InsaneJournal

The Magician's Nephew


I know everyone says you’re supposed to read MN first, and Horse and His Boy after LWW, but I don’t really see why it makes a difference. Both books are out of step with the rest of the timeline, and MN could even be confusing if you tried to read it first. It really only has relevance if you’re familiar with the rest of the series, and he even makes references to things that will happen later as if he’s reminding us of it. There is very little subtlety in that, so a new reader will just be confused as to why he’s casually mentioning stuff that was in books that take place in the “future”. You only get that “ohh, so that’s what it meant” feeling if you’ve read the others (except the last book) first.

“This is a story about something that happened a long time ago when your grandfather was a child.”

I think when I first read this book I wondered “do you mean the late 1920s or early 1930s?” But of course, he means the turn of the century.

Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer have been playing in a “secret passage way” that connects their row houses (I love this concept) when they accidentally end up in Digory’s Uncle Andrew’s study. Uncle Andrew, who is a mad magician (with a literal fairy godmother) who considers himself above the rules of ordinary human behavior, forces the children to assist him in his inter dimensional travel experiment. When left to their own devices for getting home again, the children start experimenting with world-hopping.

The first world they enter is a seemingly abandoned city with no stars over head and glowing with a strange, red light. They find a hall filled with people in elaborate dress, but the people all seem to be asleep. There’s a bell, with a little hammer, and obviously this reeks of Do Not Under Any Circumstances Touch, so of course they ring the bell. Digory is the one who insists on doing it, here we have our first Adam and Even temptation role reversal.

“Then at last it began to be mixed with another sound, a vague, disastrous noise which sounded first like the roar of a distant train and then like the crash of a falling tree”.

Ohhhh…

Jadis, the woman they have woken up, tells them a story about the last days of her world, Charn. Does this contradict her back story as given in LWW, or can it be explained? Jadis is just like Uncle Andrew, believing that her royal status and her magic make her better than everyone else and not subject to the same rules.

She grabs onto them and follows them into our world, where she starts bossing people around and making demands as she prepares to take over. She’s stealing stuff and physically assaulting people and demanding that Uncle Andrew take her for an expensive lunch. She stole a cab and crashed it, and knocked a policeman unconscious. This is hilarious.

I’ve mentioned in my review of “Left Behind” that the (Left Behind) books would be so much better if they were satire on the me!me!me!culture they are set in. Sadly, they are not, as far as I know. But C.S Lewis is very good at characters who are so mundane and self centered that they are either totally oblivious to, or simply can’t handle, encountering fantastic miracles.

In MN, Uncle Andrew is exactly that sort of person. He is more concerned that Jadis embarrassed him in the restaurant than he is that they aren’t even in their own world anymore. But here, it’s deliberate satire, and in Left Behind, the authors are totally serious. In MN, when Jadis is wreaking havoc in London, there’s all these people standing around being so 19th century middle class British about it, and it’s just so funny. In “Left Behind”, not only would this scene not be intentionally funny but most of the characters wouldn’t even notice it, they’d be walking around like those blank faced mannequins in “The Movies” computer game.

“Now then,” said the policeman, “What’s all this?” Hahahaa. This was written probably before that line became a running tv gag, but whatever. Heheh.

Jadis breaks off a piece of the lamp post outside Digory’s house, and starts using it as a weapon. Jadis, the lamp post, Digory, Polly, Uncle Andrew, the cabbie and the cab horse all get flung into a new world.

This world is empty. I mean really empty. They are standing on Nothing and in Nothing. And here comes the best part, the singing starts. A world is being born.

It was a Lion. Huge and shaggy and bright, it stood facing the risen sun.

The piece of lamp post which Jadis threw at the Lion buries itself in the ground and starts to grow into a new lamp post. Hurrah for evolution (and evolving toffee trees too). The lamp post is the first image of Narnia, the first vision the author ever saw of the world that would be come *so* influential. He saw the lamp post in the snow, and a faun wearing a scarf and carrying packages and an umbrella. People have tried to give all these explanations about what the lamp post is supposed to symbolize but I think it mainly symbolizes a lamp post. It’s one of those inexplicable images that authors get in their heads and end up taking root, like, well, a self evolving lamp post.

Uncle Andrew eventually becomes unable to understand what’s going on at all, because he’s so selfish and distrustful that he blocks out everything that doesn’t specifically have to do with him. He can’t hear the animals talking, which means he finds them threatening when they’re just trying to be friendly. It just…it does not go well with Uncle Andrew and the Talking Animals.

“Evil will come of that evil but it is still a long way off and I will see that the worst of it falls upon myself,” Aslan says of Jadis and her arrival in his newborn world. So he knew something would happen, but he probably didn’t know *what*. Aslan will create a protection for Narnia. He asks Digory to travel to a certain garden and bring him back an apple- and not to take anything else.

Weird interlude while Digory and Polly are traveling to the garden.

When he came back, Polly went down and had her bathe, at least she said that was what she’d been doing but we know she was not much of a swimmer and perhaps it is best not to ask too many questions.

What on earth does he mean by that? Did she just get her period?

They find the garden with golden gate. But Jadis is already inside, she’s stolen an apple and eaten it. She tries to tempt Digory into doing the same thing, another Adam and Eve role reversal. And nowhere, *nowhere* in this story is it ever implied that Polly would have done worse at resisting Jadis. But Edmund failed the test too (even though it wasn't an apple that time). Uncle Andrew bombed the test so badly he was one of those people who looks down at the test booklet and forgets their own name.

This time Digory resists Jadis and flies back to Aslan. As his reward, Aslan allows Digory to take one apple from the tree which is planted in Lantern Waste to protect Narnia. As long as the tree remains, Narnia will not fall. I am assuming he means the entire world, not just that one kingdom because Narnia is always getting attacked and occasionally conquered.

There are Gold and Silver trees from Uncle Andrew’s spare change (fallen out of his pockets), parts are made into crowns for the cabbie and his wife, who Aslan has crowned the first king and queen of Narnia. They bury Andrew’s rings in the back garden and plant a tree of the same Narnian apples over them. When the tree in our world eventually fell over, Digory had the Wardrobe built from it.

This is a story about a little boy whose mother is dying, written by a man who used to be a little boy whose mother died. I believe that knowing this helps a great deal in understanding the story. Digory wants to use the magic of the other worlds to find a miraculous cure for his mother, and in the world of literature, in fantasy fiction, you can make your mother not die. Aslan actually ends up coming through for him. Digory uses the apple Aslan gave him to cure his mother.

As Dr. Who says, "Just this once, Rose, everybody lives!"