a gallimaufry

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
[...] On the way, the House showed me many wonders.
In the Forty-Fifth Vestibule I saw a Staircase that had become one vast bed of mussels. One of the Statues that lined the Wall of the Staircase was all but engulfed in a blue-black carapace of mussels with only half a staring Face and one white, out-flung Arm left free. I made a sketch of it in my Journal.
In the Fifty-Second Western Hall I came upon a Wall ablaze with so much golden Light that the Statues appeared to be dissolving into it. From there I passed into a cool little Antechamber with few Windows, where it was cool and shadowy. I saw the Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it.

I have now read Piranesi and I am ready to tell you that it’s just as good as everyone says, albeit very different to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

It is impossible to write very much about it without spoiling it, and one of the pleasures is that you really don’t know at first where it’s going. So I’ll just explain that it takes the form of a series of journal entries by Piranesi (not his real name) who inhabits a vast labyrinth of abandoned stone halls. Seas wash the lower ones and clouds float through the higher ones. Many of the halls contain statues, but apart from the birds and the fish Piranesi lives alone. He has explored many of the halls and noted down his observations of them, but he has not found their limits. On his travels, he has found the bones of thirteen different people, and he cares for them, bringing food, drink and lilies as offerings. Piranesi loves the House and appreciates its beauty. His observations are a tribute to it; they are also essential to his survival since he records the tides which sporadically sweep through and would drown him if they caught him.

(Piranesi, ‘Via Appia and Via Ardeatina’, etching from Le Antichita Romane, 1756; from here)

However, there is something unsettling about the world from the beginning. Piranesi does not seem to belong there. Among the marble and the fishes, he sniffs the smell of petrol, which is out of place in this car-less place. How does he know the smell of petrol? He finds crisp packets. He is visited twice a week by the Other, who gives him a pair of brightly coloured trainers. He has a sleeping bag, a torch, plastic bowls to catch rainwater. Despite his meticulous record-keeping, there are holes in his memory. His innocence is both charming and odd; is it the result of some trauma?

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.
Yes, I answer Myself.
And if the House has made you forget, it has done so for good reason.
But I do not understand the reason.
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

The Other is the one who has named Piranesi. He does not seem to feel the beauty or the kindness of the House. He believes that that it is the repository of some secret and powerful knowledge which he intends to find and exploit. He knows that to stay too long in this world is to pay a price. He perceives the House as a prison, which presumably is why he has chosen the name Piranesi.

(Piranesi, ‘The Pier with the Chains’, etching from Carceri d'Inventione, 1750/1761; from here)

The question that the reader has is not, What will happen to Piranesi? but, What is this place and what does it mean? This places Piranesi in a tradition of Absurdist and Surreal literature in which characters are trapped in places that do not seem to be our world and are forced to reflect on themselves. I am thinking of Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, that sort of literature, though there are probably better-known examples which I just can’t remember. Unusually, Piranesi experiences the labyrinthine House as a benign, living entity. He feels a religious awe for it and his existence, his record-keeping, is a sort of worship. And without, I hope, giving too much away, it is a place that others long for even before they have seen it (this is explored in the interviews at the end of the novel). It is both a place of escape and a prison.

The novel abounds in literary allusions which give us further ways to understand the House. There is an epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, and at the heart of that novel is the Wood Between the Worlds which contains the entrances to many different universes. Something similar occurs in this novel. There is also an abandoned city (although Charn is dead, and the House is living) and a magician who likes to experiment upon people, both of which may be relevant to Piranesi.

Near the beginning of the novel, Piranesi encounters an albatross.

Still it continued, straight towards me, and the strangest thought came to me: perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and become another order of being entirely: an Angel! This thought both excited and frightened me, but still I remained, arms outstretched, mirroring the albatross’s  flight. [...] The moment that he reached me – the moment that I thought we would collide like Planets and become one! – I gave out a sort of gasping cry – Aahhhh! In the same instant, I felt some sort of pent-up tension go out of me, a tension I did not know I had until that moment. Vast, white wings passed over me.

