Through the Wardrobe

by Herbie Brennan

  In Sydney we spoke in English, outside the house at least; in France we spoke French, of course. We sometimes attended the village school in Empeaux, and that too was utterly different from our Australian city school: it was small, with all the pupils in one room no matter their grade; in the younger years you used slates and chalk and then graduated to inkwells and blotters and squared writing books, instead of pencils, lined exercise books, and ballpoint pens. French schoolwork was harder and required more learning by heart, more grammar, more attention to handwriting—oh, how hard that was for me and my messy script, I never got the grasp of writing with ink and blotters and always smudged my work! You didn’t get to write “compositions” or do creative writing, like you did in Australia; it was all dictation and parsing of paragraphs and analysis of poems. You recited history lessons about “our ancestors the Gauls” and not about Anzacs fighting at Gallipoli. You didn’t wear uniforms like in Australia, but just a pinafore over your ordinary clothes. Instead of eating sandwiches in the playground, you got to go home for lunch, where you had two hours off to digest.

  Usually we went to France in the spring or summer, but once we went at Christmas. And that was more different. Christmas was always magical for us, because our parents made it so. But it was on an even greater level of magic that year. For the first time in years it snowed in Empeaux for Christmas, and we went to Midnight Mass at the village church with everything glittering like fairyland around us, and then went home to a roaring fire, a tree piled with presents, and even notes from Father Christmas, written in gold ink.

  It’s not surprising then that I was the sort of child whose reading taste ran mostly to fantasy and especially the kind of fantasy where you go from a “normal” world into an enchanted one. It didn’t seem like a fantasy to me; in fact it felt familiar, easy to understand and believe in. It felt natural. When you boarded the plane, you moved from one world to another; once you were in that other world, the one you’d come from might as well not have existed. You forgot about it. It vanished into another dimension. Lots happened to you while you were away, yet when you came back, it seemed as if nothing had happened; your friends were doing just the same things as before, and school went on just the same as ever. And so, when I discovered the Chronicles of Narnia at about age seven or eight, just before going off on one of our family visits back to France, it made perfect sense to me.

  In my parents’ room in our house in France, there was a huge old wardrobe that looked rather like the picture in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It too was filled with coats, some of them fur, including a heavy dark wolf-skin coat that my great-grandmother had brought back from Canada, where part of the family came from. As a little kid, I was a bit scared of that coat, which seemed to loom on its big wooden hanger like a giant wolf waiting to spring. I thought it smelled rank, too, like a hibernating beast. After I’d read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I pushed my way gingerly past it to crawl into the wardrobe and sit there amongst the smell of moth-balls, imagining, with my heart beating a bit faster—what if, when I touched the back of the wardrobe, it suddenly melted away under my touch and I was in that winter Narnia, where it’s never Christmas? That it didn’t happen didn’t matter, not really. I could see it so vividly. I could imagine myself walking out there, because the world of the book seemed so real. And besides, deep down, it was good to know I wouldn’t really have to face Maugrim or the White Witch—because would I be as brave as Lucy? I didn’t think I’d be as stupid as Edmund—I didn’t think he could have read many fairy tales or else he’d have known the White Witch was up to no good—but I wasn’t absolutely, absolutely sure. And I did love Turkish Delight. . . .

  I identified with Lucy. Susan and Peter were a bit remote to me, like my bossy older sisters—five and seven years older than me, already in high school when I was still at primary school— who stayed all the time in France in boarding school and never came to Australia with us, who we only ever saw when we were on our French holidays. Edmund was a bit like my younger brothers and sisters, who teased the dreamy, messy, storytelling girl I was, always trying to get them to act in plays I’d written or join me in “imagination games” I’d based on the books I read. Especially Narnia. From the first moment I picked up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I loved Narnia. I loved everything about it: the landscapes, the castles, the magic, the adventures, the mouth-watering feasts. I especially loved the wonderful creatures: the Talking Beasts, the Fauns, the Centaurs, the Nymphs and Dryads, the Marsh-wiggles. I loved Aslan, but I also loved the villains—or I loved to hate them. They were scary, but they were powerful. You felt it really was something to fight against them. Narnia and its neighbors—Archenland, Calormen, and the Islands—were places I really, really wanted to visit. I wanted to know everything about them. I wanted to be there!

  And I could escape there, any time I liked, in my imagination. C. S. Lewis made Narnia and its neighbors very, very real to me. I could see them, smell them, taste their food, hear their sounds, touch their trees, their stones, the fur of their Talking Beasts. . . . It was all just as real to me as the world around me. As real as Earth, the place variously called, in the books, Shadowlands, Ward Robe, and Spare Oom; the place of railways and timetables, school bullies and homework, family quarrels and rules; the ordinary, everyday, humdrum world familiar to legions of schoolchildren, where nothing much ever happens, where adults rule everything and you have no power and have to put up with all kinds of annoyances; where there’s no magic or Talking Beasts, but there’s always the threat of boredom. Narnia was never boring. There was always something happening. It was an enchanted world, bursting with possibility. Escaping to Narnia was wonderful.

