The Magician's Nephew (The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 1)
Hello, all. Welcome back. I hope you’re all ready for a jaunt into Narnia.
I hadn’t read a Narnia book prior to coming across this title. My exposure to the franchise was limited entirely to Disney’s Narnia films from the mid-2000s. In terms of wider literature by C.S. Lewis, I once read a bit of Chapter 11 from The Great Divorce in a Bible study, and I once had a passage from The Screwtape Letters quoted to me.
That said, I was aware about who C.S. Lewis was. He was the Christian allegory guy. He was the writer Tolkien criticized for being too heavy-handed in his religious allegory, despite the fact that Tolkien himself played a role in Lewis’s conversion.
Prior to reading The Magician’s Nephew, I accepted this assessment without question. After all, those bits I knew from The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters were very clearly Christian Literature. It was evocative CL, using allegory to make one think rather than merely slapping a Christian message on, but the intent with these works was very clear. I used to use Narnia and The Lord of the Rings as milestones to distinguish between CL and literature that merely had Christian themes. I further looked at Disney’s Narnia films, noted the Christian allegories within it, and assumed that there was a lot more of it in the books that was cut out for general audiences.
At the same time … despite my usual aversion to blunt messaging, I was willing to make an exception for Lewis. The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters make no pretense that they are anything other than Christian Literature. Criticizing them for their messages would be like criticizing Warhammer 40K for being grimdark - that is to say, a person is free to not want to consume such content, but that same content doesn’t diminish the objective literary quality. In the case of the Narnia books, I was willing to give even further leeway because they were written for children. Children don’t have the same depth of life experiences as adults and are still developing their reasoning skills; if a book is written to have a message for children, subtlety can be detrimental. Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes isn’t diminished by the fact that the narrator states the moral at the end of the story. (Obviously, that example is meant for even younger audiences then Narnia, but allegory is already more subtle than that, so I feel it balances out.)
All this is to say that I didn’t exactly go into The Magician’s Nephew with an open mind. I fully expected to be bludgeoning in the face with blunt messaging. I also assumed that said bludgeoning would at least make sense within the context of what was promised to the audience.
And … well …
The hammer blow didn’t come, leaving me a bit confused.
STATS
Title: The Magician’s Nephew
Series: The Chronicles of Narnia (Book 1)
Author(s): C.S. Lewis
Genre: Fantasy (Middle Grade)
First Printing: 1955
Publisher: HarperTrophy
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for The Magician’s Nephew will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible.
STRUCTURE
In this review, we will cover the following:
Premise
Rating
Target Audience
Theme
Plot
Character
Worldbuilding
Prose
PREMISE
Narnia … where Talking Beasts walk … where a witch waits … where a new world is about to be born.
On a daring quest to save a life, two friends are hurled into another world, where an evil sorceress seeks to enslave them. But then the lion Aslan’s song weaves itself into the fabric of a new land, a land that will be known as Narnia. And in Narnia, all things are possible …
Reaction
This is another premise that’s on-point because of its simplicity. It helps that the story itself is also simple. There’s not a lot of wiggle room to misrepresent things or misplace emphasis.
One nitpick I will make is that the premise makes it sound like Jadis (the sorceress, known later as the White Witch) is from the world that becomes Narnia. This skips over the adventure that makes up the first half of the book, where Digory and Poly (the “two friends”) travel to Jadis’s world and accidentally bring her back to our world; they don’t travel to the world that becomes Narnia until they are trying to get rid of her. Once this happens, they stumble onto Aslan creating Narnia. This exclusion does make sense, though. The omitted adventure builds up the characters, but it doesn’t change the overall trajectory of the plot from what’s described here. Not mentioning it keeps the premise concise.
RATING: 8/10
Much like Caraval, I am absolutely the wrong audience for this book, and that made it hard to settle on a rating.
The Magician’s Nephew is an incredibly simple story, written in a manner that makes it easily digested by the youngest ranks of the Middle Grade audience (either young children who are just starting to read chapter books or younger children who are having chapter books read to them). That leaves a lot less room for mistakes or contradictions to be made. Characterization is simplistic, the worldbuilding is incredibly sparse on details, and the plot has almost no twists. Yes, this also means that there’s less to engage or impress older readers, yet the fact remains that the book successfully tells the story the Lewis set out to tell. The only outright complaint I have is that Lewis rushes critical setup for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the last chapter, doing so in manner that feels like an afterthought.
Ultimately, I settled on a final score by asking myself what I’d rate it if the scale was only out of 5 (and I didn’t do half-points), then scaling up from there. This story works very well. It’s not revolutionary by today’s standards, yet the flaws are so minor as to be negligible.
TARGET AUDIENCE
As stated above, this book is undeniably aimed at the youngest MG audiences. The protagonists are preadolescent, the prose is easy to digest, and every element of the story is so simplified that it's going to be hard for me to do the rest of this analysis without spoiling literally everything in the book. The book so also very short: according to Wikipedia, it barely crosses 41,000 words.
