This is where the enchantment began for so many of us. Deb Caletti has produced a richly evocative recollection of her first trip to Narnia, carried there by the set of books she received from her parents for Christmas when she was only ten years old, and describes how the magic was passed on when she had children of her own. . . .
Just Another Crazed Narnia Fan
DEB CALETTI
When I was in the sixth grade, I loaned my copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Lisa Miller and never got it back.
Not that I hold a grudge.
Lisa had a surgery that required breaking both her legs and resetting them, putting her in a wheelchair for the good part of a year. Flimsy excuse, yes? I mean, this was my beloved and cherished copy, part of the ENTIRE SET of the Chronicles of Narnia that my parents had given me for Christmas when I was ten. An entire set of Narnia books without The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe —it’s like an entire set of dishes without the, well, dishes.
I still remember getting those books. For some reason, my mother had hidden them, unwrapped, inside a set of decorative drums that were underneath the Christmas tree. One day I was messing around, as any proper ten-year-old will do, and I opened up the drums. I was shocked, thrilled, surprised, and guilt-ridden at accidentally finding my gift. I knew they were meant to be mine. They had to be. First of all, I was the resident inhaler of books, bringing home stacks of them from the library that I’d consume same as popcorn before the movie even started. Second, they were meant to be mine because they just had to be mine. The covers alone told me so—that castle and the crazed-haired witch; that prince against the orange background, sword drawn against his chest; that magical boat. . . .
Knowing the books were there but being unable to have them yet—it was as if I loved chocolate and was forced to go into See’s Candies with no money and my hands tied behind my back. They waited enticingly, and then, finally, they were mine. There is a hideous Christmas photo from that time—I am in tangled hair and wearing a white nightgown, sitting in front of a purple bike with a banana seat. But it is the books that are on my lap, that my fingertips are touching.
And so, like millions of children around the world, I entered the wardrobe. And once through, I discovered a wondrous land of creatures and adventures and powerful feelings. Ogres and Fauns and frozen places beginning to thaw. Unspeakable evil and goodness so good it brought you to tears. Battles and magic and vials of potions that cured every ill. I wanted to keep pushing through those coats until I reached that place, until I heard the snow crunch underfoot, felt the chill wind, saw the yellow glow of what might have been a lamppost off in the distance.
I read the books out of order, and so my first trip to Narnia was the same as Lucy’s. And, same as Lucy, I would want to tell the others about my trip, all others, but no one would quite believe me until they had experienced it themselves. In addition to thrusting the books on friends, I tried to express my experience through my own writing—a story I wrote when I was twelve should have been named “The Voyage of the Something That Isn’t the Dawn Treader but May as Well Be the Dawn Treader.” It was the tale of a trip to a land with Talking Animals, and proved without question that one could overuse the word “mysterious.”
I revisited Narnia, finding other ways to enter—through a painting on a wall, a magic ring, the Wood between the Worlds. I grew up in the suburbs of California, during the time the “mod” color for appliances was olive green. We had sidewalks and a community pool where you were required to wear a bathing cap. But I disappeared into the eaves of old houses, into an ocean of flowers and islands of dreams, into a land where a great Lion breathed life into animals so that they might speak. In real life, I fought off mean boys who snapped your new bra and smacked you with the small red rubber ball during dodge ball, struggled with my inabilities to do all the things girls seemed to know how to do—spin circles on the bars, lift a cat’s cradle from the fingers of your best friend, chase Larry Hogan, the cute boy. But in Narnia, you could be small and be heroic. Mean boys got what was coming to them. Hurt bodies and hearts were made new. The worst kind of evil, a sledge speeding through snow—even it would stop when spring was allowed back again.
My Narnia love did not stop when I supposedly “grew up.” A fine thing happened, which is that I had children. A fine thing in any case, but an added bonus when they were old enough to sit through a reading aloud, at Christmastime, of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. All of the expected and great things happened: they listened with wide eyes and begged for more. They cried when Aslan—well, you know—and I grabbed their pajama sleeves and said, “Wait, wait. Don’t worry, you’ll see!” It was as satisfying a reading experience as you could get, so much so that we repeated it the next year, and the next, and I confess here that (as a Narnia fan will do) I carried things a bit too far. I understand, I do, that people who have lockers and are old enough to get their driver’s permits don’t want to sit with their mother on the couch and hear a story they’ve heard a million times, even if she does beg and nearly cry and say, “Pleeeeeeeze!” My children, bless them, as they will do, held their ground, and found other ways through the years to indulge the Narnia fan that made their lunches. They bought me an ENTIRE SET of Narnia books, complete and whole, finally. They took me to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the film was released, and my son put together a gift from a San Francisco bookstore for me—a gorgeous, life-sized cardboard wardrobe that was a promotional piece for the film, a wardrobe of endless sections and tabs and slots but with doors that opened and displayed a snowy land and a lamppost that really lights up. He had to cut the bottom off of it to even get it to fit into my office. My kids also participated in a Turkish Delight taste test in our London hotel room. A disappointing affair, I might add. After imagining for years its buttery and mouth-watering perfection, delectable enough to make a boy turn traitor against his own siblings, I was rather let down to find it was actually something you’d want to spit into a napkin.
