The Home Place || Narnia Revisited

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Narnia RevisitedAuthor(s): Patricia CraigSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 160-174Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057448 .

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NARNIA REVISITED

Patricia Craig

Where did It all come from?

The other day I was reading a memoir by the journalist Justine Picardie, called

My Mother's Wedding Dress, when I suddenly came on a passage describing a series of childhood visits to the home of an elderly relative who lived in Wiltshire, in an early nineteenth-century house built of golden stone, "surrounded by a

rambling, stepped garden of lawns and woods and secret places". By the time she was eight or nine, Justine Picardie says, she'd become convinced that this was the actual house described by C.S. Lewis at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to which the four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and

Lucy, had been evacuated during the war, and in which they found the entrance to a parallel world, where things were very much more urgent, miraculous and exotic than anything to be encountered in ordinary life. The eight- or nine-

year-old Justine Picardie, of course, went rooting round the place in search of the vital wardrobe, which - alas! - was not to be found. I mention this not

especially distinguished memoir just to give an indication of the extent to which the Narnia stories had, and have, become absorbed into the common stock of childhood experience, making an indispensable point of reference and

suggesting to impressionable readers a state of affairs that might or might not be true; like Father Christmas - who makes an appearance in one of the books - the land of Narnia holds out a promise of being "real" - until knowingness supervenes, that is. But even then, it is still to be believed in, utterly, if only in the realm of the imagination.

Another recent, more substantial and evocative memoirist, Francis

Spufford, in The Child That Books Built (published in 2002), considers his childhood relish for those stories in which the central characters move between

everyday reality and some supernatural zone, whether it's a matter of travelling through time or space. This particular genre cuts out writers like Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin, whose settings, Middle Earth and Earthsea, "had no location in relation to this world". They were entirely separate. He immersed himself in these as well, Francis Spufford says, but - I quote - "My deepest loyalty was

unwavering. The books I loved best of all took me away through a wardrobe, and a shallow pool in the grass of a sleepy orchard, and a picture in a frame, and a door in a garden wall on a rainy day at boarding school, and always to

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Narnia. Other imaginary countries interested me, beguiled me, made rich

suggestions to me. Narnia made me feel like I'd taken hold of a live wire. The book in my hand sent jolts and shivers through my nerves .. ." Well! C.S. Lewis no doubt would have been immensely gratified to find such a responsive reader - and Francis Spufford is only articulating what thousands of equally committed Narnians have experienced to one degree or another - but at the same time, it's necessary to bear in mind that the books, as they came out and

later, were not universally acclaimed or appreciated. Lewis's great friend J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, disliked The Lion, the Witch

and the Wardrobe, partly because the book seemed trivial to him in comparison with his own monumental work, and partly - as Lewis's biographer A.N.Wilson suggests - because he was only human, and therefore an element of envy entered into his perception of C.S. Lewis's "fluency, his ability to get a

thing done, and his increasing attractiveness to publishers". Actually, C.S. Lewis had begun the first of the Narnia series in 1939, and it wasn't finished until nine or ten years later. But then the next six books were written at high speed, with The Last Battle being completed by March 1953.

This, of course, is not the place to go into the fortunes of the Inklings -that loosely-knit group of Oxford friends and contemporaries to which Lewis

belonged (the story has been well told by Humphrey Carpenter, among others) - but one of the group's functions was to hold readings by members of various

works-in-progress, including The Lord of the Rings; and A.N.Wilson's book has a memorable description of one of the Inklings, Hugo Dyson - not a Tolkien enthusiast - "lying on the sofa with his club foot in the air and a glass of whisky in his hand, snorting, grunting, and exhaling - 'Oh fuck, not another elf!'" I

expect this vignette appeals to me because I was never a great admirer of the Tolkien opus - having had it pressed on me by a friend in the 1960s, when it was of course enjoying cult status, I struggled through the whole lot with a certain amount of boredom and resentment, and have managed never to open the tiresome books since. The Narnia stories are, by comparison, much more readable and diverting, but I have to confess to conceiving something of an

aversion to these as well, on first looking into them. Of course, I read them at

the wrong age; if they'd come my way when I was nine or ten (as they could

have done), I might have been as besotted as Francis Spufford, or found myself just as susceptible to their atmosphere of the riverbank and the knightly undertaking.

