What's the plan?
So what’s the plan? What am I going to cover in my Narnia posts over at Into the Wardrobe and Beyond?
I’ll start by looking at why we should read the Chronicles of Narnia at all, especially as adults. In other words, I’ll be looking at what C. S. Lewis wrote about stories before turning my attention to the stories themselves.
Then I’ll look at each of the Narnia books in turn. (I’ll work through them in the order they were published for reasons I’ll discuss in a later post.) To provide a structure for these posts, I’ll be asking a series of questions about each book. Here are some examples:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1. Where do the Pevensies go when they are evacuated?
2. How is the Professor’s house like a church?
3. Why is there so much food in Narnia?
Prince Caspian
1. Why can’t Lucy bring the trees back to life?
2. What’s the difference between school and education?
3. Why doesn’t Susan shoot the bear that attacks her?
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
1. What sort of book is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?
2. Why doesn’t Edmund know what assonance is?
3. Why does the narrator keep telling us what’s going to happen?
The Silver Chair
1. Where exactly is Aslan’s country?
2. Why is it (sometimes) good to be lonely?
3. How do Eustace, Jill, Puddleglum and Rilian find hope in the Underworld?
The Horse and His Boy
1. How should you fall off a horse?
2. How should you tell a story?
3. Why do Shasta and Aravis get married?
The Magician’s Nephew
1. What’s wrong with curiosity?
2. Why is the garden surrounded by a wall?
3. When is it a good time to eat apples?
The Last Battle
1. Where do bananas grow in Narnia?
2. Why does Susan not return to Narnia?
3. Why can’t the real story be written?
The approach is similar to the one taken by John Sutherland in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and various other books. Another example is my own Did Jesus go to School? and other questions about parents, children and education in which I start each chapter with a puzzling question and find that, in answering it, I have covered all sorts of other questions, the importance of which we might not have expected had we not asked the original question in the first place.
So much for questions. What else can you expect? I’ll be reviewing some books - which is the best biography of C. S. Lewis? There are a few to choose from - recording a few podcasts, and, importantly, looking at Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction for adults.
My starting point here will be the Chronicles of Narnia. I shall be arguing that we can only make sense of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, if we also look at Surprised by Joy and That Hideous Strength. We can only make sense of The Horse and His Boy when we consider Studies in Words and The Four Loves. And The Magician’s Nephew makes a lot more sense when we read it in the light of A Preface to Paradise Lost and Perelandra.
The plan is to have a regular weekly post, but I’m also happy to address any questions between times. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover, please let me know!