This is my own story of Narnia love, and it is only one story of eighty-five million others. Eighty-five million! That’s how many books have been sold, anyway, of the seven volumes that make up the Chronicles of Narnia, outsold only by Harry Potter. Eighty-five million—that’s roughly the population of France and Sweden and Switzerland combined, plus a smaller country of your choice. Narnia has an obvious lasting appeal and a devoted following. Devoted, hmm. Crazed might be more accurate. Merely type the word “Narnia” into Google’s narrow rectangle, and a treasure of 12,300,000 hits will pour down upon you like a trove of pirate riches.
Numbers are only part of the picture, though, because devotion, being devotion, generally has no finite number attached. A look at the variety of offerings on the Web gives you an idea of just how hard these books have hit our collective consciousness. Sure, there are book and movie reviews, articles, and products. Amazon alone offers some 4,000 Narnia-related goods for sale, from Sir Peter’s knight shield (very cool), to bookends (have those), to an Aslan marionette (thin, lame, and frankly, a bit strange), to Divan Turkish Delight with Pistachio (I’ve already warned you). And there are plenty of guidebooks and maps, should you make a wrong turn at the lamppost. But what’s most fascinating is the glimpse beyond the consumer harvest, to Narnia fandom at its most pure.
Think of this—you’ve got busy people here (I assume busy, at least busy in that they must make a living and take care of children and remember to let the dog out and go to the bank). And yet you see the countless hours involved in the numerous Narnia fan sites, countless spent—not only by the people who create and maintain these sites, but those who visit and contribute. There are reading groups, writing groups, Narnia-related costume parties. Crafts, decorating ideas (my kids would have me committed if I made that bed canopy). There are ongoing lectures and a C. S. Lewis Society (general membership is twenty-five bucks), artists whose life works are based on Narnia scenes, as well as fiction, films, and music created by fans. There’s a Swedish Christian metal band by the name of Narnia, as well as many businesses with its name—a pet-training company, a florist, a kennel. Various vacation spots—cabins and hideaways and tranquil settings suitable for weddings and other special occasions. There are sites where visitors display the Narnia costumes they’ve made and designed, and a Narnia Museum in Wheaton, Illinois, which holds C. S. Lewis’s own boyhood wardrobe, along with his family memorabilia, photos, letters, and more. Five thousand people a year visit.
You can, if you’re inclined, participate in forums on fan sites, tell Narnia jokes, take a Narnia Personality Test. Answer questions like, “Would you consider yourself brave?” (responses from “Quite Timid” to “Very”), and “Be honest, are you at all gullible?” and find out if you’re a White Witch or an Edmund, or, as I learned, a Mr. Beaver (“Despite your size, as Mr. Beaver, you are decisive, confident and bold. You are brave in times of need and show great loyalty to those you respect”).
1You wonder if poor old C. S. Lewis, taking that life-altering walk in the woods with Tolkien (the walk that, legend has it, held the seeds to the Chronicles), could have ever imagined this.
And, too, you wonder why. Why have these books with these characters hit us with such force? When a book generally stays on a shelf for no more than three or four months, why have these particular books continued to weave themselves so permanently and powerfully into our lives and hearts?
I understand that for many the answer to that question involves the elements of the books that are their controversial backbone—the Christian parallels. Or, as the headline in an article in the Sunday Times succinctly put it, “The Narnia Lion Really Is Jesus.” Reading the books as a child, though, I was clueless to this aspect of them, and it was only when I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as an adult that I went, “Hmm. This reminds me of . . . Oh.” Critics of the book’s message will say that this cluelessness doesn’t impair Lewis from achieving his goal—unwitting readers will still suck up that message same as hidden phrases in record album lyrics or buried images in advertising. Proponents of the books’ message will also say that this cluelessness doesn’t impair Lewis from achieving his goal. Religious educators use the books outright to nudge children toward their own objectives.
