By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Donal Anthony Foley reviews Further Up & Further In: Understanding Narnia, by Joseph Pearce, TAN Books, hardcover, 216 pages; $24.95 at www.tanbooks.com; Kindle version available at amazon.com for $9.98.
The Chronicles of Narnia, the seven books written originally for children by the celebrated Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, are among the most popular books ever written, and in Further Up & Further In: Understanding Narnia, author Joseph Pearce sets out to explain why this is, and why they aren’t just for children, but like all traditional “fairy stories,” they have an important message for adults, too.
On this point, he quotes G.K. Chesterton, who said, “Civilization changes: But fairy tales never change” — that is, they have an enduring significance.
According to Pearce, they do this by opening our minds to the supernatural, in that they reflect its reality in a moral sense, and allow us to judge what is evil or imperfect by the perspective of the good and perfect. And because as we grow up, we lose our childhood innocence, adults arguably need fairy stories even more than children — that is, they need to have their sense of wonder and awe rekindled. But to do this is not to be childish, but rather, childlike.
The author goes on to say that if we approach fairy stories in the right way, the “good” magic they contain will undo the “bad” magic mankind has suffered from since the Fall. As he says, this good magic “has a sacramental quality. It baptizes the imagination.”
But to appreciate this, we have to be humble, and being humble and being childlike go together. And humility leads to gratitude, which leads to wonder, and thence to contemplation, and to what St. Thomas Aquinas described as the “dilation of the mind,” that is the opening the mind to the depths of reality.
Pearce quotes J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, who said that fairy stories offer an escape from the prison of materialism, a healthy escapism. But people who are trapped in a materialistic mindset cannot see this, and so they can’t appreciate fairy stories.
And what is also required to appreciate them is virtue, since without that we are blind to the goodness, truth, and beauty of what is being read. But with the right approach the reader will appreciate how truth is being portrayed in the stories through the use of allegory or symbol.
The author has a chapter for each of the seven books in the Narnia series in the order in which they are meant to be read, rather than in the order in which they were written. Thus he begins with The Magician’s Nephew, followed by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and on down to The Last Battle. He doesn’t summarize each book — which would have made Further Up & Further In rather unwieldy, but rather focuses on the main points as illustrations of the importance of the moral themes underlying the stories.
So, for instance, in the first book, The Magician’s Nephew, Digory Kirke is the nephew, and his uncle is Uncle Andrew, who has certain magical powers, and who acts arrogantly, thinking he can do whatever he wants. The background to this is that it allows Lewis to contrast what Pearce calls “scientism,” from science proper, with the understanding that science is good, whereas scientism is not.
Scientism is the principle of using knowledge as a means to power, which was the approach of the medieval alchemists, many of whom were interested in turning base metals into gold, or discovering the elixir of life. This links them to those modern scientists who are only interested in using science to exploit nature. As the author remarks, “Alchemists are alive and well and working in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry.”
In discussing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was the first of the books to be written, Pearce contrasts the attitudes of two of the characters, Lucy and Edmund. Whereas Lucy has a childlike faith and simplicity, Edmund is guilty of childish petulance and cynicism. The name Lucy comes from the Latin lux, which means light, and Lucy in the story has a childlike faith which opens her eyes to wonder.
But Edmund, her brother, is a cynic who refuses to believe in obvious truths, is prone to giving in to temptations, and who harbors resentment toward his elder brother which leads him to act treacherously toward his family. Pearce links this to the wicked Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear.
In the same way, Aslan, the Lion of the title, is the antithesis of the wicked Witch, and in fact was clearly meant by Lewis to be seen as a Christ figure, one who offers himself to be sacrificed in the place of the guilty Edmund. So in that respect, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe incorporates a symbolic retelling of the Passion of Christ.
In discussing the next book in the series, The Horse and His Boy, the author defends Lewis against accusations of racism regarding the Calormen of the story who live in a hot desert-like region, and are dark-skinned, as opposed to the fair skinned Narnians. He argues that Lewis actually really wanted to highlight the age-old struggle between Christendom and Islam — that is, he was looking back to medieval works such as the Song of Roland.
In dealing with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in the series, Lewis introduced the character of the disagreeable Eustace Scrubb, whose parents hadn’t done a very good job of bringing him up, and who, as Pearce points out, are modeled on Fabian Socialists, and thus disciples of George Bernard Shaw.
Eustace is really the main character in the book, which details his conversion from “socialist” arrogance to Christian humility. In the story, the ship the Dawn Treader lands at an unknown island, and here, the nasty Eustace falls asleep on a pile of treasure in a dragon’s den and wakes up to find he has become a dragon. As Pearce points out this physical metamorphosis is also due to Eustace’s inward spiritual descent into dragon-like selfishness.
But paradoxically, this physical transformation leads to Eustace’s spiritual redemption, because, as a result of his predicament, he realizes that the other children actually like him, and that in particular, Reepicheep, the fighting Mouse, whom Eustace had previously treated very badly, is prepared to forgive him.
An Enduring Appeal
Joseph Pearce brings in many allusions and references to the work of writers such as Chesterton and Tolkien, and poets and dramatists such as Dante and Shakespeare, in this entertaining and readable book.
He succeeds in bringing out many hidden aspects of the stories, and shows how Lewis was not putting the Narnia stories together in a casual way, but rather producing finely crafted tales with subtle layers of meaning, tales which have proved to have an enduring appeal for generations of children, and adults, now.
For those who haven’t read the Narnia books, Further Up & Further In: Understanding Narnia, will be an encouragement to do so, and for those who have read them, this book will undoubtedly help to illustrate their hidden depths.
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Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also a written two time-travel/adventure books for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/.
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