Like the author of The Lord of the Rings, the creator of Narnia, CS Lewis, was a don, a Christian and a first World War veteran. But his work may be better suited to film than Tolkien's, writes Eileen Battersby
It all began with a game of hide and seek. Or rather, no it didn't. It began because of a war, always a war. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy" begins CS Lewis's classic tale, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the first of the Narnia books to be written. "This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of air raids."
All very straightforward and, as Susan might say, logical, until the moment Lucy arrives at the back of the wardrobe. Behind the musty coats and the mothballs, lies Narnia, a land caught in perpetual winter and denied Christmas during 100 years of hardship. Yet rebellion is nigh; it has been reported that Aslan is on the move.
Much of the initial information about Narnia's oppression under the rule of the White Witch is conveyed by a faun named Mr Tumnus. It is he who invites Lucy for tea "and toast - and sardines - and cake" in his well-furnished gentleman's cave with its shelf of books including titles such as Is Man A Myth?. Later, Mr Beaver, husband and dam-builder, expands on the political situation.
Transferring imagination from the page to the screen is difficult, if not impossible, particularly when an extensive central cast of speaking animals is involved, as in the new movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Devotees of JRR Tolkien's epic, The Lord of the Rings, held vigils in dread anticipation of Peter Jackson's film version of the trilogy. As recent history now confirms, Jackson's ambitious efforts proved honourable and sufficiently faithful for Tolkienites to sigh with relief, even if we still cringe on behalf of the Ents and disown the self-conscious humour, cutesy hobbits and romantic sub-plot introduced by the film-makers.
Lewis readers will be more than happy with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As with Jackson, fellow New Zealander Andrew Adamson honours the text and avails of the breathtaking technological advances which now allow the visual reality to approach the imaginative force of the written word.
Jackson's trilogy is impressive, but nowhere as good as the books, which are serious works of fantasy literature drawing on Tolkien's Old and Middle English scholarship. Adamson, however, has triumphed. His film convincingly celebrates Lewis's original achievement - and in fact, thanks to the brilliant recreation of the animals and the humour he introduces, surpasses the book. Yes, the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its dramatic, newly invented opening sequence, takes many of Lewis's imaginative devices and allows the magic to soar.
This is a sophisticated film, imbued with gravitas, attention to textual and period detail, a subtle tone and skilled nuance. It has taken 21st-century technology to meet the demands of correctly portraying the animals - this is inspired Disney, dispensing with the cute and improving on the original text.
The wolves are brilliant, their chase scenes (not in the book) fantastic. They are what the Black Riders are to The Lord of the Rings. The human performers are pretty good too. The child actors convey the wonder and fear experienced by the 1940s Pevensie siblings, as well as their fraternal bickering. They also acquire understanding, belief and courage, qualities essential to Lewis's vision, and confront betrayal, cruelty and loss.
Tilda Swinton as the White Witch is magnificent, bringing a Shakespearean malevolence to the part as she schemes and threatens all around her. When sensing victory, the self-appointed Queen of Narnia appears, as with so many dictators, to go completely insane.
LEWIS AND TOLKIEN, Tolkien and Lewis - it always seems to come back to these two dons who mastered fantasy: the contrasts, similarities and differences between the pair. They knew each other and were for a while friends. Both were early literature scholars, Tolkien a professor of Old and Middle English, Lewis a medievalist and a specialist in Renaissance literature. Lewis's academic reputation rests on a seminal text, The Allegory of Love (1936), a history of allegorical love literature from the early Middle Ages to the late 16th century.
Both writers had served in the Great War: for Tolkien it was a nightmare, but for the blunt, laddish, determinedly anti-intellectual Lewis - known as "Jack" and, according to his biographer, AN Wilson, described as "a red-faced Belfast butcher" - it was an adventure, While most intellectuals tended to lament their spell in the trenches, Lewis admitted to having enjoyed the camaraderie.
Battle features throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia chronicles. Tolkien's trilogy and the seven books comprising the chronicles were all published in the grim post-war 1950s. Much has been written of their religious content, particularly in the case of the Narnia books, which are both praised and criticised as Christian allegory. Tolkien, always secure in his Christianity, was a convert to Catholicism, while Lewis, who rejected God at the age of nine for allowing his mother die, later regained his faith and became, in classic prodigal style, a popular Christian apologist.