However, having recently cast off the shackles, as it seemed to me, of my

particular religious upbringing, and graduated into the freer air of atheism, I

read The Lion, the Wtch and the Wardrobe itth increasing disbelief and annoyance

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at its Christian colouring, and by the time I'd reached the end of The Last Battle I was aghast that the "dead children" motif, which I'd thought had disappeared with Peter Pan, had suggested itself to C.S. Lewis in the middle of the twentieth century as a fitting resolution to the series. The Lion, the Witch, etc, had got off to a splendid start, with the back of the wardrobe spiralling out into a fairy-tale dimension; but things thereafter - in my view - went rapidly downhill as Christ-the-Lion came into the picture, and the whole Christian fabrication was re-enacted. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the plot of the opening Narnia story, with the youngest evacuee, Lucy Pevensie, getting into a wardrobe hung with fur coats at the home of Professor Kirke (which is sometimes spelt with an "e" and sometimes without) - one of those rambling old houses of fiction in which any kind of magical occurrence seems a

possibility. Magic duly takes place as Lucy, on the other side of the wardrobe, finds herself standing in the middle of an extraterrestrial wood at night time, with snow coming down in buckets around her and a debonair faun carrying an umbrella in the offing. She's got herself into Narnia, so she has, which is

undergoing perpetual winter due to a contrivance of a diabolical witch - and

she, though she doesn't yet know it, together with her brothers and sister, is destined to bring about a happier state of affairs.

First, though, a lot of metaphorical thickets have got to be cleared away. The Pevensies are nice, honourable English children of the kind often encountered in books, with the exception of the second brother Edmund for whom a spot of character-moulding is in store. Edmund, though he knows Narnia exists, having been there himself, pretends to the other two that Lucy has made it up; this is the spiteful, deceitful part of Edmund's nature coming to the fore. His next defect is greed, specifically, greed for Turkish Delight which gets him into a terrible predicament. The witch, who has now appeared in her sleigh looking, and acting, like a cross between the Snow Queen and Cruella de Vil, gets Edmund into her clutches and feeds him Turkish Delight to further her devilish ends. I cannot bear people telling me the plots of things they've read or seen, so that is as far as I'm going to go with that plot, except to say that Asian the Lion has to die for the sins of Edmund, and then, in accordance with a cosmic plot, is resurrected and lives happily ever after.

You'll be aware that I have used that last phrase deliberately, to suggest the

lumping together of Christian allegory and essence-of-fairy-tale - and

fortunately, for much of the narrative, it's the second that prevails. Narnia's inhabitants include talking animals, fauns, centaurs, dryads, witches, giants and dwarfs - creatures straight out of Northern myths and folklore, some of them

definitively embodied in the illustrations ofArthur Rackham, whose work had

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delighted C.S. Lewis from the moment he first encountered it, as a schoolboy, in Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. Many, many people have drawn attention to Lewis's "borrowings": the famous wardrobe, for example, harks back to a

story by E. Nesbit called "The Aunt and Amabel," and also further back again to

George MacDonald's Phantastes, in which the hero's bedroom gradually turns into a glade in a wood. (The wardrobe also existed in Lewis's mind as an actual

piece of furniture in the house in East Belfast in which he spent most of his childhood: we'll come back to that later.) The Wind in the Willows, The Water

Babies, Peter Pan, The Story of the Amulet, all contribute something to Narnia,

along with Homer, Spenser, Malory, Rider Haggard and the Tales of King Arthur, to name but a few. The mixture was found indigestible by some - like an overstuffed Christmas cake - but most succumbed with pleasure to the "rich and strange" ethos evolved by the author.

Those of you who've glanced at The Irish Times this morning may have noticed a tiny paragraph by me on C.S. Lewis, in which I say that my attitude to the Narnia series has been somewhat modified over the years. The more you get to know something, of course, the easier it is to appreciate it - if it's worth

getting to know in the first place. My initial reaction to the series blinded me to some of its delights - I couldn't see the enchanted trees, as it were, for the Christian wood. I'm still not completely bowled over by the whole thing, but I'll come back to my continuing reservations in a minute. To go back to the distant past: when I voiced some criticisms of C.S. Lewis I was taken to task -