Far from shooting it with a crossbow, as did the Ancient Mariner, he feels kinship with the bird, concern for its chick. And the arrival of the albatross heralds significant changes for Piranesi.

(Piranesi, detail from ‘The Triumphal Arch’, etching from Grotteschi, 1748; from here)

A final literary allusion is to ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, two characters discuss the ancestor of one of them, who declared he would write a novel and create a garden labyrinth. When he died, his relatives found a jumble of papers which made no sense. Stephen Albert, the man who has translated these papers, explains that novel is the labyrinth. In most fiction, characters are presented with questions, they make a choice and the consequences of that choice follow. But in this novel, every possible choice is explored, every forking path, and the book just carries on expanding. This seems to me to bear a relationship to the nature of the House, which is endless and apparently living. Perhaps it is created by the collective imagination, constantly expanding, prison and freedom. It is, after all, an artifice constructed between the sea and the sky.

Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter

(Arthur Rackham, illustration for The Wind in the Willows, New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1940; found here)

Before you ask, no, not that Humphrey Carpenter: this Humphrey Carpenter wrote a number of biographies, including one of Tolkien, and some children’s books, including Mr Majeika. He was also the editor of the first Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, published a year before Secret Gardens. In his preface he explains the purpose of his book:

About twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, it occurred to me that the great English children’s writers from Lewis Carroll to A.A. Milne formed some sort of identifiable literary movement, like (say) Bloomsbury or the Georgians or the Romantics. And the vague ambition began to gather in my mind of one day writing a book about them. It was to be concerned largely with their personal psychology, which I could perceive to be in many ways very odd.

Convinced that ‘the work of the great children’s writers between about 1860 and 1930 formed some sort of discernible pattern of ideas and themes’, Carpenter set out to discover ‘why so many authors in this period of English history had chosen the children’s novel as their vehicle for the portrayal of society, and for the expression of their personal dreams’. After a brief survey of the history of children’s literature up to the middle of the nineteenth century, he divides his book into two parts: the first (‘Arrears of Destruction’) deals with Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald and Louisa M. Alcott, the second (‘The Arcadians’) with Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne and a writer you have perhaps never heard of, Richard Jefferies. There’s a final chapter at the end on children’s literature since the Second World War, with particular reference to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce and Alan Garner.

The writers of the first group (Kingsley et al.), Carpenter argues, destroyed what had formed the foundations of writing for children up to that point and not only that but tore down the very basis of society in their works. In the case of Kingsley, Carroll and MacDonald, it was established religion and faith in God that was attacked; in the case of Alcott, it was the family unit. The men were tormented by religious doubt and also perhaps unconventional romantic-sexual inclinations (certainly I’m not sure I’ll ever read The Water-Babies again in quite the same light); Alcott, according to Carpenter, suffered from some sort of gender dysphoria coupled with the need to provide for her family and take on the responsibilities that her father had declined – take his place, in fact. These books destroy but do not offer any positive replacement for what their authors railed against.

The second wave of writers had to build something out of the ruins left by the first, and this they did by trying to recreate the experience of childhood. Carpenter posits that all of them, in different ways, wished to recapture an idyllic and rural childhood. (The exception here is E. Nesbit, who had a less happy time as a child and so constructed idyllic settings from her imagination.)

With Christopher Robin and Pooh in the enchanted place, Carpenter (while complaining about the sentimentality of this chapter) believes that the Arcadian phase of writing for children ended. His next outstanding children’s novel is The Hobbit, which, far from offering a golden world of talking toys or flying boys, is set in a place of deep anxieties, fraught with creatures who wish to harm the hobbit and his companions and where treachery and intrigue are the order of the day. It is ‘a bitter adventure’ that Bilbo undertakes. Subsequent British writing for children, Carpenter argues, far from picturing childhood as a special and magical time, is about the necessity of growing up.