Of course, the Christian parallels are there. Aslan undergoes his Gethsemane, sacrificed to atone for Edmund's sin, which is a Judas-like betrayal. Aslan returns from the dead. But the resurrected hero then turns warrior and dispatches the White Witch. Aslan is God-like, just and exacting, but he is also a lion. As Mr Beaver explains in the book (and Tumnus does in the movie): "He'll be coming and going . . . He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame one."
If the religious or Christian elements are there, I think it's because Lewis belonged to a world in which good and evil were valid concepts. The polemic is more about good behaviour than religious belief. The chronicles are morality tales but they are also adventures. Jack Lewis never lost sight of his boyhood self nor of the fun he had had with the most enduring friend he ever had, his brother Warren. Another important point is that Lewis understood belief, because he had had his own tussles with doubt.
The more conventionally correct Tolkien was a father. His carefully plotted epic, concerning the dynastic struggles for the ring and Frodo's subsequent quest to destroy it, developed out of his successful writing of The Hobbit for his own children. The trilogy was not an attempt to explore good and evil, it was Tolkien's way of testing his powers as a storyteller. Tone is crucial to Tolkien - he evoked the epic voice and sustained it. Narrative cohesion as much as imagination drives the trilogy. Middle Earth is a world with distinct races of men, elves and dwarfs, each with their respective cultures, complex genealogical histories and political agendas.
THE NARNIA STORIES are far more random, even haphazard, with a sprinkling of dated authorial asides. The Magician's Nephew, though the sixth book to be written, was published in 1955 and then became the first in reading order.
It pre-dates The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and describes the creation of Narnia. The Horse and his Boy, third in reading order but written in 1954, is the story of Shasta and the various adventures he shares with Aravis, a girl fleeing marriage to an old man. In Prince Caspian (1951), fourth in reading order yet written directly after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children are summoned back to Narnia, where they discover that the happy kingdom they once ruled has been devastated by civil war. Finally they grasp the complexities of Narnian time.
With The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1955), the old order has changed. Peter is studying for an exam and Susan is going to America with their parents for the summer, leaving Lucy and Edmund to return to Narnia via a painting of a ship. Accompanying them this time is their horrible cousin, Eustace. It will be interesting to see how the film-makers deal with this book. In reading order it is followed by The Silver Chair, written some two years earlier.
The closing book, The Last Battle (1956), dominated by war and upheaval, sees the return of all of the original four children, despite their having been told previously that they were too old to return to Narnia.
The inconsistencies and lack of narrative cohesion mean the books are more a loosely connected series than a formal sequence, a difficulty which could ultimately trouble the film- makers (although these problems do not affect the exciting opening movie).
LEWIS, WHO HAD no children, wrote the Narnia books as entertainments for wartime evacuees. They lack Tolkien's narrative cohesion and they are more avuncular, more English, than Tolkien's formal and consciously heroic tone. Lewis is often quoted as having said: "People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself." And so he did.
While the young Lewis turned against God when his mother died, he also gave up on his father, who within two weeks of her death had sent Jack off to the same nightmare English boarding school that his brother Warren had by then already endured for three years. Jack was to spend about 18 months there, hating every minute. Escape came somewhat spectacularly when another parent brought a court action for brutality against the headmaster.
Back in Belfast and a student of Campbell College by the time he was 12, Lewis quickly proved his ability. He took a double first at Oxford, which should have guaranteed his academic future, but his relationship with Janie Moore, 26 years his senior, whom lived with for 30 years until her death in 1951, compromised his reputation and career.
At about the time he met Joy Gresham, a divorced American mother of two, he had accepted the newly created chair of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge. The abrasive and opinionated Gresham proved to be the love of his life, and her death from cancer in 1960 his greatest grief. Her death inspired Lewis to write, in A Grief Observed, an autobiographically based study of loss: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." As a widower he returned to his first great friendship, his brother Warren.
CS LEWIS IS many things to many different readers: a plain-speaking religious writer; a scholar whose critical genius rests in his method of looking to the text; a bit of a rebel; and a freewheeling storyteller who was fascinated with the magic of animals and the potential lurking behind the door of the most unsuspecting wardrobe.
Luckily for him, and us, he never lost sight of childhood. He died quietly, at the age of 65, on an afternoon in 1963 when the world was looking elsewhere at the cinematically choreographed assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Lewis would have grasped the symbolism; he knew all about the ambivalence of good and evil.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is on general release