  So I devoured the first six books, my top favorites being The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy (I loved the Arabian Nights stories and this felt like that), and The Silver Chair (it was like traditional fairy tales I loved, and also reminded me of another beloved book, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin). But The Last Battle was quite another story.

  Oh, how I was disappointed by that book! It didn’t feel like the other Narnia books, I thought. There was something wrong with it. And for me as a child the main thing wrong was that, in it, Narnia was destroyed. I did not want Narnia to end. I had no interest in that other world, Aslan’s country, or whatever it was. I’d only half paid attention when it was mentioned in the other books. I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t really care. I wanted Narnia! Its loss made me very sad, sadder even than knowing that Lucy and Edmund and Peter and their parents had all been killed and poor Susan had been left behind to mourn and live on as best she could in “Shadowlands.”

  I was angry with Aslan, and puzzled. Why had he destroyed Narnia? Surely not just because of that silly business with Puzzle the Donkey and Shift the Ape? It felt like Aslan was punishing everyone in Narnia for no good reason. I didn’t much like Prince Tirian, either. I thought he was a bit of a bore—not like Caspian, for instance. The book was much more serious than the others. There was no feasting to speak of. And when Narnia was finished, what did we get? Aslan’s country! Big deal! You hardly knew anything about that place. It didn’t live for me the way Narnia did. It didn’t breathe. I closed the book rebelliously, thinking, “Well, I don’t care! I’m going to pretend Narnia still exists! I’m going to pretend this book doesn’t exist!” And so I read and re-read the other books, but left The Last Battle alone for years.

  My parents are Catholics, and very devout ones, too. We were brought up with a very strong grounding in our religion at home and at school, at least when we were in Australia, which was most of the time (I went to a Catholic school in Sydney, but in Empeaux the village school was a state one and totally secular). I knew the Bible well, and the stories of the saints and I grew up with the symbols and images of Christianity deeply embedded in my soul. But still I had no idea that the Narnia chronicles had anything specifically Christian about them. Nobody told me they did.
My parents did not read English-language children’s books (though they read English-language adult fiction and non-fiction) and left me pretty much to my own devices as far as my fiction reading was concerned. Nobody at school told me either, because I didn’t ask them. I didn’t associate Aslan with Christ, and I only vaguely associated The Last Battle with Revelations, the last chapter in the New Testament—and that was only because they were both about worlds ending. Revelations was the part of the Bible I most disliked, anyway. I also vaguely associated The Last Battle with Ragnarok, or the end of the gods in the Norse myths—the part of those myths I most disliked.

  I’m glad nobody told me back then. I might not have enjoyed the books as much as I did. Though I believed in God and had no quarrel with my religion, I preferred fairy tales, fantasy, and adventure to holy-type stories. Besides, to think of Aslan as Jesus back then would somehow have been embarrassing to me. And then where was Mother Mary, who was very important to us Catholics, too? The kind of ideas we were given about Heaven made it sound rather dull compared to Earth and certainly compared to Narnia. What child would want to just spend time mooching about a garden or playing on a harp or whatever? (We were once asked in scripture class to describe our own ideas of Heaven, and though most of the class dutifully described a garden or a beautiful country, one boy said he thought Heaven was a candy shop that never closed, where there was every kind of candy, you never had to pay for it, and you’d never get sick. Our teacher was horrified by the thought, but we kids thought it not a bad notion!)

  It wasn’t until I’d grown up that I realized Lewis was deeply Christian, and that this had partly inspired his writing of the Chronicles—at least, the part of him that analyzed what he was doing, not so much the storyteller. As he puts it in his interesting essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” the Chronicles first came to him the form of images: a Faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent Lion. It was only later that he realized this fantasy, this long fairy tale, might have a Christian underlay. This is what he says:I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.

  Now, in my family religion is not associated with lowered voices. We are not a family—or a culture—that speaks with lowered voices! In fact, there were many lively discussions around the family table on all sorts of things to do with God and religion. But apart from the lowered voices bit, I could understand at once what C. S. Lewis meant. Though we might discuss religious things with great liveliness—we were not, as in the French saying, grenouilles de benitier (literally “frogs who live in holy water fonts,” or holy Joes, if you like)—the central stories of our faith were approached with great reverence. Jesus was not a figure to regard lightly. He certainly didn’t come from the same world as fairy tales. He was too big and important and serious. Nowhere in the New Testament is he shown laughing, and yet Aslan laughs a good deal. Holy stories, whether the Bible or the stories of the saints, don’t have much time for fun, for feasting, and certainly not for magic. They have no light touch. There can be adventure and grand events, but you don’t feel like you can take part in it, even in imagination. Everything is serious. Lewis was right. The stories themselves are powerful, but the way they’re taught, presented, shown to us, can be off-putting. Surrounding these stories is too often an obligation to feel. A feeling that one is almost trapped, listening to important stories, stories with a message you might be forced to learn by heart. Not in Narnia. In Narnia things were free, fun, magical. Nobody preached to you or tried to force messages on you. At least it didn’t seem so, until The Last Battle.