Well. I had a complicated reaction to this book. One the one hand, it is an entertaining read, its prose clear and straightforward to read. I liked the main groupings of the books and, when Carpenter moved away from the psycho-analytical angle, his insights. On the other, there did not seem to be a lot of common ground between all these writers and their works, other than those I’ve mentioned in the summaries above, which are pretty broad similarities due to time and social context. I did not feel that the psycho-analytical angle yielded much. Also, I did not think that he made a good case for the inclusion of only one American writer, Alcott, and not Mark Twain or Joel Harris, for instance. And his dislike of E. Nesbit’s work was so strong (he calls her a ‘hack’) that it was hard to see what she was doing there either, considering his avowal to discuss only outstanding children’s literature. I am not sure, therefore, that he altogether achieved his purpose.

(Arthur Hughes, illustration for At the Back of the North Wind, London: Strahan, 1871; found here)

Furthermore, Carpenter was clearly a man of very definite opinions and I disagreed wholeheartedly with a lot of what he wrote (despite obviously being considerably less knowledgeable about the subject than him). Disagreeing with an author is, of course, not a bad thing per se and disagreeing with Carpenter was actually fun. His standards for children’s literature were, I felt, absurdly high. Quick to condemn the works he studies as ‘brilliant and a failure’ (The Water-Babies), ‘rambling ... predictably monotonous’ (The Princess and the Goblin), ‘dull’ (Little Women), ‘condescending’ (pretty much Nesbit’s entire oeuvre), ‘sentimental’ (parts of The Wind in the Willows and The House at Pooh Corner, and scores of ‘lesser’ works – sentimentality seems to be the worst crime a writer can commit in Carpenter’s book), he is not quite as quick to define their good qualities. There is little sense here of the peculiar magic of many of the works discussed; perhaps he felt he would be preaching to the converted? In fact, only the Alice books and most of Beatrix Potter’s work escape some degree of censure. Fans of Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and C.S. Lewis should probably have a drink before reading his views on them, and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is ‘ridiculous’ and ‘crude’.

However, I did feel that taking a psycho-analytical approach to the works, though interesting, was ultimately limiting. And the case of Lewis Carroll’s childhood further shows that it can be problematic. Some biographers speculate that Carroll was deeply affected by the death of his mother and was unhappy at school; Carpenter quotes a few letters to argue that exactly the reverse was true: his mother’s death hardly affected him at all and school wasn’t that bad. It’s impossible to evaluate whose version is more accurate and so using one of them as a reliable basis for understanding his works seems unwise. (Especially when it conveniently fits with your theory...) As for his analysis of Louisa M. Alcott (who looked ‘mannish’ like her mother and thus must have longed to be a man), I thought it was outrageous and entirely lacking in sensitivity or nuance. In fact, his analysis of women’s writing overall was poor (he seemed to think that Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses is just a poor shadow of Alice).

My other quibble though is a minor one: he discusses Beatrix Potter’s books purely in terms of their text and with not one single reference to the illustrations. And yet, the illustrations are fundamental to the stories. Delicate, pretty, civilised, they provide the veneer of respectability which the stories themselves, concerned with eating or being eaten, undermine and satirise. We all want to live in Tabitha Twitchett’s lovely house in the Lake District and yet we would not want to share our home with someone who plans on baking our children, like Samuel Whiskers. I recently read The Tale of Kitty in Boots, an unpublished Potter work discovered in 2015 and published a year later with illustrations by Quentin Blake. Granted it is not one of her finest works, but Blake’s illustrations – and while I love his work, he would not have been my choice for this – only reinforce the violent comedy, never complicate it. There is no sense that Kitty is trespassing on social norms, just that this is a rollicking tale of cross-dressing and rabbit-eating.

That was a massive digression... It’s an imperfect book reflecting its times, but it does give a good overview, I think, of the development of children’s literature over 150 years and some useful potted biographies of some of the most important writers in the field. And many of Carpenter’s insights are brilliant: the destructiveness of the early books, the idea of Christopher Robin as a sort of watchful god of love who yet never intervenes, the richness of the layers of The Wind in the Willows. Worth quarrelling with.

