Jordan Davis at The Nation writes on what continues to make going to Narnia with C. S. Lewis so appealing to readers of all ages:
His is a sane and playful presence, not tame and never thoughtless. Though great danger is always imminent in Narnia, there is a profound sense of excitement, of mystery, of being loved. This sense is difficult to accomplish but also impossible to counterfeit. Lewis manages it partly through frequent second-person digressions keyed to the experience of any bright but otherwise ordinary 9-year-old, the age at which he lost his mother. Most of all, he forms a bond with young readers by pledging again and again to believe them by proxy: in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy persists in believing that she has gone to another world, and despite the betrayal of her brother Edmund, the other children go there with her. (To my knowledge, no one has followed up on the aside that Edmund's perverse, hateful behavior began when he was sent away to boarding school.) What continues to draw children to Lewis is not only the pleasure of traveling to a world that sounds better than this one but the promise of his company, so entertaining and learned, and so light about it.
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Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis's Narnia.
Jordan Davis at The Nation writes on what continues to make going to Narnia with C. S. Lewis so appealing to readers of all ages:
2 comments:
The article claims Lewis was a member of the Flat Earth Society. Sounds bogus to me, and I can't find any substantiation for it online. Has anyone heard of this before?
I recall Humphrey Carpenter saying in his book, The Inklings, that Lewis had been offered an honorary membership. Whether, bemused by it, he accepted, I don't know.
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