When it comes to children's genre classics, this is one of the big ones and I thought I'd remembered it pretty well from my last read through maybe forty years ago. However, it had its surprises and I was surprised to be surprised. It's pretty widely known that the 'Chronicles of Narnia' are a thinly veiled Christian allegory and it doesn't take a scholar to see that Aslan, the Lord of the Woods, is an obvious take on Jesus Christ, even before he sacrifices himself for others and is resurrected. In fact, a friend of mine rather enjoyed this until his curate father told him that effectively, "It's the story of Jesus", which spoiled everything for him. I enjoyed this anyway.

However, for a Christian allegory, it seems to contain an awful lot of pagan imagery. It isn't Aslan who's crowned king at the end of the book, it's four human beings, or daughters of Eve to use the terminology of Narnia. While Aslan feels entirely Christian before we even meet him, his foe isn't the devil but the White Witch, who seems much more concerned with maintaining her power than  spreading any sort of evil. Sure, she corrupts Edmund but not for the sake of it. Her most obvious impact on Narnia is to ensure it's always Winter but never Christmas, which feels odd in two ways. The focus on seasons is far more pagan than Christian and how do we shoehorn Christmas into an actual Christian allegory? Come to that, how does Father Christmas play a part?

Another surprise is that this feels like a complete story told in a single book, not the beginning of a series. It starts with Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy being sent away from London in wartime to a professor's house in the country. It's a big house and mostly an empty one, so they explore it, of course, and that's when Lucy tries the wardrobe and keeps on going into it until she's in the snow by a lamp post talking with a faun. These children live out full and satisfying lives on the thrones at Cair Paravel, only to eventually end up at the lamp post to return through the wardrobe to the professor's house as children once more. This certainly wasn't the first portal fantasy—I read an earlier one last month—but it's an archetypal example and the ease of this ending seems wrong now, having read Seanan McGuire's 'Wayward Children' books.

That faun is Mr. Tumnus and he's in the service of the White Witch, even if he doesn't want to be. There's nothing Christian at this point, just a portal into a fantasy world and that time-honoured classic story of ultimate power. Only Lucy has found her way into Narnia at this point, but nobody believes her story. Next time, Edmund is with her and has a very different experience, the White Witch feeding him Turkish Delight and bleeding him of information. He also lies when they return to the house, denying that Narnia exists and that he just went there, perhaps underlining how he has already fallen under the White Queen's corrupting influence. Finally, it's all four children and everything changes.

Mr. Tumnus is gone, apparently arrested for high treason, his place trashed. So they join up with a beaver instead, hear that Aslan is on the move and about the prophecy that will see two boys and two girls on the thrones at Cair Paravel. The sides are quickly forged, with Edmund sneaking off to join the White Witch, Maugrim the grey wolf who leads her secret police and their forces, but the other three joining up with the local population and eventually Aslan to fight them, sometimes in a literal fashion, names like Sir Peter Wolfs-Bane not being given for nothing.  Oh, and yes, Father Christmas, who seems entirely anomalous at this point.

Reading up about the reality behind the writing of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' is a big validation. It feels like this didn't start as a Christian allegory, merely a fantasy "in the tradition of E. Nesbit". Apparently, Mr. Tumnus, as yet unnamed, was the first detail set in Lewis's mind: an image of a faun carrying parcels and umbrella through the snow. It took him over two decades to get round to writing a story about it. The advent of war and the evacuation of a trio of schoolgirls from London to Lewis's home outside Oxford deepened that story and it was pretty clear already that the professor in the story is a self-portrait.

Lewis has apparently suggested, in an essay called 'It All Began with a Picture' that he didn't have many ideas about how the story would unfold until Aslan "came bounding into it" and "pulled the whole story together". That feels right, because it isn't Aslan's story until it suddenly is and yet it never quite seems to be. He's a mystery, a legend come to life and his sacrifice and resurrection is a pivotal part of the White Witch's downfall, but he's absent for most of the book, which belongs instead to the four children. They begin it and they end it and the decades of peace in Narnia are due to them not to the lion who was only there for a brief, if crucial, moment.

Maybe that's why this doesn't feel like a Christian allegory to me, or to use Lewis's own phrase, a Christian supposition. It feels like Aslan is a Christian allegory but he's thrown into a fantasy with all the worldbuilding done before he was ever added. Thus, we have a portal to bring us in and an all-powerful despot to overthrow and an array of talking animals and goddamn Father Christmas to play their parts, as the snow melts and Winter finally gives way to the long withheld Spring. It's all traditional rural English fantasy, maybe with a clear sense of moral duty but one that doesn't rely on any particular reading of religion to succeed. That Aslan does show up and represents the Christ figure and brings a Christian flavour to proceedings doesn't change that.

I'll continue on through the series, following the order of publication. Apparently, even that is up for debate, given that this is technically the second within the internal series chronology after an outright prequel, 'The Magician's Nephew'. However, this was published first and that sixth, with only 'The Last Battle' still to come. I see heartfelt discussions about recommended reading order and many collected editions adhere to internal chronology. However, having reacquainted myself with this first published novel, I have to say that I'm rather happy to have shared Lucy's wonder as she emerged from the wardrobe to see a lamppost in the snow and a faun with an umbrella, with no conception how any of it got there. At this point, it doesn't matter. It's just magical. ~~ Hal C F Astell