(E.H. Shepard, illustration for Winnie the Pooh, London: Methuen, 1926; found here)

The Eildon Tree, by William Croft Dickinson

Having enjoyed Borrobil so much I splashed out and bought the sequel, The Eildon Tree. This was published in 1947 and unlike Borrobil it was never re-issued. It has a different illustrator too: James S. Richardson, who provides mediaeval-influenced line drawings, in place of John Morton-Sale.

The Eildon Tree begins with Donald and Jean standing beside the Eildon Stone which, they are assured by Andrew the ancient shepherd, stands by the spot where the Eildon Tree once grew. Ballad-lovers will know that it was by the Eildon Tree that Thomas the Rhymer first laid eyes upon the Fairy Queen riding by in ‘grass-green silk’. Andrew tells a version of the story of Thomas the Rhymer, who travels to Elf-land with the Queen and is given the gift of ‘a tongue that could never lie’ (hardly a useful gift, I’ve always thought) which here means that he can foretell the future. Thomas is then brought back to the ‘real’ world, a turbulent mediaeval Scotland which has been divided into three under three kings. However, Thomas remains a servant of the Fairy Queen and is eventually summoned back to Elf-land. Andrew concludes his tale by adding that at times of great need Thomas will return to Scotland.

(Meredith Morris Williams, ‘The Fairy Queen and Thomas the Rhymer’, illustration for Elizabeth Grierson (1910), The Scottish Fairy Book. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company)

No sooner has Andrew left them than Thomas the Rhymer arrives and the children find they are now sitting by the Eildon Tree, the stone having vanished. Thomas the Rhymer tells them some prophecies, one of which they are part of, and gives each of them a vision. Donald’s vision is of a black knight defending a besieged castle; Jean sees a ship leaving an island. These visions and prophecies are crucial to what follows, as the children find themselves in the Middle Ages during a power struggle between Gabran the Good and Maldred the Malcontent, a usurper. They are taken to the castle of Dunverran, captured, escape through secret passages and help to restore Gabran as the sole and rightful king. (In an afterword, Croft Dickinson explains that this part of the plot is inspired by events in Scottish history from the end of the thirteenth century, when the heir to the Scottish throne died aged eight and a number of men stepped forward to claim it.)

When The Eildon Tree was written, children’s time-slip novels were still quite unusual. Its predecessors are Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, but it is quite different from them: closer really to the Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings. Their portal to the past is not a house or an object but a person, Thomas the Rhymer: Thomas’s uncertain status as a ‘real’ person signals that the past the children will enter may not be the ‘real’ past, informed though it is by Croft Dickinson’s knowledge of mediaeval history. This is also unusual, since most authors of time-slip novels take pains to situate their stories in an accurately recreated past. Perhaps Croft Dickinson is making a subtle point about the impossibility of doing that.

The most absorbing parts of the novel, I found, were those in which the children played an active part: escaping through the secret passages, hiding in the heather and taking a boat down the river at night. The climax of the book is the siege of Dunverran which is probably more thrilling for children to read than me. As in Borrobil Jean is a slightly more compelling character than Donald although, older now, she has lost the charming habit of inventing words as she did in the earlier book. For much of The Eildon Tree they are under the protection of two knights, Hugh of the Hill and Gilbert of the Long Bow, both of whom are very brave but otherwise slightly bland; they speak in that slightly antiquated, ‘heroic’ way that the ‘high’ characters speak in the novels of Lewis and Tolkien.

They sat down beneath the green shelter of the trees. Everything seemed strangely still. No song of birds, no sound of scuttling small animals, no hum of insects came to them. No breath of wind rustled the leaves above. Of all of them, only Hugh seemed to be undisturbed and unaffected by the strangeness of it all. From time to time Gilbert looked cautiously about him, pretending to be merely curious; but Donald and Jean both knew that like them he was under the weight of suspense, that like them he was feeling that fro the surrounding stillness something unwelcome, something fearful might suddenly spring upon them and hold them powerless in its grip. Again Donald shuddered at the eeriness of it all. Jean began to draw closer to Hugh. And at that moment a long drawn-out cry broke the silence of the wood.