I have no idea whether the current generation of MG readers would enjoy this book. It’s clearly written in another era. I was strongly reminded of The Phantom Tollbooth (published in 1961) while reading it. Still, if modern MG readers can engage with the prose and the story structure, I think they’ll enjoy this.
THEME
Perhaps I’ve just been desensitized to allegory by the painfully blunt and poorly executed messaging of today, yet I found this novel of Christian allegory to be rather underwhelming as a Christian allegory.
Don’t get me wrong - the Christian allegory is here, if you know what to look for. The back half of this book is effectively the first three chapters of Genesis, just with the part about the tree and the serpent going in a different direction. The introduction of Jadis is a basic parable about the consequences of not resisting temptation. Aslan is Jesus. Couple this with Lewis’s other works, and it’s obvious what the intent was.
It’s just that, by today’s standards, it’s incredibly subtle. None of these things bring the story to a screeching halt for the sake of virtue signaling. Sure, I recognize what Lewis is doing, but that’s a result of factors outside of the text itself. If I didn’t know Lewis as the Christian allegory guy, I don’t know if I’d recognize this as allegory. Were I eight years old, I probably wouldn't even have recognized these connections, and if I had, it would feel like I was being rewarded with a deeper understanding of the story, rather than being bashed over the head with a theme that disrupts the narrative.
Even setting aside subtlety and target demographics, the themes don’t damage the narrative. At most, they introduce a clearly defined axis of morality, and we can anticipate where the story will go based on that morality. Even the fact that it’s retreading Genesis doesn’t constrain the narrative. Characters still have agency and make mistakes, rather than being constrained by a framework.
I thinks worthwhile point of comparison here is A Master of Djinn. The messages in that story were very blunt and very flat, but that was only an issue because the book is aimed at adults. The reason the themes failed as messages was because adult readers would have already been exposed to their arguments and moved deeper into the thematic discussion, so to speak; nothing Clark presented was new or thought-provoking. As for constraining the narrative, the big twist felt flat not because it tied into a theme but because Clark hammered on that theme so hard that the story couldn’t go in any other direction without proving the anti-theme.
All this is to say that, if you’ve only been avoiding Narnia because you don’t want to be preached to (i.e. you are fine with the Christian messages and simply don’t like being patronized), I feel like The Magician’s Nephew is a safe read for you. Maybe the rest of the series, too, though I can’t say for certain until I’ve read them.
Tolkien
After reading The Magician’s Nephew, I found myself suddenly at odds with Tolkien. If this was the only reason Tolkien had for not liking Narnia, and if The Magician’s Nephew is reflective of the series as a whole, then Tolkien was throwing a stone from inside a glass house. The only meaningful difference I can see between what Lewis did here and what Tolkien did across his The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion is the author’s intention. Yes, Tolkien’s adult works were far more subtle, but you can clearly see where Tolkien drew inspiration. His works could be applied to a Bible study just as effectively as Lewis’s (and I did indeed read Gollum’s backstory as past of the same Bible study where The Great Divorce was used).
This led me to do a little digging. As it turns out, his dislike of allegory was only one of Tolkien’s problems with Narnia. Given his known penchant for perfectionism, it might well have been the least of his problems.
First, let’s source where Tolkien actually criticized the allegory. This apparently comes from a letter he wrote in 1971:
“I am glad that you have discovered Narnia. These stories are deservedly very popular; but since you ask if I like them I am afraid the answer is No. I do not like ‘allegory’, and least of all religious allegory of this kind. But that is a difference of taste which we both recognized and did not interfere with our friendship.”
By Tolkien’s own admission, this was a matter of personal taste. It is true that he didn’t like the allegorical nature of Narnia, but as is presented here, it doesn’t seem like he felt this element diminished the quality of the books.
There were, however, three other issues that Tolkien had with Narnia. I don’t have the primarily source for these, but I’ve seen them cited in a few places, and one of those sources cited a study by Josh B. Long as the original analysis of these issues.
Lewis’s worldbuilding was haphazard, throwing together different cultural influences with zero regard for how they’d mesh together. A particular point of disagreement Tolkien was apparently Lewis’s decision to put both fauns and Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Naria was a series of superficial stories that Lewis rushed out in just a few years rather than taking time to draft and redraft.
Tolkien though Lewis was liberally borrowing his own ideas.
All this is to say that, yes, Tolkien’s issues with Narnia ran deep than the allegory. Even if he hadn't written that letter in 1971, we’d probably still be talking about how Tolkien disliked Narnia. It’s just we’d probably be hyper-fixated on one of those other three issues.
(It does not escape my notice that all three of these additional criticisms are things I have criticized The Empyrean for in one form or another. Make of that what you will.)
PLOT
The story follows Digory (the titular nephew) and his neighbor Polly as they stumble upon his uncle’s magical experiments and are forced by his uncle to travel between worlds. This leads to an encounter with the witch Jadis, who follows them back to the real world, and eventually brings all of them to the world of Narnia at its very beginning. Digory and Polly then witness Aslan’s creation of everything within Narnia and help him to raise magical defenses to limit the harm Jadis can do there.
