Reflections on C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew

The Magician’s Nephew was retcon before retcon became a thing.

I remember feeling… disappointed when I finally got this sixth Narnia volume from my Scholastic book order in third grade. Up until now, the timeline had been fairly linear. Sure, The Horse and His Boy threw everything on its head by starting with a Narnian* character in Narnia and going back to the Golden Age reign with cameos from grown-up Edmund, Susan, and Lucy. Still, it had been set during the timeline I knew and loved and was a standalone that didn’t affect any other stories.

But The Magician’s Nephew went back to the start of Narnia, telling the story of where the first book’s eponymous Witch and the Wardrobe came from. Not only that, but even as a kid, I could sense the difference in tone that suggested that this backstory *gasp* hadn’t been at the back of C. S. Lewis’s mind when he wrote that first scene with Lucy walking through a wardrobe into a snowy woods.**

The plot is also a little different: there’s no overall goal. This isn’t the story of how kids have to defeat a witch, or help a prince gain his throne, or find the seven lost lords, or track down the lost heir, or escape slavery. Instead, the protagonists have moment-to-moment goals and even overarching concerns, but the novel unfolds scene by scene.

In retrospect, I guess it changed what I thought Narnia stories could be like (especially since I hadn’t read The Last Battle yet… holy cow, is that a paradigm shift). And I didn’t like it as much, which you can tell because my copy isn’t as beat-up as my dog-eared, wrinkle-paged first four Narnia paperbacks.

These days, I find I appreciate it more.

I mean, I have to credit Lewis’s first paragraph with sending me to E. Nesbit’s Bastables series, which are still some of the most hilarious books on my shelf. So there’s that.

But there’s also the way The Magician’s Nephew draws on the protagonists’ real-world lives in ways its prequel-sequels don’t. Digory and Polly are well drawn characters, with motivations that feel grounded. In particular, Digory’s secret hope to save his terminally ill mother–mirroring Lewis’s own childhood loss of his mother to cancer–feels realer the older I get.

His partner in crime, Polly, is way more fleshed out than Lucy or Susan. It’s difficult to compare Polly to Jill, because Jill is close to being a viewpoint character for The Silver Chair, and The Magician’s Nephew is ultimately Digory’s story. (I mean, the title isn’t The Magician’s Nephew’s Friend.) However, Polly feels equal to Digory in terms of personality. She makes decisions, stands up for herself, has hobbies, and shows spirit. She isn’t good “for a girl” or only at what are typically considered girly things. Her sense of right and wrong is more developed than Digory’s — in this allegory for Eden, it wasn’t Eve who ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil — and she’s brave enough to put herself in physical danger as well as stand up to her friends if need be.

This is also the book where Lewis gives the most commentary on everyday humans, ones who’ve grown up in our world. We see Jadis, the White Witch, transplanted to London, and we hear the voices of Digory’s adult family members, the servants, the people on the street, and the police. Unlike every other Narnia protagonist, Digory and Polly get stymied by getting grounded and by having to hide some of what they’re doing from their parents and guardians. This was uninteresting for me to read as a kid, because I didn’t understand what Lewis’s portrayals meant; I didn’t have enough context of adult life or knowledge of turn-of-the-century London. Now, I get his jokes and see the commentary he’s making. (I don’t agree with a lot of it, but I see it.)

But most of all, in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis broadens the world of Narnia the way the existence of Narnia broadens the idea of the ordinary world. Early on, Digory and Polly find themselves in the silent, bright, full Wood Between Worlds. The Wood Between Worlds is full of mysterious, holy possibilities — it’s what Lewis and his fellow travellers would describe as “numinous.” Out of everything in the Narnia books, it captures the imagination with its balance between miraculous and eerie.

In this Woods, we learn that there are infinities of worlds, which seems exciting, yes, but more affecting is how we learn that there’s only one space between them all, a place that isn’t really a world itself and doesn’t follow the rules of one. A place where people don’t belong and can lose themselves, if they aren’t careful. A place that is poison for evil but also pleasantly muddling for good.

Lewis builds on this sense of mixed wonder and strangeness when he has Digory and Polly travel to the dying world of Charn, exchanging the Woods’ mystery of timelessness and lack of mortal interference for its opposite: Charn’s emptiness is creepy precisely because it rests on a long history of people’s actions. The creep factor comes from slowly piecing together, as Digory and Polly do, that many, many people must have done some very terrible things. Lewis uses this to criticize curiosity that comes from a sense of dread rather than a sense of awe; Digory’s curiosity about the bell and the hammer he and Polly encounter leads him to commit a grave mistake that eventually lets evil into Narnia before Narnia is completely created.

In some ways, Lewis supports his argument that acting on inappropriate curiosity is wrong through the narrative itself: the most gripping moments and engaging descriptions are not of finding answers but of not knowing. What is the Woods? What else is in the Woods? Why does Uncle Andrew feel “wrong” to the children, and what could his strange Rings possibly be? Even at the end of the story, there are more questions than answers: what is the mysterious garden where Digory finds the magical apple? Who put it there and why? What is the bird that watches him make his decision?

As an adult, I sometimes lose the sense of magical possibility and curiosity in the drudge of day-to-day commutes and other practical concerns. I let my curiosity steer toward the mundane rather than the uplifting: what did she say to him? Is it true that he did the thing that is none of my business but still interests me? Is the rumour they heard about the upcoming change really true?

I disagree with Lewis that this type of curiosity is evil; I also disagree with him that knowledge for the sake of knowledge (for example, in scientific pursuit) is arrogant and dangerous by nature. But I agree that there is value in transcendental curiosity — curiosity that takes pleasure in deliberate and thoughtful not-knowing, in imagining, in possibility.

It’s a good thing that I find myself having less opportunities for that kind of curiosity as I get older; it means I’m learning more about the world that surrounds me, and, sometimes, that I’m not neglecting my practical responsibilities to myself and others. But it would be a terrible thing if I stopped experiencing it altogether, if I decided the world were as simple as our representations of it, or — as seems more common in the academic humanities — if I dismissed its unknowable complexities as unfruitful and therefore not worth exploring.

* Close enough. Not our-world-ian, anyway.
** And fourth-grade me was particularly indignant when Aslan explains to Digory what would have happened had he stolen the apple as the Witch suggested. Nuh uh! You told Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that no one gets to know what might have been! I call shenanigans!