  C. S. Lewis goes on to say in that essay:But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday-school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

  Now that I was grown up and reading the Narnia books again, for myself and to my own children, I could see the Christian associations I’d missed. But I didn’t say anything to my own kids about it, at least not till they were teenagers. They too didn’t “get” that part of it, and it was only when they were told. But like me, they too had instinctively disliked The Last Battle. So did many other readers of the Chronicles, I discovered, though by no means all. And then I began to wonder about the core of the book, not only about the fact that it’s the most overtly “religious” one, where the message tends to overwhelm the story, the one based on Revelations (which remains my least favorite part of the Bible), but also about Lewis’s own feelings regarding Aslan’s country—or Heaven, as I now saw it was meant to have been. What did he really feel about it, at least as a storyteller? And so I started to look back through the books to find out.

  We catch glimpses of Aslan’s country several times in the series. In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory is sent by Aslan to a beautiful garden on top of a hill by a blue lake in a green valley. In this garden—based of course on the Garden of Eden—grows the tree of life, with its lovely silver apples. One of the apples Digory plucks is planted by Aslan and becomes the magical Tree of Protection for Narnia; the core of the other, which brings Digory’s dying mother back to life, grows into a tree on Earth, where the wood is later used to make the Wardrobe.

  The Garden also appears in The Last Battle, where it is described fully and appears to be the world at the very heart of all the worlds, the central part of even Aslan’s country.

  We catch another glimpse of Aslan’s country at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Reepicheep leaves the others at the end of the furthest ocean at the furthest edge of the world. Just for a moment the children see a range of very high green mountains, and forests and waterfalls: a world that looks more beautiful and more real than anything they’ve ever seen. In several of the other Chronicles we are also told Aslan’s country is “more real” than any of the other places we have been: it is richer, deeper, fuller, more colorful, with more meaning and wonder than any world we have seen or imagined. In The Last Battle we also see that Aslan’s country not only contains all the other worlds he made, but the real, original versions of those worlds, not just the copy we have seen before now. Narnia still exists, then, in some strange way, even after Aslan has destroyed its supposed “copy” where so many wonderful and exciting adventures have happened.

  But then Lewis tells us that looking at Aslan’s country—or Heaven—after looking at the other worlds is like being in a room where you have a window on one side looking out to a landscape and a mirror on the other reflecting that landscape, and that Aslan’s country is like that landscape in the mirror, not the one out of the window. I hadn’t remembered that, and when I found it, and re-read it, I was puzzled. Surely a mirror world is less real than the one seen through a window! What is the point then of a new Narnia that seems less real to us than the old one? Lewis clearly intends for this to be part of the mystery of Aslan’s country, where we see and hear with different eyes and ears and understand with different minds, and become young again. He tries to make Aslan’s country seem exciting. But rather than showing this, as he does with Narnia, he tells us: it never feels quite real. When he writes about Aslan’s country, he gets stiff, awkward. You feel like he approaches it with that same freezing, embarrassing reverence he talks about in his essay. Faced with Aslan’s country—with Heaven—he can’t make it quite real the way he does with Narnia.

  Lewis certainly does not describe his heaven very much, except at the end of The Last Battle. This is partly because generally “sons of Adam” and “daughters of Eve” may only go
there after death. It is a place from which no traveler may ever return, with the sole exception of Digory, who was allowed one very quick flying visit to the Garden at the time of Narnia’s creation. But then, Creation is a very special time and universal laws are not yet in place. And the story of Narnia’s creation rings true—there is something grand and awe-inspiring and beautiful and mysterious about Aslan/God singing the world into being, something that strikes deep into the heart as a poetic truth.

  But I think Lewis is not very interested in Aslan’s country at heart. He keeps saying it’s a wonderful place, but we don’t get a real feel for why. We do not know what happens there, if anything does. It is a place of refuge and peace and love and healing and wisdom, a safe haven after the toils and dangers of both Shadowlands and Narnia. There is no evil there—no struggle, no pain, no suffering, no conflict. This is all good, yes. But—and here’s the rub—without those things there can also be no adventure, no search, no quest for wisdom, no excitement. Maybe it’s a function of our limited human nature, but in this there can be no story we can understand or relate to. In the Chronicles of Narnia, it just feels like such an anticlimax after all the excitement that’s gone before. (Just as, in my opinion, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials—the mirror image of the Narnia chronicles—also ends with a disappointing anticlimax, because the “Republic of Heaven” seems so dull; it just doesn’t come to life in the way the old world did.)

  Even though Lewis tells us “all their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read,” he fails to make the reality of Heaven—of Aslan’s country—and the possibilities there live for his readers. That’s why The Last Battle, which is so focused on getting to Aslan’s country and getting rid of Narnia, doesn’t work like the other books, or only occasionally does, in flashes. What C. S. Lewis did make live, gloriously and richly, were Narnia, and Calormen, and Archenland, and the Islands: wonderful countries of the imagination, the world he loved above all, and the reason why “going to Narnia” has remained a favorite pastime for millions of young readers the world over.