According to Wikipedia, that breathless compendium of trivia, the Narnia movies are “the 24th highest grossing film series of all time.” And what ranks 23rd and 25th? And how is this relevant? In any event, three films have been made from C.S. Lewis’ sequence of seven children’s novels, but the series has stalled. Seems the Walden Media studio is wrangling with Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Graham, whom we met as a child in the extraordinary film Shadowlands (with Anthony Hopkins as Lewis).
Even if Narnia’s cinematic future is in doubt, the books keep finding new readers—and interpreters. A thoughtful and succinct analysis can be found in Rowan Williams’ The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia (Oxford University Press). Although Evangelical Protestants have chosen to become one of Narnia’s audiences, Lewis makes uncomfortable company for the fundamentalists, Williams is pleased to note. “Some varieties of impoverished and nervous modern Christian mind” fret over Lewis’ easy mixing of pagan mythology and Christian allegory.
Williams, formerly head of the Anglican communion as Archbishop of Canterbury and now Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge, brings a breadth of culture and learning to the richness of Lewis’ theological vision. Williams dispatches some of the usual accusations leveled against Narnia while conceding that Lewis cannot entirely be acquitted of conveying the ethnic and gender attitudes of his day—and neither can most of us. Williams deconstructs the notion that Lewis cast aspersion against Islam; his depiction of apparently Middle Eastern people was rooted in the Arabian Nights literary tradition, not in broad stereotyping. As for misogyny, the “courage and determination” of the girl-protagonist Lucy “are a constant theme in the books where she appears.”
Williams explores the main ideas behind Narnia. For starters, Lewis was concerned to show the strangeness of God. Aslan, the leonine stand-in for Christ, is no cuddle toy—he’s not anyone’s personal Jesus. As Williams writes, “the experience of meeting him [is not] easy for persons who habitually settle for much less than the truth in their account of themselves and their world.” And what of the role of humanity? In Narnia’s realm of talking animals, “the moral world is not exclusively human.” Our species is part of a greater ecology in Lewis’ vision.
Like the Edwardian children’s authors Lewis admired as a boy, his authorial voice whispers quiet subversion in the ears of readers in a conspiracy against an adult world governed by routine and lack of reflection (if not hypocrisy). Aslan is a figure of riotous freedom. In Prince Caspian, Aslan, accompanied by the Greco-Roman god of wine and revelry Bacchus, breaks into a prim girls school to liberate the pupils from the dour reign of the White Witch. “In a word,” Williams concludes, “what Lewis portrays with such power and freshness is simply grace: the unplanned and uncontrolled incursion into our self-possessed lives of God’s joy.” It’s not the Christianity of Jerry Falwell—or Richard Dawkins.
