The Magician's Nephew
The Magician's Nephew is a fantasy novel for children written by C. S. Lewis. It was the sixth book published in his The Chronicles of Narnia series, but is the first in the chronology of the Narnia novels' fictional universe. Thus it is an early example of a prequel and includes many references to the previously published books, especially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In more recent republications, the books have been re-ordered with The Magician's Nephew as book one. See The Chronicles of Narnia entry for more information on the ordering of the books in the series.
This book is dedicated to "the Kilmer family".
[edit] Plot summary
The story begins in 19th century London, where young Digory Kirke has arrived to stay with relatives. Digory hates London and finds his new living conditions to be generally miserable. His father is away in India, his mother is bedridden with a terminal illness, and he suspects his uncle Andrew to be insane. Things take a positive turn when he meets and befriends his neighbor, a girl his own age named Polly Plummer.
Uncle Andrew, while not exactly a lunatic, does turn out to be a dangerous housemate. A self-styled adept, he dabbles in ceremonial magic and the occult. He callously manipulates Digory and Polly into becoming test-subjects for his experiments, which involve using magical rings to teleport to other worlds.
Although unwilling participants in Andrew's scheme at first, the two children gradually learn to control the rings and decide to explore their possibilities for adventure. They land in Charn, an ancient world full of ruins beneath a cold and dying sun, empty of all life save its last queen: the cruel sorceress Jadis.
Digory ignores Polly's warning and foolishly breaks the spell that has kept the Witch enthralled in sleep for centuries. Almost immediately, Charn begins to disintegrate around them. Jadis demands that the children take her to Earth; not only to flee the imminent destruction of her homeworld, but also to subjugate theirs.
After trying and failing to lose her, the children bring the Witch back to London where, fortunately, her magic turns out to have no potency. Jadis nonetheless begins to wreak non-magical havoc on Digory's household and city. Painfully aware that her presence is his fault (not to mention anxious that she may find and frighten his sick mother to death) Digory hatches a plan. With Polly's aid, he uses his uncle's magic rings again, this time with the intention of forcibly transporting the Witch to some other random world.
That world happens to be Narnia. In the stillness and darkness of its pre-Creation state, Digory and Polly arrive there with Jadis -- as well as uncle Andrew, a hansom cab driver, and his horse Strawberry. The entire group had been in physical contact when the rings' power was invoked, and so were all transported together. They witness Aslan singing the creation-song which brings Narnia, its creatures, features, and foliage to life all around them.
The Witch takes an instant dislike to the new world and its Creator. After a direct attempt to assault the Lion fails, she flees screaming into the wilderness.
Before the inhabitants of Narnia, Aslan chastises Digory for bringing evil to that world on its very first day. He charges him with a quest: to plant a magical tree whose power will temporarily ward off the Witch. To do this, he must first travel west to the mountains, enter an enclosed garden, and retrieve the fruit from whose seed the tree will grow. With sinking heart Digory agrees to right the wrong he has caused.
Aslan then grants wings to the horse Strawberry (who has already gained the power of speech, along with many of the other new animals) and sends him along with Digory and Polly. Meanwhile Aslan addresses Frank the cabby, and asks him to be Narnia's first king. Uncle Andrew is left to the care of the Talking Animals, whose speech, due to his own narrow-mindedness, he is unable to hear.
Digory manages to locate the walled garden, finds the correct tree, and plucks the fruit. He briefly considers pocketing a second fruit for himself but decides against it, remembering that the gate had borne an inscription warning against theft and selfishness.
However, he had reckoned without Jadis. Not only had the Witch been following him, she has disobeyed the inscription, scaled the wall, and gained immortality and eternal youth by consuming a fruit. As an added consequence, her flesh now appears white and bloodless; hereafter she is known as the White Witch. Jadis tempts the boy to follow her example: to eat a fruit, abandon his quest and rule by her side. She even baits him with the possibility that the fruit could heal his dying mother. Very reluctantly Digory rejects the Witch's suggestions in favor of his own conscience.
Returning, Digory plants the tree. Aslan praises Digory's efforts and forbearance, instructing him to approach the tree (which has sprouted and matured almost immediately) and take a fruit with his blessing. After a stern warning for mankind to avoid the self-destructive fate of Charn, Aslan finally returns the children and Andrew to London.
Digory gives his mother the fruit and she recovers completely. Then he buries the core along with Andrew's troublesome rings.