For me, though, and I think for many, the real, lasting appeal of the books is far simpler and more pure than the tangled motivations of religious or secular belief. The reasons for their timelessness are more straightforward and rare than religious fervor, though some would say worthy, too, of adulation—great storytelling, beautiful language. Like all good books, the magic is in the word choice, the rhythms; in the story, in the setting, in the characters. Less “The Lion Is Really Jesus” and more “The Lion Is So Magnificent, You Too Would Give Anything to Ride on His Back.” The characters speak to our painful and victorious experiences of childhood in safe ways: the White Witch is that cruel teacher at the blackboard, who gives homework over winter break; maybe even a parent whose slap of a hand can sound like that whip. Edmund Pevensie and Eustace Scrubb—they’re the bad boys who teased you about your braces or who stepped on the back of your shoe to make you trip. Tumnus, who didn’t get it right at first, but tried again and did it better—he’s you, and so are Peter and Susan, the brave and kind and solid boy or girl you try to be when you raise your hand politely and stand in line without causing trouble. It’s that moment in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy returns home and sees the characters in her dream world in her real life—the scarecrow is the farm hand, the witch is Dorothy’s wicked neighbor. We understand the characters of Narnia—as children, especially, we understand them—their struggles over bad things, the struggle to be heard. The need to believe in one all-powerful being, who will finally arrive and set things right.
And story. Good versus evil, what larger story than that? A saga that’s close to our hearts at any age. We know that need, we live that need, to triumph over things bigger than ourselves, whether it be a raging father or a bad windstorm, a friend who you told your secrets to and who betrayed you, or the time you, too, felt like you’d been turned to stone. When we read the Chronicles of Narnia, we are masters over all those things and bigger things still. We are masters over Dwarfs and Dryads and spells and even death. We carry swords and are brave.
And we do it in a magical setting. There are no mini-marts here, or traffic jams. No loud mall music or parking lots littered with cigarette stubs. No toxic waste dumps or hulking Costco buildings with soy sauce bottles bigger than your head. No sounds of clanging shopping carts or sirens, or the thumping bass from a jacked-up truck. Here, in Narnia, the land is lush and fanciful. There are patches of warm sunlight and cool green thickets and wide mossy glades. There is an Arthurian stone table, and a castle with a beautiful name, Cair Paravel. There are the Wild Lands of the North and the Great Forest. It is “always winter and never Christmas” and then snow turns to slush and the green tips of flowers poke through the once-solid mass of white.
But finally, there is language. To me, the true origins of the power of Narnia can be found here—in the tender word choice and lulling rhythms of these works.
This, from when Lucy enters the wardrobe in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
And this, in the same book, when Lucy and Susan are riding Aslan:
Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black or grey or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind.
Simple words. Snow under feet. Noiseless padding of great paws. Words with imagery both gentle and sturdy, fanciful and yet everyday. Here, I believe, is where the enduring essence and the real magic lie. In these simple, simple words, these potent pictures of sensory detail, these delicate and sparse but impossibly rich sentences. Evocative words, dreamy even. And yet solid and tangible. The word choice is Hemingway-esque: physical, solid, present, yet somehow wistful and suggestive. Add magic and childhood, and suddenly you’re a step beyond the enduring devotion of Hemingway fans into the crazy, boundless territory of Sir Peter desktop statues and Cair Paravel welcome mats. The enchantment is easy to understand, I think. The words we all know, laced with what we can only imagine.
My Narnia love will be one of those lasting pieces of me, I realize. The characters in my books often love Narnia as I do, and the idea of walking through a wardrobe and feeling your presence there so strongly that you see your own breath is an image I often share with other writers about the writing process itself. My love for the books stays as pure and simple as the language that created them.
And although I will pass on the Narnia fleece throw, the Aslan pocket watch, and the Lucy’s Vial pewter necklace, and will forego the annual C. S. Lewis Conference and forum discussions on Narnia and faith—Lisa Miller, from Mr. Deebach’s class at Ben Franklin Elementary? If you’re out there somewhere? I’d still like that book back.
Deb Caletti is a National Book Award Finalist whose books are published and translated worldwide. In addition to other distinguished recognition, Deb has also been a PEN USA Literary Award finalist, and has received the Washington State Book Award. Her novels include The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart; The Nature of Jade; and The Secret Life of Prince Charming, among others. Her seventh book with Simon & Schuster, Stay, will be released in 2011. Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions (Hard Candy, Far From Heaven) and Foundation Features (Capote, Stone of Destiny) have also partnered to develop Deb’s novels into a film series titled Nine Mile Falls. She lives with her family in Seattle.