quite rightly - for, among other lapses, confusing Narnia with heaven, when in fact it's another world like ours (well, as much like it as is compatible with its inclusion of voluble fauns and beavers and other magical goings-on). It was about twenty years ago, when I reviewed for the London Review of Books a study of children's classics by Humphrey Carpenter called Secret Gardens, that I

happened to make some mildly dismissive reference to C.S. Lewis and found -

in the expressive Northern Irish phrase - that I'd brought an old house down on my head. I don't think any other opinion that I've expressed in print ever

generated such a heartfelt response, as reader after reader rushed to the defence of Lewis and Narnia in the Letters Page. The outcry alerted me to the

strength of feeling attaching to the series, as I was accused of being anti- Christian as well as anti-Lewis and goodness knows what else. Whatever my confusions, I felt they were confusing me with the wicked witch - and witch or not, I certainly lacked the skills of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe whose defeat of Lewis in 1948 in a public debate at the Socratic Club in Oxford was supposed to have planted in his mind the idea of the malevolent queen, which swiftly took shape as the bane of Narnia. When it came to the facts, as

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opposed to matters of opinion - facts like my misinterpretation of heaven, above - I had to bow down to the furious London Review correspondents who

clearly, at the time, knew the books much better than I did. Some of the

opinions have stuck, though. Carpenter's Secret Gardens treats the classic stories of the first "Golden Age"

of children's literature - that is, the period between the 1860s and the 1920s - and finds the best, or the most celebrated, of these derive a lot of their interest from some ulterior force, or extraneous ethic, which takes over from the ordinary moral views the author set out to encompass; or at least, from a

productive ambivalence in his or her outlook. These are all authors who meant a lot to C.S. Lewis - Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Beatrice Potter and so on. Carpenter's book is generally sharp and resourceful, and well worth

reading, but occasionally he goes too far - for example, when he claims that

J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, unlike some of his predecessors, distorted his

particular Christian model satisfactorily and thereby provided for his readers an alternative source of numinous sensation. Carpenter's case for admiring Barrie would seem to rest on his perception of the dreadful play "on its deepest level" as "a satire of religion and a mockery of belief" - and this we can't quite swallow (or at least I can't). This critic is better on the unconventional

Christianity running through The Water-Babies, for instance, which bears out

Kingsley's own recognition of the perfect suitability of a children's book as a vehicle for assimilating "an adult's most personal and private concerns" - concerns which, in the case of Kingsley himself, included cold water, lukewarm socialism and red-hot religious feeling. Another minister of religion, George MacDonald - as Carpenter has it - obliquely got to grips in his fiction with certain doctrinal problems which agitated him, and ended by supplying for his readers a good dose of spiritual nourishment, even if he had difficulty in

telling the difference between his grandmother-as-a-fairy, and God. In one of his novels, Lilith of 1895, MacDonald invented a country full of children who'd failed to grow up; one of these, Carpenter notes, is called Peter; Peter's much more famous namesake, when he moved centre-stage in 1904, simply "refused' to grow up. (And where did that leave him? To put it plainly, dead.) A nominal descendent of the two is Peter Pevensie, eldest of the four C.S. Lewis children, who likewise never makes it to adulthood - except in Narnia, of course, where he attains a good age, enjoying a successful reign as High King.

If it's true to claim that much classic writing for children accommodates some subversive strain, greatly to its enhancement - then you'd have to say that C.S. Lewis and the nineteenth-century authors I've just mentioned, came at

the resulting complexity and the stimulating friction it engenders, from

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opposite angles. With the earlier authors, it was Christianity and some of its moral imperatives that got subverted, willy-nilly; whereas with Lewis, the

subverting force is the Christian allegory, which works its way through and on

top of the magical story. Indeed, it overpowers the story, so that no informed reader could ever have been in any doubt about the author's didactic purpose. I've already mentioned the death and resurrection of Asian, but you also get many other disguised Gospel incidents infiltrating the text - the two girls Lucy and Susan, for example, confronting the empty tomb like the two Marys on

Easter morning, and the breathing of life into all the people turned to marble

by the witch, like the rising of the dead at the Last Trump. ("Marble" is not an accident - it's associated with tombstones.) And there's Lucy's remark, in The Last Battle, about a stable in our world which once contained something bigger than the world itself. Of course, as has often been stated, these are children's books and their proper readers are unlikely to pick up every Christian

reference, or to attach much significance to it if they do. It's the power of the fiction that counts - true, but the underlying message, in so addictive a series, is bound, at the very least, to have a subliminal effect. All right, I've left no one in any doubt as to what my own view is; and I won't say any more on the

subject - except to reiterate that one might have wished for a more latitudinarian standpoint on the part of Lewis.