As time passed, things continued to improve for Digory. After the death of a wealthy family member, his father returned from India and the family moved to a large house in the country. Digory and Polly always remained friends. In Narnia, all lived in peace. King Frank and Queen Helen reigned in glory. Their oldest son became King after them and their second oldest son settled in Archenland and became King of that land. The lamppost which the witch had accidentally planted burned brightly through the generations until it was happened upon years later by a young girl in another story. The area was called the Lantern Waste.
The apple-core Digory planted grew into a large tree and provided good fruit, though not magical fruit, for many years until the tree was blown over in a storm. Digory, now a grown man and a learned professor and owner of the Ketterly's old house, could not bear to see the tree cut into firewood so he had the tree cut into timbers which he had fashioned into a wardrobe to be put in his old house in the country. Though he never discovered the magical properties of that wardrobe, someone else did and thus began the travels between Narnia and our world.
Uncle Andrew stopped practicing magic, but from time to time he could be found bragging about the foreign queen whom he had once entertained in London.
[edit] Commentary
Readers familiar with Genesis will recognise the parallels to it in Lewis's work. With respect to Creation, it also has some core similarities with Ainulindalë, the Song of the Ainur, the story of creation in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, due, presumably, both to drawing on the Biblical accounts for some of their material and to the close professional relationship between Tolkien and Lewis, who may have discussed together some themes such as a song of creation seen in both Ainulindalë and The Magician's Nephew but not in the Bible.
The story includes the divine establishment of a royal and aristocratic social system in which an English couple (the cabby and his wife) and their descendants are set in authority over an empire consisting of Narnia and its adjoining countries. The reader is also left in no doubt about the precise social class of each of the English characters, but with no implication that this matters to God; the cabby identifies himself and his wife as "both country folks, really." At the end of the book, Digory's father, who was working in India (then under British rule), inherits money and a large house, and this sudden wealth and country landlord status is stated to be a good thing. We may assume that these aspects owe something to Lewis' own attitude, which tended to be shared by most English people at the time of writing[citation needed]; the standard expectations are skewed a little, however, by having Mr. Kirke suddenly come into his inheritance, not to mention by the fact that King Frank and Queen Helen were of so lowly stature in their own world.
Another of Lewis's own attitudes is that God might have a sense of humour, evident by "The First Joke." Soon after Aslan makes the Talking Animals to speak (in pairs of their species, biblically reminiscent of Noah's creatures on his Ark), a talking jackdaw makes himself the butt of a joke by accident. When he sees that all the other talking animals are laughing at "his joke", he says to Aslan, "Have I made the first joke?". Aslan responds, "No, you have only been the first joke", and they laugh all the harder, even the Jackdaw.
The characters are developed through a series of moral choices, particularly Digory. Polly is more than a mere sidekick but is assigned to a strong supporting role in the drama; she has more practical common sense than Digory and is not deceived by Jadis. Uncle Andrew, initially a very sinister and manipulative presence, collapses into a figure of fun at the end, while Jadis, the White Witch, provides the real portrayal of evil and temptation not at all far from Christian belief in how Satan works.
Of the seven Narnia books, The Magician's Nephew is one of the only two that does not feature the Pevensie children (the other is The Silver Chair). However, Lucy is mentioned twice in this book (though she is unnamed) in connection with her discoveries of the wardrobe and of the lamppost in the forests of Lantern Waste. It is also the only book in the series where a significant amount of the storyline is in our world.
There are also several allusions to the novels of H. Rider Haggard. The character of Jadis is very similar to that of She: a queen who regards herself as the absolute owner of her people and as superior to the demands of morality, and who will do anything to obtain the occult knowledge which brings immortality. The hall of mummified images may owe something to the cave of buried rulers in King Solomon's Mines.[1]
The book explains in accordance to the second novel in the chronological series how the White Witch had come to power, how Narnia was founded, why there was a magical wardrobe in the Professor's (that is, Digory's) mansion—as well as how he came to own a mansion— and why there is a lamppost in the middle of the forest on Narnia's outskirts.
The basic story of The Magician's Nephew was included in the 2005 film version of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Viewers who observe carefully will see the story pictorially represented in the carvings on the face of the wardrobe.
Michael Ward, in his book 'Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis', argues that Lewis constructed the story out of the imagery associated with Venus (Fortuna Minor) as it was understood within pre-Copernican cosmological thought.
