Having
worked my way through Madeleine L’Engle’s time series (minus An Acceptable Time,) I’m ready to move
on to another fantasy series that was important to my younger reading
days: The Chronicles of Narnia. The preferred way to package the series these
days seems to be chronologically within the stories themselves, and that’s how
the boxed set I picked up arranges them, so we might as well get started with The Magician’s Nephew.
Digory
and Polly become friends one London summer, struggling to find their own fun on
damp days (seems like it’s always the rain that spurs kids in C.S. Lewis books
to the greatest adventures.) One day, a
bit of indoor exploring puts them unintentionally in the path of Digory’s Uncle
Andrew, a self-proclaimed magician who uses the children to test the means he’s
created to travel to another world. Both
armed with a pair of magic rings that transport them between realities, Polly
and Digory meet a certain evil queen on a dying world before discovering
another on the very brink of creation – Narnia is born.
Even
though this is the first book in terms of the story, it stills feels a bit
backward to be talking about it before The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the like. It’s very definitely a prequel, giving us our
first looks at Narnia, Aslan, and the White Witch, and offering “and that’s the
origin of that”-style nods to iconic bits of Narnia lore like the lamppost and
the wardrobe. That said, it’s a pretty
good prequel, and while it obviously references the famous aspects of the
previous books, it also does its own thing and isn’t afraid to add something
new to the series.
I love
the whole concept of the magic rings and the wood between the worlds; it’s neat
and well-realized, and it’s cool to see magical settings outside of Narnia and
its surrounding lands. And in Digory and
Polly, Lewis has another respectable set of leading characters. For my money, his child protagonists somehow
fall somewhere between vague everykids and clear types, but they still
basically work for me. Digory is a smart
kid who maybe thinks too much for his own good, and Polly is a tough cookie
with a good head on her shoulders.
Additionally, the book has a fine villain in Uncle Andrew, a notion it
turns almost completely on its head once the White Witch shows up and handily
demonstrates how a real villain does
it.
Not all
of the Narnia books lean as heavily on the Christian allegory as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
but I think The Magician’s Nephew is
pretty far up there as well. While it
spends a lot of time on general fantasy goings-on, the creation/fall of man
allusions hit hard once the kids arrive in Narnia. I don’t think it’s written quite as well here
as in The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe – the on-the-nose garden with the tree of forbidden fruit doesn’t
have the elegance of the Deeper Magic – but there is still some good stuff to
be had in Narnia. I enjoy the
literally-growing world, and the animals have a hoot with a particular
interloper (that might be the funniest sequence in any of the Narnia
books.) And really, you can’t go too
wrong with Aslan.
Warnings
Scary
moments for kids, brief violence, and mild swearing/drinking.
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