The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

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.