‘Four of you! Four of you!’

The Eildon Tree is for slightly older children than Borrobil. Not only are Donald and Jean a little older themselves, but there is some darkness here and the tone is less light-hearted and more adventurous. Magic has been replaced by mysticism. I have now discovered that there is a third novel in the series, The Flag of the Isles, which draws on the Battle of Culloden. Perhaps, if it’s not too wildly rare and expensive, I might read it...

Borrobil, by William Croft Dickinson

How frequently have we all wondered what a mash-up of Puck of Pook’s Hill with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, as written by C.S. Lewis, would be like! Good news, my friends, today I have discovered the answer, and it is Borrobil, written in 1947 by a distinguished professor of Scottish history. (This information I gleaned from Geraldine Harris’s excellent review at FantasyReads. She also notes the similarities of Borrobil to Brisingamen, though unlike her I still prefer the Garner novel, perhaps because I never read Borrobil as a child. It is amazing how much more powerful the impact of a book when read as a child.)

Why was the wood so strange and mysterious? There it stood, a dark ring of trees, on the top of the distant hill. It looked much like other woods. Yet there the children had never been. There they so much wanted to go.

[...] they began to wonder about the wood. Sometimes it seemed dark and aloof, forbidding, frightening; at other times it appeared lonely and friendless, as though it were longing for someone to visit it and to enter its shade. Soon, as they played in the meadows or round the haystacks, the children found themselves turning to look at it, almost as if it had called to them, whispering to them, “Come to me. Come to me.” And at night, especially, this call of the wood seemed to be even more urgent, more impelling. Then the children would gaze from their bedroom window at the dark spiky crown breaking the line of the sky until they felt drawn towards it, until they felt they must go and answer its call.

Thus begins Borrobil. Donald and Jean are on holiday, that perfect time for adventures in children’s literature. Drawn to and repelled by the wood, one night they feel compelled to go there in a memorable journey through the dark countryside. Among the trees they find nine standing stones on a low mound, with two fires burning on either side of what seems like an entrance. A little bit of dancing later, and they have inadvertently summoned Borrobil and been transported back into the past. Borrobil is a friendly guide, ‘the merriest, queerest little man’ they have ever seen; he explains that they passed between the fires at a significant moment, Beltane. At Beltane every year the White King of Summer challenges and defeats the Black King of Winter. The children are now in the ‘dead’ past, the domain of the Black King. When the White King defeats him, they will return to the ‘living’ present. But in the mean time, Borrobil will take them to a dragon fight. And thence on to other adventures, including capture by an evil wizard, a visit to a fairy knoll and a close escape from the Blue Men of the sea, as well as a fierce battle against marauding Men of the Long Ships.

The novel is principally a series of journeys ending in mortal combats, brightened with stories, songs and poems mainly related by the resourceful Borrobil. The light, humorous tone, the presence of the kindly yet powerful Borrobil, and Maroc’s second sight, which usually reveals the outcome of a battle before it begins, keep any darkness at bay. Even when Jean is captured by one of the Men of the Long Ships, Maroc immediately has a vision of her safe. This makes the book a charming and ‘safe’ read, suitable for even quite young children.

Donald and Jean’s rôle in the adventures is fairly passive; they are observers, tourists even in this fantastical world, protected by Borrobil (who is a sort of super-parent figure). Even so, when necessary they play their part. Twice they are required to give a gift and each time their offering – three biscuits, a lucky stone, the humble kinds of things that children might have in their pockets – is accepted as valuable and worthy. With quite some strength of character, they resist the lures of the fairies, so that Borrobil may borrow a pony from them. As two of the members of the army of five, they help to turn a battle in their friends’ favour. The adult characters all treat the children with great respect and courtesy, which is always pleasing to a child reader. The book seems to be telling us that children may not be able to swing mighty swords and defeat giants, but in their own way they can make an important contribution.