What else? To return for a moment to the "dead children" motif: this puts the Narnia series in the tradition of The Water-Babies and Peter Pan with his, to say the least, suspect assertion: "To die will be an awfully big adventure".

(Tweeness and morbidity make a terrible combination here.) Peter Pan takes the Darling children on a journey through the skies to his own heavenly land where the Lost Boys dwell: these are "children who fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way". But to reach this haven, or heaven, the

Darlings have to have faith; the fairy dust sprinkled on them by Peter is not

enough. In a later echo of this circumstance, when the elder Pevensie sister, Susan, loses her faith in Narnia, dismissing it as make-believe, a juvenile fad on the part of her siblings, she is excluded from the state of gloriously Christian bliss conferred on every other "good" character in the series, as each of them finds a permanent home in "Aslan's Land". The significant humans among them reach this consummation by losing their lives in a train crash; while Susan, who, as someone remarks severely, "was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown up", is off somewhere mucking about with lipstick and high heels. It has always struck me as odd that no one, either in the books or out of them, has remarked on the disproportionate nature of the punishment - punishment for what? -

meted out to poor Susan who, at a stroke, has lost her entire family, brothers

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and sister, parents, cousin and all, along with a number of her friends including the old professor at whose house the whole saga began. It is certainly disproportionate in the scheme of things: in a different kind of fiction, Susan would have been an object of commiseration, not someone to be sneered at

simply for allowing the maturing process to take its natural course. And this is someone who was once a queen in Narnia, and rode on Aslan's

back over hills, through forests and streams! Talking of disproportion - as I say in The Irish Times snippet - I found the business of the four children becoming great kings and queens an unnecessary piece of aggrandisement, on the level of Enid Blyton's Find-Outers continually getting the better of ScotlandYard. One minute you have Edmund as a grubby schoolboy in short trousers, with a Bunterish craving for sweets, and the next minute he's ennobled as Edmund the

Just, King of Narnia, and speaking in a correspondingly elevated tone:

"'Madam,' said King Edmund, 'a like foreboding stirreth in my heart also.'" If this isn't make-believe I don't know what is, and a pretty mundane piece of make-believe at that. However, with regard to the lives lived to the full on a different plane, Lewis makes this work - just - by the device of telescoping or

elasticating time, so that the years passing in Narnia have no counterpart in this

world, and vice versa; when the time comes in Narnia, the great kings and

queens in their ceremonial finery tumble back through the wardrobe and find themselves cut down to size, shorts and pigtails and all, and not a bit of royalty about them. The way back to reality is sign-posted by the original lamp-post in the middle of the wood which made a landmark for Lucy at the start of the adventures. (What the lamp-post is doing there in the first place we learn in a later story.) They get back all right, and find that no time at all has passed - but as Lewis says in his novel Perelandra, a person who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. He's set them up for a short life on earth, so he has (well, apart from Susan), as - in the words of Francis Spufford - "their connection beyond the world took priority".

But they still have a way to go. In Prince Caspian, the second book of the

series, the four are back in Narnia; and by one of those disorientating time shifts I just mentioned, it's hundreds of years since they reigned there, and their names have passed into legend like that of King Arthur or Fionn MacCool.

They've been summoned back by the power of magic - or the power of Aslan - to help Prince Caspian, heir to the throne, defeat the machinations of the

usurper Miraz (who happens to be his uncle). Narnia seems unusually prone to serial misfortunes and misrule - if it's not the wicked witch it's a wicked uncle, another immemorial villain. However, once again help is at hand, even if it

sometimes comes in a small package. Prince Caspian sees the first appearance of

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the upright mouse Reepicheep (upright in both senses) - or a musketeer transformed into a mouse, as Francis Spufford says. Most commentators on Narnia single out Reepicheep as a first-rate character; otherwise, the consensus of opinion seems to be that this book represents a slight falling away from the decorativeness and exuberance of its predecessor. My own view is that the books actually become more engrossing after the first - which really hasn't much in the way of a plot - and before the last, when the allegorical outline once again becomes far too obtrusive. Book three, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is possibly the one that impresses readers most: the critic Naomi Lewis, for

