Returning to Narnia

Why didn't I finish a childhood favorite book series?

Found this place via my new favorite website, The Labyrinth Locator

Confession: I never finished The Chronicles of Narnia. As a kid I read the first six books, loved each one, then promptly stopped before beginning the seventh and final installment. This mildly irked various people around me — my dad, who valued the importance of finishing what you start; my friends, who were eager to discuss the fate of the world we were all discovering. But I was adamant, in that way that children are, that I would not be reading The Last Battle.

Not then, anyway.

In the mid-to-late aughts, Disney released a series of three Narnia adaptations: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We watched each one of them (and fourteen years later, my brother still remembers the ocean pouring out of the painting in Dawn Treader). But still, I did not read The Last Battle.

In the midst of her fantastic success with Barbie last summer, Greta Gerwig was announced as the writer/director for at least two of Netflix’s planned Narnia film adaptations. And as exciting as this was, as much as I loved her adaptation of another childhood favorite, Little Women — I still didn’t return to the series. But for the first time in a while, I did stop in front of C.S. Lewis’ spot on my bookshelf and wonder.

I can’t speak in detail to the motivations of my adolescent self, who’s sometimes as mysterious to me now as I was to the people around me back then. But there’s one truth that’s evergreen: I don’t like goodbyes, and I hate endings. Another? All this time, I’ve avoided spoilers. Even just a few months ago, to the point of exclaiming WAIT! during a conversation that had somehow meandered back to the world beyond the wardrobe.

I guess it might’ve been then that I realized — whether my younger self intended this or not — that I was trying to leave a door to the past open for the future. One that gave passage into a world where magic might exist, which sometimes brushed up right alongside our own.

When I opened my old copy of The Last Battle this year, I found a bookmark that my younger self had left behind for me, snug at the title page.

Do you ever get the distinct sense that you’re doing something for a past self? Sandra Cisneros’ “Eleven” is another story I read as a kid. Just a couple quick pages — a scene, really — about a young girl who experiences a moment in the classroom that makes her feel small. (And it’s her birthday, to cap things off.) Cisneros writes:

The way you get old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.

I’ve been thinking about that little girl a lot lately. Past me. I’ve been carrying her with me. I guess in a way, I’m reading this book for her. All this time, the no wasn’t never. It was just not yet.

Maybe when she left that bookmark behind, she was thinking of me, too.

If you’ve read or watched any of the Narnia stories — or perhaps had the good fortune to stumble through the back of your own wardrobe into a magical world (jealous, bring me next time) — you’ll know that the states of childhood and adulthood are huge plot points in Lewis’ narrative universe. It’s not lost on me that characters are told, at various moments, that this is their last visit to Narnia. That once they leave, they won’t return. Perhaps this hit my younger self harder than I realized.

Was the bookmark a kind of doorstop? A little loophole I threw out for myself against the passage of time?

There’s so much I adore about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe — my favorite, certainly, of the series, the one I loved so much that it was included in the scant handful of books I packed for my first year in a college dorm. One moment in particular that always stuck with me is its ending. The four Pevensie siblings have seemingly spent years ruling over Narnia together; so much time has passed in this world that they barely remember the one they came from. But on a hunt one fateful day, they happen upon a strangely familiar lamppost. We as readers know that this is the very same lamppost that Lucy saw when she first discovered Narnia years prior. The quartet follow the path back together, led by a nagging sense of déjà vu, only to tumble out of the wardrobe to find themselves children again. As it turns out, no time has passed at all.

It’s scary, yet also freeing, isn’t it? The idea that you could live all these years of your life, only to return to childhood once more. Maybe the simplicity of that time is closer than we might think. How old were you when you stopped believing that another world might be uncovered simply by opening the right door?

I haven’t finished The Last Battle yet. I’m almost done, just a few chapters to go. I had this idea that an essay could be like a bookmark. A way of holding your place in time. A monument to the moment you stopped to take a breath, somewhere in the middle.

The worlds I come back to time and time again are never perfect. They aren’t places where everything always works out in the end. Where the endings are always uniformly happy, and no one ever dies. Neither are they worlds exempt from critique. They’re simply other worlds. And the ones we grow up knowing, the places we discover as children — those are special.

They’re imperfect, like this one. But like this one, they also feel like home.

Belief is deeply weird. We tell ourselves truths about the world we live in so that we can continue to exist in that world. (I wrote this sentence and laughed at myself because I realized I had unconsciously paraphrased Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”)

Lewis himself lived quite the winding trajectory, as the losses of three incredible women that he had the privilege to know over the course of his life left him ricocheting between doubt and belief. There were periods during which he was perfectly confident in what he knew to be true, and there were also times that grief cast him into places that were darker, felt less sure. The constant throughout was his tremendous imagination, and our world is better for it.

One thing I’m pretty sure about, even though I can’t quite explain it: I believe that we encounter certain art at the time we most need it. Not earlier, not later — exactly right. I’m sure I’m not alone in having had the curious experience of carrying a book around with me unread for years, until suddenly, one day, it’s time. And then the story is transformative.

My whole life I’ve been grateful for the world Lewis created, and in a strange way I feel like this last chance for a new story in Narnia came at exactly the right moment. This year in particular has been a hard one. There’s so much chaos in our world, and there are a lot of things that I’m afraid of, and there’s a lot about our future that feels uncertain.

But for a few hours of this year, I got to return to a place that felt familiar, and still a little bit magic. A home that will always exist for me, no matter how old I get and no matter how much time passes. One that someone else created to extend across time and space to bring his readers a little bit of peace.

“We read to know we’re not alone,” William Nicholson once wrote. I hope you have a door like mine, too.

Have y’all seen Shadowlands? Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film depicts the unlikely relationship between Lewis and poet Joy Gresham. Script by Nicholson, quoted above — whose credits also include Gladiator! — and starring Debra Winger in an Oscar-nominated turn as Gresham and Anthony Hopkins as a pitch-perfect Lewis. I loved it so much that I will probably have to write about it at some point. Five stars!

In publication news I’ve got another interview to share, this one with the brilliant Marin Kosut about her new book, Art Monster. We talked about manifestos, rethinking the meaning of success, the gallery she once founded in the shell of an abandoned pay phone, and a whole bunch more over at Write or Die.

Have a good August, y’all; I’ll see you again in a month!