When was the last time you walked through the wardrobe?
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I made a study of it, the passage into other worlds. It started around age 10 — already I recognized the peril of adulthood when it came to magic — and as the years ticked by, 11 then 12 then 13, I counted each as a closing door. Like when schools or jobs neglect to send formal rejections, that nothing had happened to me (or around me) by a certain time confirmed that one or another story would not be having me for a protagonist.
There are few children who don't like a good escapist narrative: They are hallmarks of this body of literature. Both Perrault's and the Grimm brothers' fairy tales are full of children leaving home, whether they go running or are pushed out. Alice falls down a hole into Wonderland. Mary Lennox finds a key to a locked garden. The Darling children fly off to Neverland. James climbs into a giant piece of fruit. Harry finds himself at a new boarding school. There is something in these stories that children need, want: an imaginative trial of independence, a way out of life as they know it. For some children, though, they are more than that: They are life preservers.
I write as someone who was left behind, as anyone who has read and loved a magical book is, marooned in the world we tried so hard to escape. We are Narnians bereft of Narnia, witches without wands, children who have grown old. I do not mourn for my lost childhood: let me be clear. Adulthood is another, maybe equally profound, form of escape, and one I relish. Still, I've been thinking about this very particular form of reading—desperate, wishful, life-sustaining—that I for a long time had put aside.
Critic Laura Miller, in the wonderful Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, likens her relationship with The Chronicles of Narnia, the foundational books of her childhood, to the character Lucy's encounter with a spell "for the refreshment of the spirit" in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In a volume of Coriakin's, a magician and former (or fallen) star, she finds an enchantment that is not so much spell as it is story. But the book's pages cannot be turned back (it is, after all, magical) and Lucy forgets it almost instantly. The memory of how it felt, though, stays with her, for "ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
While Miller has "read a lot of great literature since the day my second-grade teacher handed me a clothbound copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," none are her magician's book, "the story to which all other stories must be compared." The Chronicles fill that role for her "not merely because of its form or style or historical significance but because of how it made me feel, which is at heart the fundamental question with any work of fiction."
When I think about how and when I read the Chronicles of Narnia in childhood, I have to start with my bed. For a brief moment in time, around age 7 or 8, I had a lovely four-poster bed, and on special occasions I'd make a tent of it. Spiriting sheets from the linen closet and securing them over the bed's top and sides with extra hairbands, I created a dimly lit box of fabric, a cave of what was to me the most delicious privacy, secrecy, comfort, safety. It was space I reserved for only the most important books, because of course what else would I do inside it but read? Narnia deserved, required this space; and it was there, closed up and away from the world, that I fell into a story I needed with every atom of my body.
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I reread all seven books this past Christmas (when else) for the first time since childhood and I could not keep myself from crying, or crying out. I threw two, maybe three, of the books across the room.
There is something about the stories we read as children that get at the root of a person, that have access to the rawest nerves. And when these books are as aggressively enchanting, and as full of hard, cruel things, as the Chronicles are — ambivalence can be violent. Part of my distress was just the pain of seeing these children lose Narnia, one by one, and finally their own lives. Part of it was, well, all the shitty stuff. Perhaps the shittiest comes at the end of The Last Battle, when the Narnian prince Tirian notes Susan's conspicuous absence from her gathered siblings.
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