Narnia

To date, The Chronicles of Narnia have sold over 100 million copies. There was an excellent serialisation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on BBC television a few years ago, but now that the film-makers have made a brilliant start with Narnia, no doubt we can expect the other six books which make up the Chronicles to follow with much the same rapidity and success as the Harry Potter stories.

Unlike Harry

Potter, however, Ashlan, the ‘saviour’ of

Narnia, has his paws firmly planted in the

Christian story. You can watch Narnia and

see it as a simple tale of derring -do on the

part of four children, some charming talking

animals and a lion who is ‘not a tame

lion’, but you get a lot more from the tale if

you look deeper.

When writing about his seven children’s

books, C. S. Lewis said: ‘Some people

think that I began by asking myself how I

could say something about Christianity to

children, then fixed on the fairy tale as an

instrument; then collected information

about child psychology and decided what

age group to write for; then drew up a list

of basic Christian truths and hammered out

“allegories” to embody them. This is all

pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way

at all. . . . At first there wasn’t even anything

Christian about them; that element

pushed itself in of its own accord. It was’,

he added, ‘part of the bubbling.’