example, calls it "the most intoxicating of the Narnian books". She adds: "the

abiding influence throughout is Homeric, clearly going back to [the young C.S.Lewis's] 'glorious' race through the Odyssey". True, but there's another influence she doesn't mention, that of the "Wonder-Voyage" of ancient Irish literature - "The Voyage of Bran", "The Voyage of Maelduin", etc - in which a

quest is undertaken and many marvels are encountered along the way. Not only do you find a similar blend of pagan and Christian elements in the new and old

voyage tales, but the islands visited by the C.S. Lewis ship the Dawn Treader have names like Dragon Island, Goldwater or Deathwater Island, the Island of the Voices, the Dark Island and so on, and these are very close to Maelduin's Island of the Eagle, Island of the Stone Door, the Undersea Island and the rest. The Dawn Treader, which continues the story of Caspian the reinstated boy king, concerns a quest for seven loyal lords whom the evil Miraz had banished to a distant realm, "beyond the Lone Islands". The younger Pevensies, Lucy and

Edmund, find themselves taking part in the dangerous voyage along with

Caspian and his crew, having whizzed through time and space to this destination via a picture on a wall. By accident, they have with them their horrid cousin

Eustace, who proves to be another urgent candidate for character-moulding. One of the most frequently quoted passages in the whole of the Narnia series is the opening of The Dawn Treader, which goes as follows:

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes ... Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were

dead and pinned on a card ...

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Eustace, naturally, is a terrible trial and annoyance to everyone on board the Dawn Treader, with his whingeing, boasting and complaining; he's a bully and a cry-baby, and requires very drastic treatment to reduce his obnoxiousness.

Drastic, and original. What happens is this. When the voyagers have landed on one of the islands, Eustace wanders off and winds up in a dragon's lair. Falling asleep on the dragon's hoard, thinking dragonish thoughts, he comes awake to

find, to his horror, that he is a dragon, complete with scales and fiery breath.

Mysteriously, though, the awful boy makes a rather agreeable dragon, and his

companions are quite reconciled to him by the time he's back in his own skin. To reverse the metamorphosis of Eustace requires the personal intervention of Aslan himself, and immersion - baptism? - "in a big, round pond" in the open air "with marble steps going down into it".

The immeasurably improved Eustace, along with a companion, Jill Pole, takes a central part in the next Narnia adventure, The Silver Chair; this one

begins with Jill Pole crying behind the gymnasium of her and Eustace's

"progressive" school, and continues with the opening of a door in a wall which admits the two of them into a different world, in which the natural order of

things is reversed, and a ride on the back of an owl is nothing to write home about. Despite her admiration for The Dawn Treader, Naomi Lewis considers this one to be the best of the series. She calls it "a superb and magical story," and so it is, with its journey to the Bottom of the World in the footsteps of the lost Prince Rillian, and another of Lewis's inspired non-human creations, fit to take his place beside the militant mouse Reepicheep, as the children's guide on the trek to the nether regions. This is the pessimistic but intrepid Puddleglum, a

Marsh-wiggle - I'll leave to envisage for yourselves what kind of a creature that is - who gets to stand up for Christianity when someone (actually, it's the

original witch) tries to persuade him that Narnia and Aslan are figments of the

imagination. (Puddleglum, we know, has a real-life model in the lugubrious gardener Paxford, employed by Lewis at his home in Oxford, the Kilns.) When the witch, recast as the Queen of Underland, gets her comeuppance yet again, she promptly turns into a snake - giving us an impression of Eve and the

serpent rolled into one, as it were. She's defeated, but it's not her last appearance in The Chronicles of Narnia.

In yet another incarnation, this time as Queen Jadis in The Magician's Nephew, the witch is propelled through space, clutching the hair of a girl called Polly, to arrive precipitately in Edwardian London. The setting and date do not occur by accident; this book is the closest C.S. Lewis gets to paying overt homage to E. Nesbit. "In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and

the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," we read on the

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opening page of The Maglclan's Nephew. And the visit of Queen Jadis calls to mind the unwelcome arrival in London of the Queen of Ancient Babylon in Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet which was published in 1906. Both occasions are

