The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew

[starlady]

So I'm rereading the seven Chronicles of Narnia, in internal chronological order. It's been probably a dozen years since I read all of these books, and in the following entries my thoughts are a jumble of reactions on at least four levels: Watsonian, Doylist, and fannish of both a critical and laudatory variety. I loved these books as a child, and I still do; it's still possible for me to access, dimly, the spirit of following the author's lead in which I first read them in fourth grade, but that doesn't preclude criticism, not anymore at least; like so many other books of children's fantasy, I do find them in some ways flawed, or at least, they're not everything I want them to be on the page. So, you know, depending on your reaction to Narnia, you may just want to look at this cat macro instead. But I shall do my best to be honest about my own reactions, and the reasons behind them.

Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. [1955]

I used to think that this was my favorite of the Narnia books, and though I'm withholding judgment on that now until I've reread all seven, I can see why I liked this one so much; I think it still might be my favorite in the end. swan_tower asked me why I thought that, and what I told her at the time was what I liked about it this time too: I find Jadis' backstory, and Jadis herself, to be fascinating (I bet her sister was just as titanic), and the bits about the creation of Narnia, and Polly and Diggory wandering around in the Wood Between the Worlds (Polly names it that, incidentally), and Uncle Andrew being such an idiot, and most of all the fact that Diggory's mother is dying, and he makes the choice he does anyway, and is rewarded for it, beyond thought and hope--I still find that interesting and affecting.

This time around I also noticed how Polly Plummer is MADE OF AWESOME; I also noticed the, well, preachiness (and also classism) that Lewis indulges in at times, particularly via Aslan, to say nothing of Uncle Andrew's greedy, colonialist impulses, and the implication of the Kirke family in British imperialism via India and the Raj. Also too this time I noticed that the Narnia books canonically take place in Sherlock Holmes' world, which is just screaming for a well-done crossover fic, preferably with Holmes getting the better of Uncle Andrew, who I actually despise a lot more now. But this is clearly the most Tolkienic of the Narnia books, and as a kid I was fascinated with the worldbuilding of Middle-Earth; around the same time that I read the Narnia books (fourth grade) I devoured the books of Tolkien's published papers despite not really fully understanding what was going on in them ever, and there are some things in TMN that simply have to have come by way of conversations with Tolkien, particularly the Trees of Gold and Silver (and the guardian white Tree) that are briefly mentioned before Frank and Helen's coronation. I enjoy it when books link up to each other, and I've always enjoyed knowing the origins of things (is it surprising that I am now going for a history Ph.D.? No it is not), and this book was explicitly written to link up to the later ones and to provide an origin story for Narnia, and I love it for that. It's probably best not to peek too far behind the 'creation by the Lion in a day' curtain, but even on this side of that barrier, it's a memorable story.

I was talking with my roommate about Narnia, and she pointed out that Jadis and the White Witch aren't terribly similar characters, which I hadn't really considered before but which I think is definitely true to an extent. Jadis in TMN is, well, passionate in a way--darkly, cruelly passionate, but passionate all the same, whereas the Witch is so--frozen. You can see it in their coloring, even, and Lewis does a decent job of lampshading the differences between them by having Jadis eat the apple wrongfully, but the White Witch has swallowed Winter, to borrow Michelle West's phrasing, in a way that Jadis hasn't and the apple doesn't account for in-text. More than anything, it's interesting to consider that Lewis thought that Jadis was the alpha point for the Witch.

Comments

[epershand]

I think I may once have tried reading the series in internal chronological order as an experiment, but otherwise I'm totally dedicated to publication order.

[dhobikikutti]

OMG PUBLICATION ORDER FOREVER. And fuck you Lewis for thinking you know better.
(There is actually only one series I have come across where internal chronological order trumpts publication order, and that is the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery.)

[epershand]

Ok, I was trying not to get into actual sequence war battles, just stating my opinion, but in fact Lewis did not prefer internal chronological order. He got a letter from a fan saying "I want to read the books in chronological order but my mother DEMANDS that I read them in publication order." He responded with something like "I think you're right and your mother is wrong, I really do not care what order people read them, you can read them in whatever order you want."

That's basically the evidence people have been using to say that Lewis "preferred" internal chronological.

Most series where publication order and internal chronological order are different, I go back and forth between the two but with Narnia I'm kind of a zealot. Possibly this is only because they changed the official series order while I was growing up, but still. When my first boxed set wore out I went on e-Bay and acquired another one of the appropriate era rather than cope with the retcon numbering. LWW assumes that the reader has never heard of Aslan. TMN opens with essentially "here's some backstory for that universe you already know about."

In conclusion, um, FEELINGS?

[epershand]

So, I just read Wikipedia on the reading order controversy, and learned that the order in which Lewis wrote them was also not the publication order, that he had no strong preference for there to be numbers on the spines at all, and that that is just something that American publishers imposed because they like to have numbers on the spines of children's book series.

But really, what I like most about publication order is that you start with LWW, and you proceed through the Pevensie adventures down through The Silver Chair, and then you take a worldbuilding break with HBB and TLM and the first half of TLB, and then there are bonus Pevensies back in Narnia. It has a good narrative shape, a better one than I've found reading them any other order, and it's that shape I'm attached to rather than the set numbering.

[starlady]

That's really interesting, because I have the renumbered 1994 edition, and it specifically claims on the copyright page that the renumbering was done in accordance with Lewis' interests.

Just looking at the listing on the back of the old edition of TLB that I got out of the library, I think I agree with you about the shape of the narrative.

[epershand]

I guess I got the books just under the line, in 1993, so I probably had one of the last McMillan printings before it went over to Harper Collins and the order changed.

I guess the situation is that Lewis's stepson was really attached to the chronological order, and he convinced Harper Collins that Lewis was too. I don't think Lewis had especially strong feelings on the subject.

[starlady]

So I got an older edition of The Last Battle out of the library for the reread, and the publication order definitely makes a lot of sense--there's a very nice shape to it. Maybe some day I'll do a third reread in publication order.