On Narnia
And why I love it so.
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Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers, about one of my favorite books of all time. On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for a lemon caper pasta that is simply perfect for spring. As ever and always, click here to see more of my commercial food and product photography.
It’s hard to explain, even to myself, the draw that The Chronicles of Narnia hold for me. I can’t remember the first time I read them or what drew me to them in the first place. I have some memory of at least one of the seven books in the series being read aloud to me, but I can’t place it. All I know is that the allure of this world has been there for me since early days.
I fell in love with the whole world, certainly, but especially the characters who lived within it. I fell in love with Susan and Lucy: one of them a caricature of my worst attributes and one of them a beacon of the way I wished I could think and be. I fell in love with a world where it was easy to tell right from wrong and to know from the get-go that the good guys were going to win. I fell in love with the idea of a majestic lion, though not a tame one, who came from across the sea.
The books are well-known for their overtly Christian themes, but somehow, I’m able to put that aside. I’ve re-read these books now several times (though not as many times as Harry Potter), and I find them tremendously comforting and emotionally charged. Is it a bittersweet, forbidden fruit-like bite of religious belief that draws me into this world? Or is something simpler—a childlike wonder at a hidden world and imagining all that could lay behind a door if I could simply stop being such a grown-up about it? Even as I evaluate and analyze all of this through my adult lens, I still feel the pull to align myself with Lucy’s blind faith instead of Susan’s cynicism.
Now, reading through the books, I see characters and plot lines so simple that they beg to be filled in with a child’s sense of self and imagination. In my most recent run through the books, though, I felt moved most by C.S. Lewis’s descriptions of the land of Narnia itself. A different heartstring was being pulled; this one much deeper and closer to my core.
I’ve written before about re-reading books from childhood. I know that it’s a way for me to pull the past around me and pretend for a moment that I’m back in a different place and time. But something with Narnia has hit me differently lately, and until Colin and I were re-reading Prince Caspian aloud a few weeks ago, I couldn’t figure out what it was. That night, I blinked back tears at Lewis’s description of the Pevensie children realizing that the ruins they stumbled upon were indeed their former home:
… the treasures were so covered with dust that unless they had realized where they were and remembered most of the things, they would hardly have known they were treasures. There was something sad and a little frightening about the place, because it all seemed so forsaken and long ago. That was why nobody said anything for at least a minute.
Then, of course, they began walking about and picking things up to look at. It was like meeting old friends.
There it was, staring me straight in the face. Here was why I loved these books so: we all have our Narnias, the secret places that froze in time the moment we left them, and we all wish in some deep part of our heart that we could wake back up in those moments. I think too, though, that we all feel the deep sadness that comes from knowing that even if we did go back, things wouldn’t be the same. This feeling of wonder that Eden existed and the pain of knowing we can’t get back to it is at the root of all of our nostalgias. It’s why we crave the foods of our childhoods and remember song lyrics for years and years. It’s what makes a family recipe so difficult to replicate and a family vacation spot so hard to revisit.
In the same scene, Susan plucks the horn of her bow, which has been magically preserved for thousands of years in the treasure room.
It twanged: a chirruping twang that vibrated through the whole room. And that one small noise brought back the old days to the children’s minds more than anything that had happened yet. All the battles and hunts and feasts came rushing into their heads together.
Isn’t that just…it? The perfect summary of how a memory feels when it knocks into your brain with a few of bars of a melody or bite of spaghetti? It’s so poignant and relevant and simple all at once, just the way writing should be. That’s why I come back, year after year: both because of that writing and because that writing has itself become the twang of the bow for me, harkening back to the days of old.
What childhood books do you find yourself returning to time and time again? I’m so curious to hear if anyone out there feels as strongly about another book as I do about these. Let me know below! See you back here on Friday.