The White Witch will seduce you. (Credit: AJ Pics/Alamy)
Children can spot books written by adults for other adults a mile away — when I read bedtime stories to my son, I always notice when he loses interest. And almost all products of the modern children’s entertainment industry are so freighted with issues and role models, and ingratiating attempts to be cool, that escape velocity cannot be reached.
C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.
In the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognised too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.
What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilised.
This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.
For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was 10. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”
As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with war. The Pevensie children have been dispatched to the countryside, away from the Blitz and the apocalyptic madness of the grown-ups. They stay with a kindly professor in a house “full of unexpected places”. Yet the shadows have not gone. Lucy discovers a portal at the back of a wardrobe leading to another world. (Lewis dreamt this first glimpse of Narnia as a boy: a faun under a gas streetlamp in snowbound woods.) The children discover the land to be an ice-stricken police state, and they are called, reluctantly as in all heroic quests, to confront evil.
As I revisit it with my son, after more than 30 years since last reading it, the tale has an intriguingly archaic feel. A professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis incorporated mythic and folkloric characters from various cultures — Greek, Celtic, Germanic — into his stories. At times, it’s akin to a bestiary: a hangover from a childhood spent dreaming of imaginary lands while stuck indoors. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” What brings the tale to life are the extremely vivid sketches of the children, their strengths, flaws and group dynamics, as well as clever inversions: the faun, for example, is more startled by the little girl than vice versa. It is also more dystopian than I remembered: the woodland spies, the ransacked homes and forced disappearances, the guilt and responsibility the children feel.
The most disturbing scene, though, is when the villain, the White Witch, who has cast an endless winter on the land without hope of Christmas, comes upon a festive group of animals. They claim they’ve been visited by Father Christmas. She demands they recant, but a young squirrel insists it’s true. The White Witch waves her hand — “Oh don’t don’t don’t!” cries Edmund — and turns the merry party into statues. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”
The evil White Witch steals the show, of course. She promises the insecure, egocentric child regal status, but her abusive, narcissistic nature is soon evident. She convinces her victims it is they who bring wrath on themselves. She contaminates the minds of the young and naïve while masquerading as their benefactor. Lewis is clever in introducing her not as some tyrannical psychopath but a seducer that any of us could fall for. She appeals to the best in us — curiosity and desire for instance — and feeds off, warps and stunts these qualities. It is foolhardy to believe we would be immune to her charms.
C.S Lewis’s charms were quite another matter. On a pilgrimage to his haunts in Oxford, I met an older lady who had known him when she was a child. She twinkled at the mention of Narnia and was still clearly enchanted by his books. But when I asked her what Lewis was like. “Well… I thought he was a grumpy old sod.”
I laughed. I would have been disappointed with any other description. We know that Lewis loved a drink, could start an argument in an empty room and enjoyed doing so. He smoked like a train and cursed like a sailor. For a supposed conservative, he had anarchistic tendencies, as did Tolkien. In his wife’s eyes, Lewis was “a tough Ulsterman […] with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman”. As a Republican kid growing up in Derry, I ought to have felt him to be an enemy. But few people ever gave me a more valuable gift than the maps at the start of the Narnia books. Similarly, I owed a debt to him: not just for the respite of escapism, but because it gave me a way of understanding the fortresses and threats around us.
In another of Lewis’s masterpieces, The Screwtape Letters, a demon counsels his nephew that only amateurs try to seduce people into being directly evil. The sophisticated malefactor makes them first believe they are unquestionably good or, in other words, superior. This is how the frost is born. The White Witch creates a sparkling winter wonderland that is really a bitterly frozen steppe where nothing but fear can flourish. For an eight-year-old, Narnia is a make-believe place. By middle age, it’s recognisably real.