Review: The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis

[Russ Allbery]

The Magician's Nephew
by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series:      Chronicles of Narnia #6
Publisher:   Collier Books
Copyright:   1955
Printing:    1978
ISBN:        0-02-044230-0
Format:      Mass market
Pages:       186

The Magician's Nephew is the sixth book of the Chronicles of Narnia in
the original publication order, but it's a prequel, set fifty years
before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It's therefore put first
in the new reading order.

I have always loved world-building and continuities and, as a comics
book reader (Marvel primarily), developed a deep enjoyment of filling
in the pieces and reconstructing histories from later stories. It's no
wonder that I love reading The Magician's Nephew after The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe. The experience of fleshing out backstory with
detail and specifics makes me happy. If that's also you, I recommend
the order in which I'm reading these books.

Reading this one first is defensible, though. One of the strongest
arguments for doing so is that it's a much stronger, tighter, and
better-told story than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and
therefore might might start the series off on a better foot for you. It
stands alone well; you don't need to know any of the later events to
enjoy this, although you will miss the significance of a few things
like the lamp post and you don't get the full introduction to Aslan.

The Magician's Nephew is the story of Polly Plummer, her new neighbor
Digory Kirke, and his Uncle Andrew, who fancies himself a magician. At
the start of the book, Digory's mother is bed-ridden and dying and
Digory is miserable, which is the impetus for a friendship with Polly.
The two decide to explore the crawl space of the row houses in which
they live, seeing if they can get into the empty house past Digory's.
They don't calculate the distances correctly and end up in Uncle
Andrew's workroom, where Digory was forbidden to go. Uncle Andrew sees
this as a golden opportunity to use them for an experiment in travel to
other worlds.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

The Magician's Nephew, like the best of the Narnia books, does not drag
its feet getting started. It takes a mere 30 pages to introduce all of
the characters, establish a friendship, introduce us to a villain, and
get both of the kids into another world. When Lewis is at his best, he
has an economy of storytelling and a grasp of pacing that I wish was
more common.

It's also stuffed to the brim with ideas, one of the best of which is
the Wood Between the Worlds.

Uncle Andrew has crafted pairs of magic rings, yellow and green, and
tricks Polly into touching one of the yellow ones, causing her to
vanish from our world. He then uses her plight to coerce Digory into
going after her, carrying two green rings that he thinks will bring
people back into our world, and not incidentally also observing that
world and returning to tell Uncle Andrew what it's like. But the world
is more complicated than he thinks it is, and the place where the
children find themselves is an eerie and incredibly peaceful wood, full
of grass and trees but apparently no other living thing, and sprinkled
with pools of water.

This was my first encounter with the idea of a world that connects
other worlds, and it remains the most memorable one for me. I love
everything about the Wood: the simplicity of it, the calm that seems in
part to be a defense against intrusion, the hidden danger that one
might lose one's way and confuse the ponds for each other, and even the
way that it tends to make one lose track of why one is there or what
one is trying to accomplish. That quiet forest filled with pools is
still an image I use for infinite creativity and potential. It's quiet
and nonthreatening, but not entirely inviting either; it's
magnificently neutral, letting each person bring what they wish to it.

One of the minor plot points of this book is that Uncle Andrew is wrong
about the rings because he's wrong about the worlds. There aren't just
two worlds; there are an infinite number, with the Wood as a nexus, and
our reality is neither the center nor one of an important pair. The
rings are directional, but relative to the Wood, not our world. The
kids, who are forced to experiment and who have an open mind, figure
this out quickly, but Uncle Andrew never shifts his perspective. This
isn't important to the story, but I've always thought it was a nice
touch of world-building.

Where this story is heading, of course, is the creation of Narnia and
the beginning of all of the stories told in the rest of the series. But
before that, the kids's first trip out of the Wood is to one of the
best worlds of children's fantasy: Charn.

If the Wood is my mental image of a world nexus, Charn will forever be
my image of a dying world: black sky, swollen red sun, and endless
abandoned and crumbling buildings as far as the eye can see, full of
tired silences and eerie noises. And, of course, the hall of statues,
with one of the most memorable descriptions of history and empire I've
ever read (if you ignore the racialized description):

  All of the faces they could see were certainly nice. Both the men
  and women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a
  handsome race. But after the children had gone a few steps down the
  room they came to faces that looked a little different. These were
  very solemn faces. You felt you would have to mind your P's and Q's,
  if you ever met living people who looked like that. When they had
  gone a little farther, they found themselves among faces they didn't
  like: this was about the middle of the room. The faces here looked
  very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little
  further on, they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still
  cruel but they no longer looked happy. They were even despairing
  faces: as if the people they belonged to had done dreadful things
  and also suffered dreadful things.

The last statue is of a fierce, proud woman that Digory finds
strikingly beautiful. (Lewis notes in an aside that Polly always said
she never found anything specially beautiful about her. Here, as in The
Silver Chair, the girl is the sensible one and things would have gone
better if the boy had listened to her, a theme that I find immensely
frustrating because Susan was the sensible one in the first two books
of the series but then Lewis threw that away.)