This is a very straightforward narrative. Despite that, there is a sense of cause and effect. Digory’s actions free Jadis, and events snowball from there as he and Polly try to get rid of her. Narnia would have been created regardless of them; however, because they brought Jadis into the world, it causes a ripple effect that forces them to take additional action.
I particularly like the scene where Digory frees Jadis. This is one of those moments that very much in the CL domain, presenting a straightforward parable about temptation. Later in the story, when Aslan takes Digory to task over it, the parable transitions into repentance before Christ. However, unlike with the Genesis elements, this feels less like allegory and more like a thematic lesson for children. You don’t need to understand what’s being referenced to appreciate and learn from the theme.
Another section that I personally found funny where Aslan is doing the actual creation of Narnia. Digory, Polly, Jadis, and the other characters who have been dragged along on this adventure spend the whole period standing awkwardly in the background, bickering over whether to flee or stay. There’s something comedic about how the story alternates because epic narrative about creation of the world and people scuffling over some magic rings. Maybe that’s just me, though - I suspect Lewis didn’t intend for the scenario to be funny.
CHARACTER
Character is definitely the weakest point of this book. Digory and Polly are basically blank slates onto which Middle Grade readers can project themselves. Jadis is an archetype of pure evil. Setting aside for a moment that Aslan is meant to literally read as Jesus incarnating in Narnia, the way he’s presented in this book makes him come across as a two-dimensional Wise King archetype.
Really the only three characters who I can say have any depth are all supporting characters.
Digory’s uncle Andrew has clearly defined motivations, and we see him experience regrets and delusions as he struggled to cope with all the magical happenings his experiments have unleashed.
Frank the Cabby and the horse Strawberry, who get sucked into the magical adventure as the result of the effort to get rid of Jadis, are a pair of Everyman characters trying to make sense of the strange happenings and who embrace their roles in events near the end of the story.
I don’t think this simplistic characterization holds the story back. It works for the narrative being told. I just don’t think these characters are enough in their own to make the story worth reading.
WORLDBUILDING
Much like Caraval or Harry Potter, the worldbuilding prioritizes whimsy and imagination over hard rules. It’s meant to fill children with wonder. This is another thing that I feel is fine for the story being told. While magic does drive the story to an extent, it does so in the sense of actualizing character decisions. We don’t need to understand why it’s not okay for Digory to eat the fruit off the obvious Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but it is okay for him to eat fruit grown off a tree grown from the first tree’s fruit; what’s important is that he rejected temptation in the first instance and was rewarded for his virtuous behavior.
The one hard exception to this soft setting is the Wood Between the Worlds and the magic rings that facilitate travel in and out of it. The rings and the portals within the Wood operate on very simple rules that Lewis spells out for the audience. The only time there’s any confusion about how they work is confusion that exists for the characters as well, since they’re still learning for themselves how the rules work and are making mistakes as a result.
I do have one gripe about the worldbuilding: the origin of the titular wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It isn’t mentioned until the last few pages, when Lewis is wrapping up the story. The explanation for it is convoluted:
After the adventure is over, Digory buries the core of the apple that he got from the tree that grew from the fruit of the obvious Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree that sprouts from this core (hereafter referred to as Tree 3) has some magical quantum entanglement deal with the second tree.
He and Polly bury the magic rings that facilitated the whole adventure around Tree 3. This is implied to have contributed additional magic to Tree 3, but that’s not entirely clear.
When Digory is middle-aged, a storm knocks Tree 3 down, so he decides to make its wood into a wardrobe and moves it to his country house (the manor from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
Digory never finds out that the wardrobe is portal until the Pevensie children discover that fact in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Call me jaded, but this feels every bit as tacked-on as Yarros’s aftshadowing.
PROSE
The prose of The Magician’s Nephew is exceedingly simple. An adult reader can breeze right through this. I feel like any child who can read Holes or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone should have no problem with it, either. The one potential stumbling block I can see for children is that there’s a definite sense of time and place to it. This reads like something a British writer from the mid-20th Century might find charming and whimsical. Personally, I also found it quite charming, but I can see how people with more modern sensibilities for prose would be turned off by it.
CONCLUSION
I feel like Narnia’s nature as Christian allegory overshadows so much of its perception. There’s no denying what it is, yet at the same time, it doesn’t make them objectively bad literature. This was a charming story for kids that teaches a good lesson about avoiding temptations while also making amends when you fail. I don’t know if I’ll go on to read or review the read of Narnia, but I’m happy I read this one. I highly recommend it.
LOST STARS
Next week, the Onyx Storm review rolls on with Chapters 5 through 7. We’ll get to see the narrative start to lose its way and sheer apart as Yarros prioritizes power fantasy over the story she promised.
After that, on May 7th, we’ll be continuing the War of Souls trilogy with Dragons of a Lost Star. I enjoyed this book far more than its predecessor, even if the overall quality hasn’t changed. What I enjoyed less was how this book resolved one of the two big mysteries established by its predecessor. While it is a reveal that makes a lot of sense in retrospect, it’s also one that feels like the safest and least satisfying answer.
Thank you all for joining me this week. Please remember to subscribe for the newsletter if you’d like weekly e-mails with the latest posts. I hope to see you all again soon. Enjoy your weekend.
