford that looks almost entirely Narnian. At its exact center, under a canopy of ash and lime trees, you can blot out the impression of the suburbs that lie all around and imagine you are in Narnia’s Lantern Waste, but take one step closer to the park’s edge, and that illusion will soon evaporate.

  Much of Oxfordshire matches one storybook image of the English countryside: velvety green fields trimmed with a fat braid of hedgerow and the occasional puff of trees. The hills are low, easy, upholstered. Nothing could be gentler or more curvaceous. Near the Thames River footpath, the route Lewis and his friends would take from Oxford to a riverside pub called the Trout, cows and canal boats move drowsily. The land is flat and prosperous. Although I can see a certain resemblance to Tolkien’s Shire, this region is nothing like Narnia, since Narnia, as any reader of the Chronicles can attest, is wild.

  Everyone imagines that Narnia looks like England, but England lost its forests hundreds of years ago, and when Lucy, Peter, and Susan first arrive at Aslan’s How in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they find themselves on a hill looking out over “a forest spreading as far as one could see in every direction.” This, I realized only after reading it for what must have been the thirtieth time, was a fact I had never entirely absorbed before. When I conjure up a mental picture of Narnia, I see something like a park, rolling turf broken by a few rocks and pleasantly scattered trees. Neither farmland nor woods, my Narnia falls somewhere in between — not cultivated, exactly, but not the forest primeval, either.

  During my travels in England, the closest approximation to this mental image I found wasn’t in Oxford at all. It was a view of the park at Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where I had stopped off to visit Susanna Clarke and her partner, Colin Greenland, on my way to Ireland. Susanna had also loved Narnia as a girl, and I wanted to talk with her about how it might have influenced her own work, particularly her witty, opulent fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, set in early nineteenth-century England.

  Driving back from the train station, Colin and Susanna suggested a stop at Chatsworth. We’d already begun talking eagerly about the Chronicles, and as we stood just behind the enormous seventeenth-century mansion and looked out over the grounds, I was startled to find that here, at last, the right balance between nature and culture had been struck. I asked Susanna if she agreed that Chatsworth’s park resembled Narnia.

  “Yes, I think it does,” she replied. “In the same way that Narnia was an idealized view of the English countryside, this is, too. Of course, it’s man-made, you know.”

  “What do you mean, man-made?”

  “Well, for one thing, originally, you could see the village of Edensor from here.” She pointed to a notch between two slopes in the near distance. “One of the dukes had the entire village moved in the 1800s. To ‘improve the view.’ There was a famous eighteenth-century landscape architect called Capability Brown who had the river straightened and changed a lot of other things. Back then, they had an ideal landscape in mind. They got it from French landscape painters who were painting their idea of a Greek landscape, but of course they had that all wrong.”

  “Actually, the word that springs to mind when I look at it is ‘Arcadia,’ and that was supposedly in ancient Greece, wasn’t it? But having been to Greece, I know now that it never could have been as lush as this. It’s much too dry there.”

  “Right, it doesn’t look like this at all! With the eighteenth- century English ideal, what you want is a series of very gentle green hills with occasional stands of trees. Of course, Capability Brown would have rather that it be deer under the trees instead of those cows over there.”

  “So, right now, we’re admiring a landscape that’s been overhauled to look like paintings from another country that were meant to depict still another country that doesn’t remotely resemble them. And what you and I are both reminded of by all this is a fictional country. But, tell me, do you remember that Lewis
describes Narnia as almost entirely forested?”

  “Does he? That’s not how I imagined it.”

  “I didn’t either, but it’s true. Chatsworth might look like Narnia to us, but it doesn’t match the descriptions in the books, so add that to the general confusion.”

  Eventually, Susanna and I determined that our picture of Narnia had come as much from Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of all seven Chronicles, as it had from Lewis. It is Baynes’s Narnia we saw in Chatsworth, the low hills carpeted with green grass and studded with oaks and pine, laid out under the hooves of Fledge, the winged horse on the cover of The Magician’s Nephew. Lewis’s landscape descriptions bewitched me as a child, but I grew up in a desert, and for images of much that he describes — snow, heather, even a genuine spring — I had to rely on Baynes. Her illustrations showed me how Narnia looked, and it looked like no place I’d ever been to myself.

  As a child, it would never have occurred to me that the illustrations for any book could be at odds with the text. To me, the words and pictures were inextricable, each as true in its own way as the other, so I never noticed the discrepancies between Baynes’s Narnia and Lewis’s. In my mind, I suspect, the pictures almost always won out. (Susanna, however, maintains that from an early age she had serious reservations about Caspian’s “stupid-looking” haircut in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: proof, for her at least, that Baynes’s illustrations were not infallible.)

  Baynes’s style, with its flattened perspective and fine decorative patterns of branches, vines, flowers, and leaves, is meant to recall medieval illuminated manuscripts and tapestries. Plants get as much of her attention as animals and people. In the little exterior spot illustrations in particular, she defines the edges of the drawing using lines (often tree trunks or vines) curving outward like parentheses, balanced by figures that stand in exaggerated contrapposto, so that everything in the picture appears to be dancing or swaying in place. The characters are almost always drawn in full figure, often from a distance and placed so as to set off the landscape, as when the Pevensies appear as little details in the corner of a drawing of the island at the beginning of Prince Caspian. Baynes’s illustrations are merry, delicate, fluid, and droll, but also, like Narnia itself, a little elusive. We seldom feel as if we’re inside them.