There is a bell in the middle of this hall, and the pillar that holds
that bell has an inscription on it that I think every kid who grew up
on Narnia knows by heart.

  Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
  Strike the bell and bide the danger,
  Or wonder, till it drive you mad,
  What would have followed if you had.

Polly has no intention of striking the bell, but Digory fights her and
does it anyway, waking Jadis from where she sat as the final statue in
the hall and setting off one of the greatest reimaginings of a villain
in children's literature.

Jadis will, of course, become the White Witch who holds Narnia in
endless winter some thousand Narnian years later. But the White Witch
was a mediocre villain at best, the sort of obvious and cruel villain
common in short fairy tales where the author isn't interested in doing
much characterization. She exists to be evil, do bad things, and be
defeated. She has a few good moments in conflict with Aslan, but that's
about it. Jadis in this book is another matter entirely: proud,
brilliant, dangerous, and creative.

The death of everything on Charn was Jadis's doing: an intentional
spell, used to claim a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat by her
sister in a civil war. (I find it fascinating that Lewis puts aside his
normally sexist roles here.) Despite the best attempts of the kids to
lose her both in Charn and in the Wood (which is inimical to her, in
another nice bit of world-building), she manages to get back to England
with them. The result is a remarkably good bit of villain
characterization.

Jadis is totally out of her element, used to a world-spanning empire
run with magic and (from what hints we get) vaguely medieval
technology. Her plan to take over their local country and eventually
the world should be absurd and is played somewhat for laughs. Her
magic, which is her great weapon, doesn't even work in England. But
Jadis learns at a speed that the reader can watch. She's observant, she
pays attention to things that don't fit her expectations, she changes
plans, and she moves with predatory speed. Within a few hours in London
she's stolen jewels and a horse and carriage, and the local police seem
entirely overmatched. There's no way that one person without magic
should be a real danger to England around the turn of the 20th century,
but by the time the kids manage to pull her back into the Wood, you're
not entirely sure England would have been safe.

A chaotic confrontation, plus the ability of the rings to work their
magic through transitive human contact, ends up with the kids, Uncle
Andrew, Jadis, a taxicab driver and his horse all transported through
the Wood to a new world. In this case, literally a new world: Narnia at
the point of its creation.

Here again, Lewis translates Christian myth, in this case the Genesis
creation story, into a more vivid and in many ways more beautiful story
than the original. Aslan singing the world into existence is an
incredible image, as is the newly-created world so bursting with life
that even things that normally could not grow will do so. (Which, of
course, is why there is a lamp post burning in the middle of the
western forest of Narnia for the Pevensie kids to find later.) I think
my favorite part is the creation of the stars, but the whole sequence
is great.

There's also an insightful bit of human psychology. Uncle Andrew can't
believe that a lion is singing, so he convinces himself that Aslan is
not singing, and thus prevents himself from making any sense of the
talking animals later.

  Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you
  really are is that you very often succeed.

As with a lot in Lewis, he probably meant this as a statement about
faith, but it generalizes well beyond the religious context.

What disappointed me about the creation story, though, is the animals.
I didn't notice this as a kid, but this re-read has sensitized me to
how Lewis consistently treats the talking animals as less than humans
even though he celebrates them. That happens here too: the
newly-created, newly-awakened animals are curious and excited but kind
of dim. Some of this is an attempt to show that they're young and are
just starting to learn, but it also seems to be an excuse for Aslan to
set up a human king and queen over them instead of teaching them
directly how to deal with the threat of Jadis who the children
inadvertently introduced into the world.

The other thing I dislike about The Magician's Nephew is that the
climax is unnecessarily cruel. Once Digory realizes the properties of
the newly-created world, he hopes to find a way to use that to heal his
mother. Aslan points out that he is responsible for Jadis entering the
world and instead sends him on a mission to obtain a fruit that, when
planted, will ward Narnia against her for many years. The same fruit
would heal his mother, and he has to choose Narnia over her. (It's a
fairly explicit parallel to the Garden of Eden, except in this case
Digory passes.)

Aslan, in the end, gives Digory the fruit of the tree that grows, which
is still sufficient to heal his mother, but this sequence made me angry
when re-reading it. Aslan knew all along that what Digory is doing will
let him heal his mother as well, but hides this from him to make it
more of a test. It's cruel and mean; Aslan could have promised to heal
Digory's mother and then seen if he would help Narnia without getting
anything in return other than atoning for his error, but I suppose that
was too transactional for Lewis's theology or something. Meh.

But, despite that, the only reason why this is not the best Narnia book
is because The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the only Narnia book that
also nails the ending. The Magician's Nephew, up through Charn, Jadis's
rampage through London, and the initial creation of Narnia, is fully as
good, perhaps better. It sags a bit at the end, partly because it tries
to hard to make the Narnian animals humorous and partly because of the
unnecessary emotional torture of Digory. But this is still holds up as
the second-best Narnia book, and one I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading.
If anything, Jadis and Charn are even better than I remembered.

Followed by the last book of the series, the somewhat notorious The
Last Battle.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-06-19

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044230-0.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>