One of the first things you do when you get married is to move all your stuff into the same place. So, shortly after my husband and I were united, I set about uniting our book collection. My paltry handful seemed like nothing beside the pile of tomes that he had already acquired. I was arranging the bookshelves by author, matching up which of Tolkien’s and Shakespeare’s works we had duplicates of.
And then I got to C.S. Lewis.
“What’s this?” I asked, putting down the box set of his space trilogy and picking up another boxed set. “The Chronicles of Narnia,” he answered. “But why is it all... wrong?” I gestured at it in confusion, and picked up my own boxed Chronicles to compare. “It’s not wrong, it’s just in a different order,” he corrected me. I paused for a moment and then asserted, “It’s wrong.”
In October of 1950, Clive Staples Lewis (“Jack,” to his friends) published a novel for children entitled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Though he never thought he would write a sequel, in the five years following, he wrote and published six more books that took place in his fictional world of Narnia. The series has sold over one hundred million copies in forty-seven different languages.
People like it.
But like many other things imported to America from Britain, once it got here, the Americans managed to muck it all up. The first American publisher, Macmillan, confused American readers immediately by numbering the books. Since they left them in the original order of publication, in 1994, when Harper Collins got the rights to publish the series, they decided to reorder the books chronologically, based on an excerpt from a letter written by Lewis to an American fan.
Today, we use the word “fan” to indicate when we like something: “I am a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia.” But it’s actually an abbreviation of another word, fanatical, a synonym of “crazy.” As in, “People can get quite fanatical about the order in which the Chronicles of Narnia are read.” From the violence of our arguments, “fanatical” is a pretty appropriate word to use.
Anyone who bought the series in a box set (published by Macmillan) before 1994 asserts that the correct way to enjoy the books is by discovering the lamppost in the wood with Lucy, then delighting in the triumphant return of the Kings and Queens to aid the rebels, then enjoying a journey of exploration to the end of the world, then following the signs to the lost prince, then a flight from Calormen, then world-hopping by way of the Wood Between the Worlds, and finally fighting The Last Battle against those who would mislead the faithful with a false Aslan. Those who bought it after 1994 are convinced that the reader should start with the beginning of the world and proceed in order to the end.
It’s probably pretty easy to see which side of the argument I come down on.
My biggest problem with the chronological order of things is that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells the tale of the children’s journeys into Narnia, their efforts to free it from tyranny, and their own time as wise and just rulers; The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of their rule. So in order to read these books chronologically, a reader would have to stop reading in the middle (well, near the end, anyway) of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, read The Horse and His Boy, and then go back and finish the first one.
The second objection that I have is that if you read The Magician’s Nephew (which tells the story of the creation of Narnia and one boy’s interference with it) before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the mystery of the lamppost is no longer a mystery to you, since you will know exactly where it came from and why it was there. Also, it’s hard to continue reading a series if you don’t enjoy the first book, and since The Magician’s Nephew is my least favorite in the series, I’m always afraid that it will put off someone who has not had a chance to realize what an awesome world Narnia is.
Thirdly, the series in its original published format is already mostly chronological. The first four are in chronological order, and the fifth is a semi-sequel, a story that could only have been written by an author that was very familiar with the world he had created. And lots of series get their origin stories written long after the first book is published. You wouldn’t sit someone down that was completely unfamiliar with Star Wars and make them watch the prequel trilogy first, would you? (For those of you uninformed in the utter failings of George Lucas, doing such a thing would be blasphemous.)
Myself and a friend of mine were having a very intellectual argument about it the other day. It consisted mostly of “I’m right and you’re wrong,” “No, actually, you’re wrong...” Since we weren’t getting anywhere, I decided to bring the argument to a close: “there’s most likely nothing you could say that would convince me of your being correct,” I told her. “So since this isn’t an issue of ‘friendship deal breaker,’ let’s just agree to disagree.” She agreed, and laughed.
Finally, I would like to share a quote from the same letter that C.S. Lewis wrote to the fan who was asking for clarification about the order of the series; a quote that everyone, on either side of the issue, seems to overlook when asserting the author’s desire for the books to be read in whatever order. “The series was not planned beforehand... So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them.”1
Really, the only thing that truly matters is that people enjoy them. The Chronicles of Narnia is a wonderful series for people of any age. If you haven’t read it, do. Just don’t cheat and think that watching the movies is good enough. Now, that’s an argument in which, I think, every Narnia fan would come down on the same side.
1 Dorsett, Lyle; Marjorie Lamp Mead (ed.) (1995) C. S. Lewis: Letters to Children. Touchstone.
No comments:
Post a Comment