Croft Dickinson has definitely drawn on Scottish folklore for some at least of the elements in this story, such  as the Blue Men and the details of the fairy mound. Morris points out that he was knowledgeable about Iron Age archaeology and drew on it for the descriptions of Giric’s underground home and the tower fort of the Men of Orc. Alas, I know too little about the subject even to know how much of the main action is based in Pictish history or myth, and how much springs from the author’s own imagination. Certainly my superficial researches have yielded nothing about a hero named Maroc, a Princess Finella or a King Brude. However, some of the stories have a tinge of familiarity about them: I have heard the tale of King Eochaid and the white dog before, although not with those names. I’m curious to read more about this. Can anyone recommend anything?

Borrobil itself is currently out of print, but it was re-issued in 1964 as a Puffin with a lovely cover by Pauline Baynes and copies are not too expensive. I am not really surprised that it is no longer in print as that is the case for so many excellent children’s books, but I was surprised that neither William Croft Dickinson nor Borrobil merited a reference in the latest edition of the Oxford Guide to Children’s Literature. Given its place in the history of children’s books – Geraldine Morris calls it ‘the missing link’ between Lewis and Garner – this is a sad omission. Don’t let it prevent you seeking it out.

a return to Narnia

Things I should be doing right now:

• Beginning to revise for my exam on ‘Teachers and responsibility’ next week
• Marking exam papers for my English language class
• Setting the oral exam for my English language class
• Taking a deep breath and hurling myself at the mountain of paperwork I need to submit to the school where I teach
• Finishing a report on someone’s novel
• Editing a friend’s poetry collection
• Sleeping
• Scraping the weeks of accumulated filth off the house...

But instead I am writing here... Two things have helped me through the past few weeks – well, two non-human things, my family have been lovely supportive human things – cheese and Narnia. I don’t have much to write about cheese and certainly nothing of interest, but I do want to write about the Narnia books. So I shall.

I hadn’t reread all seven books since I was a child and I was a little hesitant. I remember loving the stories very much, but since then they have come in for a lot of criticism, notably from Philip Pullman (another writer whose work I love). I didn’t really want to return to Narnia and find all the magic rubbed off and just a bundle of twigs of racism, misogyny and religious propaganda remaining.

(Lucy and Mr. Tumnus, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950; found at Brian Sibley His Blog, which has a nice piece about Baynes)

Well, I reread all the books, which makes it quite obvious that I enjoyed them (very much!). However, I was scrupulous in amassing evidence for and against the charges brought against C.S. Lewis, and while I’m sure that Lewis has more than enough advocates I feel impelled to write my reactions here, why were web-logs invented if not for this sort of bellyaching? Since I’m feeling all bullet-pointy and subheadingy today:

 

Religious propaganda

Lewis is an expert synthesiser of myths, religions and fairy tales. In Narnia he has picked out all the best bits from especially Greek but also English, Norse and Western European literature – fauns, centaurs, satyrs, dryads, giants, talking animals, magic potions, etc. – to create a world we all want to inhabit too. There are echoes of the Odyssey in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a play on Hamlet in Rilian’s relationships with his parents and the Lady of the Green Kirtle and endless allusions to the mediaeval English literature Lewis knew so well. Christianity is also a clear reference point, most obviously in the figure of Aslan and his sacrifice to save others in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Eustace’s ‘conversion’ and the words of the lamb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the life beyond death in The Last Battle.

(Aslan by Pauline Baynes, from The Magician’s Nephew, London: The Bodley Head, 1955; found here)

But propaganda? Now I know you can have really quite insidious forms of propaganda, but aren’t you at some point supposed to make it clear that you should vote for Cyril or join the Purple Party or stop eating cauliflower? I realise that personal experience isn’t in any way statistically significant, but I’ve yet to encounter anyone who, as a child, even noticed the religious symbolism, let alone felt curious enough to visit a church as a consequence. It passed me by and I was brought up as a Catholic. Lewis could write ‘propaganda’ – because I suppose you could classify The Screwtape Letters as that – so it seems surprising that if he wanted to lure children to his Christian ways he didn’t do it more effectively. (Ha ha, here I show my bias...) It does seem odd now, because to Adult-Helen the Christian themes were very obvious.

