In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new study of the unexpected worlds of C. S. Lewis
December has always been the month read C. S. Lewis. Perhaps it was growing up reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the land of Narnia being in the grip of a perpetual (if Christmas-free) winter; perhaps it’s because I have always had a soft spot for that moment in the 1993 Richard Attenborough biopic of Lewis’s life and love, Shadowlands, in which the choir of Oxford University sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ as Lewis negotiates the new relationship that is blossoming between him and Joy Davidman.
So that’s my excuse, at least, for being somewhat late with this review of Warwick Ball’s new study of Lewis’s work, East of the Wardrobe: The Unexpected Worlds of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press). I began reading it earlier in the year but work commitments conspired to come between me and it. It certainly wasn’t because of any failing in the book, which is at once a personal love letter to Lewis’s work and a meticulously researched scholarly appreciation of the surprising influences on his writing, especially the Chronicles of Narnia.
Ball readily acknowledges this surprising element in his introduction. Is not C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and ‘the East’ a strange pairing for a book? Lewis never travelled to Asia or north Africa, nor was he an orientalist by any stretch of the imagination. (He went on a tour of Greece shortly before his death in 1963, but prior to writing the seven Narnia novels, he had never set foot outside of Britain except for one childhood holiday in France and a ‘brief stint on the western front’ during the First World War.)
So, one could be forgiven for thinking that Ball’s book is going to comprise a few scant examples stretched out across 300 pages in a vain effort to make good on the book’s unusual premise.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For a start, we may recall that Aslan, the most famous character in all of Lewis’s fiction, is the Turkish word for ‘lion’, and that Turkish delight – that sweet treat ‘full of Eastern promise’ – has set generations of children’s mouths watering as they read about Edmund’s first encounter with the White Witch. And isn’t one of the Narnia books, The Horse and His Boy, set in a fictionalised version of the Middle East?
However, as Ball observes, Lewis had been fascinated by other cultures ever since he was a boy. ‘Boxen’, the pre-Narnian fantasy land he and his brother Warren (‘Warnie’) invented as children, was ‘Animal Land and India’, a world of magic which incorporated Eastern influences.
Ball – an archaeologist and historian of the Near East – grew up on the Narnia books and returned to them as an adult, struck by all of the Eastern influences on his childhood favourites. He wrote East of the Wardrobe: The Unexpected Worlds of C. S. Lewis partly to satisfy his own academic curiosity concerning how deep this influence runs. Are there other ‘oriental’ elements besides the obvious biblical inspiration on the books?
The answer, it turns out, is ‘yes’. Over the course of seven illuminating and engagingly written chapters, Ball takes us on a literary odyssey not only through Narnia but the histories of Herodotus, Persian painting, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Sufism, and much else. But it would be easy for the Narnia books themselves to become somewhat lost under the weight of all these other references. Ball deftly ensures that Narnia is never too far from us, that wardrobe within reach as he crosses between the history, poetry, and art of our world and the magical land of Narnia which Lewis created from such influences.
And his close readings of the books are often very persuasive. Ball’s chapter situating The Voyage of the Dawn Treader into a tradition of travel narratives which includes the Argonautica, the travels of Marco Polo, Mandeville’s (almost certainly fictitious) narratives, and Robinson Crusoe is especially satisfying. But his chapter exploring Lewis’s models and influences for the Calormen in The Horse and His Boy is also scrupulous and convincing. The Narnia fan will find much food for thought here, Turkish delight and otherwise.
For the most part, Warwick Ball is a rigorous scholar as he guides us through these oriental elements of Narnia and beyond. My one quibble – a minor one at that – is that he seems unaware that the name Digory, which appears in The Magician’s Nephew, had already been used by Thomas Hardy (albeit with a slightly different spelling) for his character Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native. If C. S. Lewis really had ‘read everything’, then surely he’d be aware of this classic Victorian novel? It appears that Ball isn’t, but to me this seems a more plausible explanation for the name’s origins.
East of the Wardrobe is a highly enjoyable and eye-opening account of the myriad ways Lewis was influenced by Eastern art, literature, and philosophy – and, indeed, religion. Those who have written off the Narnia books as mere Christian propaganda (Philip Pullman, I’m looking at you) would do well to learn more about how rich and varied Lewis’s imagination was, both in what it took in, and in what it produced.
East of the Wardrobe: The Unexpected Worlds of C. S. Lewis is out now from Oxford University Press.