fraught with embarrassment and agitation, which one can understand with an

autocratic, larger-than-life person in full foreign rig on the loose in London,

causing a sensation in Fitzroy Square or laying about her with the cross-bar of a lamp-post. Taking another cue from Nesbit's five children and the fairy Psammead books - in one of which a one-time cook becomes a tropical island

queen - Lewis has a London cab-driver of the period plucked out of his world

along with his horse; the cab-driver and his wife are destined, on another

plane, to establish the ruling dynasty of Narnia, for this is the book in which Narnia comes into existence, just as the apocalyptic The Last Battle sees it

brought to an end. The hero and heroine of The Magician's Nephew, Digory and

Polly, are among the people wiped out in the final train crash, though unlike the Pevensies, Pole and Scrubb, they've reached a pretty advanced age by this time. In fact Digory, once a boy in Edwardian London with a sick mother and a mad uncle, turns out to be the old professor and curator of the wardrobe

through which Lucy tumbled into a Never Never Land, to frolic with the Lion. The one tale of Narnia I haven't mentioned so far is The Horse and His Boy,

the fifth in the series and a magical adventure set in ancient times - that is,

during the reign of High King Peter. A fair-haired boy named Shasta, growing up among the dark Calormenes, escapes from his foster father with the help of a talking horse called Bree, and later throws in his lot with another runaway, the girl Aravis, whose relatives have betrothed her to an ape-faced sixty-year- old with a hump on his back. Shasta turns out, in the best tradition of the

foundling story, to be a king's son of Archenland; but before he can come into his inheritance a number of ticklish situations have to be dealt with. This is

perhaps the most breezily narrated and gorgeously coloured of the books; Francis Spufford calls it "a pony book crossed with The Arabian Nights".

The experiments with time in the Narnia books, the whirligig shifts and vast discrepancies between one zone and another can, as I've said, put your rational head in a spin - in the end you can do nothing but let go of rationality, succumb to the author's ambitious plan for the series, and just enjoy the bits and pieces of the Narnian story he's chosen to highlight. Actually, one of the most impressive things about the series is the way it all slots together. Though each title can, of course, be treated as a separate story, you only arrive at the cumulative effect by reading the Chronicles straight through, with an eye to the deftness of the way in which everything is connected up to everything else.Your

understanding of the richness and intricacy of the undertaking is enlarged, as

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explanations add another layer of consistency to the text, within the author's overall magical scheme. To take a tiny example, the lamp-post I mentioned a minute ago turns out to have grown from the cross-bar wielded in anger by Queen Jadis, and flung at Asian's head during the creation of Narnia; but you have to wait until you reach Book Six to find this out. The more you learn, indeed, the more you're drawn - in imagination - further and deeper in; which is one reason why it comes as a bit of a let-down, in the most disquieting of the

stories, The Last Battle, to find that the beautification of Narnia is only a prelude to dissolving the whole thing.

Where did it all come from? We've already noted a few of the influences and appropriations that went to the making of Narnia - all taken in by C.S. Lewis in the course of a lifetime's reading, and re-created as something wonderfully and uniquely his own. Homing in - for example - on the antique glamour attaching to castles, enchantments and heroic quests, on the

quaintness of Nutwood and the charm of E. Nesbit-land, he regenerated his

jumble of ingredients by subjecting them to the force of his unifying imagination. I don't know how much validity there is in conjoining literary and

biographical analysis, but of course an irresistible impulse to relate the work to the life comes into play, once you get interested in a particular piece of writing. When I made the point earlier about the opening passage of The Dawn Treader

being frequently quoted, I didn't add that this is because of the light it casts on the author himself, and one or two of the foibles, or prejudices, he displays in it. In the passage he is poking fun, in a way reminiscent of Richmal Crompton, at "progressive" notions like rule-free schools and fads such as vegetarianism. (In one of Richmal Crompton's "William" stories we encounter a pair of Ruskinites who bake their own cooking utensils and wear no garment that has not been woven by themselves on their own hand-loom, and the narrative tone, just like C.S. Lewis's, directs us to find them hilarious and silly.) Lewis was, of

course, as we all know, an Ulsterman, with all the Ulsterman's impatience with fads and fancies. But the vegetarian business gets him into a spot of difficulty - first of all, to be excessively literal-minded for a moment, when he lumbers