(Bacchus and entourage by Pauline Baynes, from Prince Caspian, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951; found here)

For me, the Christian element is part of the rich mix of sources on which Lewis drew to write the Narnia books. It informs the values he upholds and the behaviours he approves in his characters – kindness, honesty, courage. Yet these values are not held exclusively by Christians, I don’t think that by promoting them he is being particularly sectarian. His religion was important to Lewis personally, but it also contains some very good stories – stories which, as he might have known, often have their roots in still older religions and cultures. These stories include creation myths and gods (and goddesses) who die and are reborn. Although Christianity is no small part of the books, I can’t help reading them as celebrating not just religious values but, intertwined with them, the value of imagination. Yet with a different religious upbringing, how would I feel about this?

(Puddleglum, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Silver Chair, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954; found here)

 

Racism

As a white European, it’s more than possible that I miss subtle – maybe even not-so-subtle – racism, or dismiss it. Is this what I am about to do?

(Tashbaan by Pauline Baynes, from The Horse and His Boy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953; found here)

It is the Calormenes who attract the accusations of racism on the part of Lewis. If you read the books in the order in which Lewis wrote them, they first appear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they are described as having ‘dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-coloured turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people’. They also deal in slaves. Much of the action in The Horse and his Boy occurs in Calormen, the land from which the children and the Talking Horses are trying to escape. Calormen lies to the south of Narnia across a desert, and its climate seems to be hotter. Pretty early on skin colour is remarked upon by a Calormene noble who wishes to buy Shasta from his foster-father: ‘This boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.’ I did feel more uncomfortable reading that. There’s nothing overt, just the alignment of beauty with the fair and white, and the contrast with the dark. The ruler of Calormen, the Tisroc, is a clever, cruel despot with a sense of humour; his son is brave but rash and greedy. The other Calormenes live in fear of their absolute ruler and are good at baths, gardens and intrigue. In The Last Battle they ally with Shift the Talking Ape to infiltrate Narnia and conquer it. In this book their worship of Tash and dedication to him of human sacrifices is more prominent, as is their skin colour – the Dwarves, admittedly characters we are not intended to like, repeatedly call them ‘Darkies’, which draws attention to this.

(Lasaraleen and Aravis by Pauline Baynes in The Horse and His Boy, as before)

But the Calormenes are not the only villains in the Narnia books. Narnia and the children are generally threatened by outsiders, and the White Witch/Jadis, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Uncle Andrew, the giants, the Telmarines and the slavers of the Lone Isles are apparently all white-skinned, or at least we are not told that they are dark which, I believe, for a white British author of the mid-twentieth century comes to the same thing. Moreover, there are sympathetic Calormene characters: Aravis, Emeth and to a lesser extent Lasaraleen.

My conclusion, after a lot of thought, is that it is the Calormene culture rather than race which Lewis is portraying as Other and in opposition to the culture of Narnia. Religion is included in that. I see the Calormenes as the imaginative, cultural and religious Other Lewis chose to create. To do so, just as he used one set of literary and cultural references to create Narnia, so he used another to create its opposite: chiefly, I think, the Arabian Nights but also Ottoman history and the history of ancient cultures. The society he imagines is, in Edward Saïd’s term, Orientalised, a fantasy on several levels and too general to be linked to any one ‘real’ society. And yet I think that it can make us uncomfortable, at least, it did me in The Last Battle, because of its conflict with Narnia. There’s a distinct whiff of ‘my English, classically educated and Christian culture is better than your vaguely foreign and exotic culture’ which, being part of his culture, I didn’t notice as a child. So, I don’t find the books to be racist, but perhaps rather Little Englander sometimes.

