The Magician's Nephew

[sawyl]

Having already written about The Silver Chair and being determined to leave The Last Battle until last, it's time to tackle The Magician's Nephew. Although it's not my favourite book in the series, I have a bit of a soft spot for it based on fond memories of Michael Hordern's truly wonderful audio version that made many a boring car journey speed by.

The story begins when Polly Plummer discovers that a boy has moved next door. She and the boy, Digory Kirke, quickly become firm friends and spent their rainy summer exploring indoors. Going through a small door in Polly's attic, they discover a corridor that runs the length of the terrace of houses and ought to allow them to get into the empty house just beyond that of Digory's aunt and uncle. But they miscalculate the distance and emerge, not into an empty building, but into Digory's uncle's study. Never willing to miss an opportunity, Andrew Ketterley offers Polly a present: a yellow ring from a tray containing matched pairs of yellows and greens. When Polly accepts it, she immediately vanishes. Uncle Andrew explains that the only way Digory can save Polly is by taking her a green ring — the yellow rings take a person out of the world while the green ones bring them back — and, in a speech full of self-justification, explains that he can't possibly be expected to do it because, as a magician, he is far too valuable to risk.

The opening does a particularly deft job of establishing the characters and their circumstances. Polly is charming and likeable and friendly, and its not hard to see why she and Digory get on. Her comfortable circumstances contrast with Digory's rather unhappy ones: living with his aunt and uncle — his mother's unmarried siblings — because his mother is terminally ill and being cared for by Aunt Letitia. Andrew Ketterley is a delightful character: shallow, self-serving, and so deeply cowardly he is forced to trick a pair of children into doing his work for him. Digory, who eventually grows up into the Professor of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is a brave boy whose curiosity may drive him to do unwise things but whose sense of morality always sees him right in the end.

Putting on his yellow ring, Digory finds himself in a drowsy wood full of shallow pools of water. After a brief discusion he convinces Polly to try one of the other pools before using the one to take them back to London. The pool they pick takes them to the dying world of Charn, to a decaying palace and a hall full of statues of people. Here, against Polly's wishes, Digory rings an enchanted bell that wakes one of the figures, the Empress Jardis, who reveals that she used her magic to kill everyone rather than see her sister take the throne from her. Through a series of disasters Digory and Polly manage to bring the Empress back with them to London, where she causes all sorts of trouble.

The introduction of the Empress Jardis, clearly the White Witch of the later books, is thoroughly unpleasant from the moment she appears. The story of her war with her sister is obviously intended to be read as an allegory for the nuclear age, with magic standing in for atomic weapons — the sisters initially have an agreement not to use magic, which the Empress claims her sister broke. Later Aslan makes the analogy explicit, telling Digory and Polly that before the end of their lives they will see scientists working on weapons every bit as terrible as the Empress's Deplorable Word — a spell that kills all living creatures except for the person who speaks it.

Eventually after she causes a certain amount of comic mayhem in London, Digory is able to use his yellow ring to pull the Witch along with his Uncle, an unsuspecting cabbie, and the cabbie's horse Strawberry, into the wood. Attempting to return the Witch of Charn, Digory and Polly step into a pool only to find themselves in a world of nothingness. From nowhere they hear a great voice singing, and as they watch the stars and the sun come into being revealing the singer: a Great Lion. After singing the plants and animals into being, Aslan choses two of each creature and gives them the power of speech, giving them stewardship over the dumb unaltered creatures. While Uncle Andrew and the Witch are appalled by the new world, Digory and Polly and the Cabbie are delighted.

Lewis' borrowings here are many and various, with Genesis being the most obvious. But the beautiful idea of the world being sung into being is very similar to Tolkien's creation of Eä in The Silmarillion but where Lewis' myth has the advantage of being short and focused solo, Tolkien imagines a vast choir with every voice adding its own line of being to the world — a sort of celestial Spem in alium. The moment when Aslan grants the power for speech to the beasts is clearly intended to echo the account of the first Pentecost in Acts, when the holy spirit grants the apostles the power to speak in tongues. The story also emphasises how the characters own natures qualify their reactions to Aslan: those with evil intent, like Uncle Andrew and the Witch, are afraid while the others — even Digory, whose conscience is troubled by his actions in the Hall of Images in Charn — feel strengthened and renewed.

Hoping against hope that the new country may have some magic to help his dying mother, Digory screws up his courage and approaches Aslan. Realising that Digory is genuinely repentant, the Lion offers him a chance at redemption: by travelling to a distant garden and recovering a magic apple, he can help defend against the evil he is responsible for bringing to Narnia. Digory readily agrees and with the help of the cabbie's horse, now a great winged creature called Fledge, he and Polly travel to the closed garden on the hill. Here he enters alone and finds himself face to face with the Witch, who tries to tempt him into taking his apple home and using it to heal his mother. Digory resists and returns with the apple to Aslan, who has him plant the tree that will defend the land from the Witch. During the ceremony to crown the cabbie and his wife as King and Queen of Narnia, the tree grows and fruits and it is one of these apples Aslan offers to Digory as a gift to help save his mother's life. The story closes with the children rescuing Uncle Andrew, who in a slapstick section, has suffered greatly through the misguided kindnesses of the talking beasts and their attempts to look after him, and returning home with Aslan's present.

The final section, with its Edenic garden and apple tree and evil tempter, is obviously a reworking of Genesis. But Digory is no Adam and the Witch's blandishments, which turn on her fatal assumption that everyone is as selfish as she is, fail to sway Digory from the path of his pilgrimage. The story also allows Lewis to strengthen the links between The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by emphasising Jardis' pure white pallor after eating her stolen apple and by linking the wood of Lucy's wardrobe with the wood of the tree that grew from the pips of the apple that Digory used to cure his mother.

The Magician's Nephew is perfectly serviceable with good bits towards the beginning, but it stops working for me when the scene shifts to the creation of Narnia, where it all feels a little bit worthy.