poor, unreformed Eustace with an insect-torturing tendency which is really not consistent with the way the dreadful boy is supposed to have been brought up. More seriously, there's a considerable gap between Lewis's utter, common- sense disparagement of vegetarianism and his attitude to the splendid, noble and resourceful animals with which he populates his other worlds. (What's even odder is that in one of his science fiction novels, That Hideous Strength, he shows himself to be strongly opposed to the use of laboratory animals in

experiment or research; he's on the side of these and other animals, but not

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when it comes to those destined for the dinner plate.) Ah, but, you will say, he

sidesteps the problem in the Narnia books by ordaining that only the talking beasts are exempted from edibility; a dumb rabbit or pigeon is another matter

entirely. Jill Pole, in The Last Battle, goes out hunting with her bow-and-arrow and bags a rabbit for supper - only an ordinary rabbit, we're quickly assured, of which there are lots and lots scampering about with their little white bobtails in Western Narnia. What's not explained is how she can tell the

difference, when all rabbits look alike - and it's important not to make a mistake. In Lewis's book, to eat a talking beast is equivalent to cannibalism: we remember the so-called Gentle Giants in The Silver Chair, who not only serve a

portion of talking stag to their guests Eustace, Jill and Puddleglum, breaking a serious taboo, but have designs on the guests themselves as potential items on the menu.

I don't want to make too much of this, but it does show how C.S. Lewis tends to uphold military and manly accomplishments such as the ability to

slaughter your food as well as your enemy. There are far too many battles in the Narnia stories - a circumstance we may trace back to Lewis's youthful fascination with knights-in-armour. (His other abiding interest was of course the "dressed animals" carry-on, beginning with those which inhabited his

imaginary world of Boxen, or Animal-Land, the land he created, with his brother Warnie, in the "Little End Room" of the house in East Belfast known as Little Lea, before the First World War.) Again, it's a chancy proceeding to fix on incidents in anyone's life to illumine their subsequent literary output; but the overwhelming blow that disrupted the Lewis boys' happy childhood, the death of their mother in 1908, undoubtedly carried reverberations which were

literary as well as personal. A.N. Wilson, in his biography of 1990, goes so far as to equate the passage through the wardrobe and its stack of fur coats, with a

journey back to the womb, a search for the lost mother. You don't have to be Dr Freud, he argues, to read it in this light. On the other hand, to view the

thing from a different angle, you might cite the mystical experience undergone by C.S. Lewis on a bus going up Headington Hill in Oxford in 1929, this

epiphany marking an early stage in his return to full-blown Christianity. Like

Lucy emerging from the dim wardrobe into a place irradiated by a lamp-post, Lewis himself experienced something like a sudden transition from the darkness of atheism into the blinding light of religious belief (as it seemed to

him). Or perhaps one should - as Elizabeth Bowen suggested, in relation to

something else - stick to the story, and leave its implications alone. It was also Elizabeth Bowen who said, "If you begin in Ireland, Ireland

remains the norm; like it or not."There were many things about his birthplace

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that C.S. Lewis didn't like, but it remains fundamental to his development, as a person and a writer. I've no wish to rehash the biographical facts here -

they're pretty well known in any case, and include his miserable schooling in

England, the Oxford years, his experience as an officer during the First World

War, his peculiar domestic arrangements and reticence in relation to these, his

lifelong devotion to his brother who succumbed to alcoholism, his career as a Christian apologist and Fellow of Magdalen College, his late marriage to Joy Gresham followed by her death from cancer. The Lewis persona - rowdy and

thoughtful, bluff and sensitive, the whole "beer and Beowulf" image and the whimsical animal-lover - contains contradictions which go back a long way. It is surprising, remarked the critic Claud Rawson, a one-time pupil of Lewis's, "how many of Lewis's most characteristic adult guises, including his famous habit of'Johnsonian' repartee, originated in early childhood". When Lewis was

dying in 1963, he and his brotherWarren -Warnie - talked themselves back to their first and most pungent refuge, the Little End Room at Little Lea, with Boxonian adventures in full spate and the sense overpowering both of them "that the holidays were drawing to a close". Possibly the ghost of the wardrobe entered their consciousness at this time too - the wardrobe carved by their

grandfather, once a dominant presence in the Little End Room, and now to be seen only if you travel as far as Wheaton College, Illinois.