[edit] Deplorable Word
The Deplorable Word is a magical curse which, when uttered with the "proper ceremonies", ended all life in the world of Charn except that of the one who speaks it. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to nuclear weapons, but he certainly makes allusions to the power of humanity to destroy itself. Writing in 1955 at the height of the Cold War, Lewis has Aslan say to Digory and Polly, who are from the Victorian era:
| “
| It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are an old man and an old woman, great nations of your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware. That is the warning.
| ”
|
When Jadis is awakened, she tells Digory and Polly of a world-wide civil war she fought with her sister. All of Jadis' armies were defeated, having been made to fight to the death of the last soldier, and her sister claimed victory. Then Jadis spoke the horrible curse which her sister knew she had discovered but did not think she would use. A moment later, Jadis says, she was "the only living thing beneath the sun".
[edit] Christian parallels
Just as in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis illustrated the mysteries of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, with themes of betrayal and redemption. The Magician's Nephew illustrates, at a similar level, the themes of creation, primal innocence, original sin, and temptation. A nine-year-old who has heard the Biblical account of Creation should have little difficulty following the story; there are a few obvious parallels with events in Genesis, such as the forbidden fruit represented by an Apple of Life.
Aslan acts in the role of the Creator. There is no reference to the distant "Emperor-Over-the-Sea" who had been paralleled with God the Father previously in the series. It corresponds with the New Testament's teaching that Jesus (God the Son) was the agent of Creation; e.g. "All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made," (Gospel of John 1:3 NIV, see also Epistle to the Hebrews 1:10 and Colossians 1:15–16). Aslan's personal selection of many of the wild beasts in Narnia to be made into Talking Animals is also reminiscent of the Genesis story, since both Aslan and Noah chose two of some kinds of animals for their purposes. The flash from the stars when they are given the ability to talk represents the "breath of life" of Genesis chapter 2, as well as (possibly) the scholastic concept of the divine Active Intellect which inspires human beings with rationality.[2]
The beautiful, but wicked and powerful Queen Jadis being pulled out of her comfortable homeworld, being dropped into Narnia, changing colour and shape and becoming immortal after eating the apple, also parallel to Christianity. It is similar to Satan's story, being the most beautiful of immortal angels, who is cast out from Heaven to Earth, which is a much less comfortable place, and is changed into a much less beautiful form.
Parallels may also be found in Lewis' other writings. Jadis' continual references to "reasons of State", and her claim to own the people of Charn and be superior to all common moral rules, represent the eclipse of the medieval Christian belief in natural law by the political concept of sovereignty, as embodied first in royal absolutism and then in modern dictatorships.[3] Uncle Andrew represents the Faustian element in the origins of modern science.[4]
[edit] Film, television, or theatrical adaptations
Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media currently retain the option to make The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew in the future.
[edit] Endnotes
- ^ See his essay "The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard", in Of This and Other Worlds.
- ^ In the view of Avicenna and Maimonides, intellectual inspiration descends through ten angelic emanations, of which the first nine are the intelligences of the heavenly spheres and the tenth is the Active Intellect.
- ^ See chapter 1 of Lewis' History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.
- ^ See The Abolition of Man.
[edit] External links
| Works by C.S. Lewis |
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| The Chronicles
of Narnia | | | | Space Trilogy | | | | Other fiction | | | | Poetry | | | | Non-fiction | The Allegory of Love (1936) · Rehabilitations and other essays (1939) · The Personal Heresy (1939) · The Problem of Pain (1940) · A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) · The Abolition of Man (1943) · Beyond Personality (1944) · Miracles (1947) · Arthurian Torso (1948) · Mere Christianity (1952) · English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954) · Major British Writers, Vol I (1954) · Surprised by Joy (1955) · De Descriptione Temporum. An Inaugural Lecture (1955) · Reflections on the Psalms (1958) · The Four Loves (1960) · Studies in Words (1960) · An Experiment in Criticism (1961) · A Grief Observed (1961) · They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (1962) · Selections from Layamon's Brut (1963) · Prayer: Letters to Malcolm (1964) · The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964) · Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966) · Spenser's Images of Life (1967) · Letters to an American Lady (1967) · Christian Reflections (1967) · Selected Literary Essays (1969) · God in the Dock (2 volumes) (1970-1971) · Of Other Worlds (1982) · The Business Of Heaven (1984) · Present Concerns (1986) · All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922–27 (1993) · Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories (2000) · Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church (2000) | | | Collected Letters | Volume I: Family Letters 1905–1931 (2000) · Volume II: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949 (2004) · Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963 (2007) |
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