(The stranger with Arsheeh and Shasta, by Pauline Baynes in The Horse and His Boy, as before)

 

Sexism

It’s hard to argue that Lewis is really sexist when he has created characters like Lucy, Jill and the tomboy Aravis. There are some casually sexist remarks bandied about, occasionally by the narrator, but when the girls hear them they usually challenge them:

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Susan. ‘I can’t remember all that.’

‘That’s the worst of girls,’ said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. ‘They never can carry a map in their heads.’

‘That’s because our heads have something inside them,’ said Lucy.

Nobody argues with Father Christmas when he says ‘battles are ugly when women fight’. Would you argue with Father Christmas though? Is this view unusual even today? And is the view of a character necessarily that of the author anyway? Susan, Lucy and Jill all fight with bows and arrows. In The Last Battle Jill is not only given a knife in lieu of a sword (she’s too small for an adult one) but apparently dies in battle.

(Tea with the beavers by Pauline Baynes, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

The adult women in the books are rather different. For a start, there aren’t many: Aunt Letty, who takes a no-nonsense approach to Jadis; Digory’s mother, Queen Helena and Caspian’s wife, who doesn’t even get her own name, who are all pretty characterless; the grotesque giant Queen of Harfang, whose seeming motherly feelings for the children disguise her literal desire to eat them; and of course Jadis/the White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who is both substitute mother and intended wife for Rilian. With the notable exception of Mrs Beaver  – whom I believe I can include in this discussion of adult females – the only admirable woman of any real note is the grown-up Polly, who never marries and somehow retains the spirit of Narnia into old age. But when you are a child reading these books, do you notice or care? You identify with the children, not the adults. It’s quite possible that Lewis had some interesting ideas or complexes about women and mothers in particular, but I don’t think any girl would read these books and come away diminished because of her gender. Still, perhaps your experience is different?

(The White Witch and Edmund, by Pauline Baynes, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

And then of course there is Susan. Pullman claims that Susan is cast into hell for liking boys and clothes, but this is not how I read it. Susan, like Peter, visits Narnia twice before being told by Aslan that she is too old to return. But Susan isn’t just too old, she is changing. Already in Prince Caspian she is sceptical, closing herself off to the wonders of Narnia. At the end of The Last Battle, when all the other children are finally back in Narnia together, her absence is explained thus:

‘Sir,’ said Tirian, […] ‘Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?’

‘My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.’

‘Yes,’ said Eustace, ‘and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, “What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.”’

‘Oh Susan!’ said Jill, ‘she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.’

‘Grown up, indeed,’ said the Lady Polly. ‘I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.’

I interpret Susan’s ‘crime’ as rejecting Narnia and what it stands for – religion, the imagination. This isn’t necessarily a consequence of growing up, as Polly, Digory and Peter have all remained true, but becoming an adult does often coincide with a curbing of creativity, imagination and the religious impulse and a more worldly attitude. Perhaps Lewis wanted to make this point and needed to choose a character to show this. She’s not cast into hell, as Pullman says, there’s no suggestion she’s even on the train when it crashes, but she is shut out of Narnia, albeit of her own volition.

But – it is so unfair! This is Susan, who watched over Aslan after the White Witch had killed him and who danced with him in the beautiful dawn! Aslan seems to give everyone else a second chance…

(Pauline Baynes, cover illustration for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

 

Conclusion

My amazing and original conclusion: C.S. Lewis was a product, perhaps even a rather conservative one, of his time. He had religious convictions and these, like his literary loves, are present in the Narnia books. He wasn’t a card-carrying feminist but gives us some great heroines and some powerful villainesses in a very male-dominated culture. His Calormen is definitely Orientalised and presented as anathema to Narnia, but unless you believe that culture is the inevitable product of race, I don’t think you could argue that it’s racist. It is not unproblematic though. Overall, I acquit Lewis of all charges – except for being utterly mean to Susan, as a character rather than as a female. How could he do that to one of the Pevensies?

If anyone has managed to read this far without dying of combined boredom and exhaustion – what do you think of the Narnia books? Do you think that they are less innocent than I suggest?

(Surely everyone’s favourite mouse? Reepicheep, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952; found here)