Northern Ireland affected C.S.Lewis in ways both good and bad. His friend Tolkien was apt to contend that a factor in Lewis's thinking, which he dubbed "the Ulsterior motive", the bogey of his Ulster background, lay dormant beneath the surface of his imagination, "and rose when he was off-

guard to make him brutal in manners, crude or illogical in thought". I'm

quoting A.N. Wilson here; and Wilson was not bowled over by Northern Ireland when he came here in pursuit of the subject of his biography; in fact, he concluded that "in no place on earth does it seem truer that Christ came to

bring not peace, but a sword" - a perception that goes some way, perhaps, towards explaining the battle-mania of the Narnia stories, in which the militant children think nothing of smiting their enemies' heads off, or slashing away at their unprotected legs and feet.

The madness of Ulster impressed A.N. Wilson very unfavourably (he came at an inauspicious moment, the late 1980s), but it also alerted him to one or

two elements in the Narnia books he might otherwise have missed - for

example, The Last Battle (by the time one reaches it, one is glad it is the last

battle) - this book opens with a very bad Ape and the simple-minded Donkey, the innocent Puzzle, who's at his beck and call. Coming unexpectedly on a

lion-skin, the Ape manipulates Puzzle into putting it on, and then announces to

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everyone that Aslan has returned, and that he, the Ape, and he alone, has access to the Lion's wishes and decrees. This situation suggests to A.N. Wilson that the Ulster author is parodying the Pope with his ex cathedra pronouncements. And when he -Wilson, that is - describes C.S. Lewis as "a red-faced pork butcher in shabby tweeds," you feel he's holding in his head an image, not of a specific person, but of an archetypal Ulster buffer.

There are other possible Northern Irish correspondences that A.N. Wilson

may have overlooked. When the half-Dwarf tutor, Dr Cornelius, in the second

book, tells Prince Caspian that his ancestors were not native Narnians but came from the land of Telmar, many of whose inhabitants were brought into Narnia

by Caspian the First, or Caspian the Conqueror as he was also known - when we read this, is it fanciful to speculate that C.S.Lewis may have had the Ulster Plantation in mind? Or that it was Ireland he was thinking of, when, in The Horse and His Boy, he has someone say of Narnia: " We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire. He longs to blot them out, gobble them up ..."? These

suppositions are possibly worth considering. And the physical landscape of Ulster keeps breaking through, as in the last pages of The Lion, the Witch and the

Wardrobe, when the children ride on the back of Aslan " up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes and across the shoulders of heathery mountains "

But there's a deeper correspondence. When C.S. Lewis writes in his

autobiography Surprised by joy, about his perpetual awareness of "the stab, the

pang, the inconsolable longing", we know that something akin to this feeling was first aroused in him by the sight of the Castlereagh Hills from his nursery window. And some time later, in the same book, we reach the famous panegyric on County Down - of which I'm only going to quote a fragment:

Now step a little way - only two fields and across a lane and up to the

top of the bank on the far side - and you will see, looking south with a little east in it, a different world. And having seen it, blame me if

you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world's end, the land of longing, the

breaking and blessing of hearts.

Then, coming down to earth a bit, he adds: "You are looking across what may be called the Plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains."

Here is the thing itself. Narnia too, redeemed by Aslan, was the thing itself, until the relentless imagination called for something even more Elysian, the platonic perfection ultimately located in "Aslan's Country". In The Voyage of

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the Dawn Treader, the phrase "the way to the world's end" is repeated over and

over, as the ship sails perilously close to that land of Aslan's - though, as we've

seen, the final dismantling of Narnia, and of the series, doesn't occur for a few books yet. "There are other places," T.S. Eliot wrote in "Little Giddmg", "which also are the world's end,"

some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city - But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England

- and it was, I suppose, the sense of some such numinous place underlying the

fantasy element of Narnia that gives the books their power. But it's their gusto and inventiveness, not to mention the fun of identifying the copious "borrowings" from a hodgepodge of genres, that have ensured their appeal.

This essay was delivered on 10 December 2005 as a part of the C S Lewis Festival in Belfast

A critic, essayist and anthologist, Patricia Craig was born in Belfast and lived for manyyears in

London Her most recent books are The Belfast Antholgy (The Blackstaff Press, 1999) and

Brian Moore: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2002) Her sequel, The Ulster Anthology, alsofrom Blackstaff, will be published at the end of 2006 She now lives in Antrim with her husband, the

painter and wood-engraver Jeffrey Morgan

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