Forgive Me If You've Done This Before Before I Was Following You, But Please Could You Expand And Expound

Forgive me if you've done this before before I was following you, but please could you expand and expound upon your stated preferences of The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew among the Narnia books?

(My favourites changed so frequently over the whole course of my childhood - I read them at least a thousand times each - that I couldn't even say where my official favourite landed in the end!)

The Silver Chair is one of the most grounded books in the series--few magical creatures (most of whom are humanoid), a straightforward road trip plot, a simple quest to save one man from a single villain. It's the very soul of November, capturing the feel of those late autumn days when the bright colors have passed, but the clean, white sleep of winter remains beyond our grasp, so we struggle through a lifeless land, one weary step at a time, until our journey is done. Those two things are a big reason I love it so much--it's an easy-to-understand illustration of the most basic struggles of Christian life.

Jill Pole, more than any of the other heroines of the series, is an ordinary girl. She goes to school, she struggles with bullies, she's in the middle of her horse-girl phase; she's kind and energetic, but utterly grounded in reality. Eustace has been touched by Narnia, but he's still a more common type of adventurer than any of the other heroes; he's no anointed king or long-lost prince, just a boy who's less dragonish than he once was. These two don't get a glorious adventure with Aslan by their side. They get vague instructions that they manage to muff up, long treks through the slush, cold nights on the hard ground. It's no wonder they're tempted astray by the comforts of the giants' castle--direct obedience to Aslan is hard work. But despite the struggles and the screw-ups, they push through and manage to succeed. They hold fast to their instructions right in the moment where it's hardest of all to obey, and in doing so save Prince Rilian.

And they do it all with Puddleglum at their side. Puddleglum is the real reason this book is so wonderful. He's precisely the companion to have on a journey like this. He's humorous, yes, and his prognostications of the worst make the children more appreciative of the not-the-worst things that wind up really happening. But he's also got the perfect personality to endure this type of journey. He doesn't expect glory or comfort. He doesn't even expect happiness. He expects the absolute worst things to happen every step of the way, yet he never hesitates to take a single one of those steps. He has a mission and it must be done, simple as that, even if it ends up destroying him. He will act as Aslan wills even if he sees no chance of success. And because of that, he succeeds beyond anything they could have imagined.

The faith he shows is a faith in things not seen. It is hope borne of utter hopelessness. He can see nothing but grim struggles and high chance of failure, but what sustains him is that he knows it is all worthwhile. He is struggling for something--for someone--better and brighter than anything in the world that he can merely see around him. And when the Witch tries to take even that assurance away from him, he refuses to let it go, no matter how foolish it seems, because this foolish faith is wiser than all the wisdom of the world she wants him to see. It is that stubborn, grim, utterly foolish hope that ultimately saves them all--and provides me personally with an example that has pulled me through many dark and dreary days of doubt.

All three of them, really--these three ordinary and fallible traveling companions--remind me to pull through the annoyances and confusion of life, to keep striving even when it seems I've messed it all up. They have some of the same flaws and failings that I do. They struggle with the same petty annoyances. They make mistakes and forget to say their prayers in the bustle of the day. But even they, if they keep at it, can be heroes in their own way--and perhaps that means there's hope for me.

If The Silver Chair is reality, The Magician's Nephew is a fairy tale. Polly and Digory are explicitly not real children. They live in the long-ago land of children's literature, in the streets where the Bastables and Sherlock Holmes once roamed. Digory's uncle is a magician with a fairy godmother. They travel to not one, but to multiple fantastical worlds, and explore a place where it's possible to reach infinite others. They see Narnia at its most magical, the very moment of its creation, where existence is a jaw-dropping thing to behold. They face unspeakable evil, come face-to-face with ultimate goodness, bring that evil into an innocent world and help that world hold onto its innocence for a long time in the future. It's bold colors, broad strokes, doing what all the best fairy tales do--breaking into our ordinary world and infusing it with a forgotten sense of wonder. With the fresh joy that comes with innocence and new creation, making old and jaded eyes young again by showing us marvelous surprises.

Digory and Polly are characters from the classic children's literature world they live in, ideal for discovering a new world, like Alice, because they are first of all curious. They want to explore new worlds, which leads them to marvels--and to grave mistakes. The same curiosity that drove them to other worlds drove Digory to touch a bell he had no business touching, thus awakening an evil that causes trouble for multiple worlds.

Yet even that evil, in this children's literature world, isn't as unstoppable as it likes to suppose. This is a fairy tale that points to the True Fairy Tale, where even the strongest evil is no match for the goodness that will prevail. A seven-foot-tall witch gets scolded by a stern maiden aunt, and her powers have no effect in the real world. In Narnia, she offers Digory his heart's desire, and fails to sway him from his purpose in saving this newborn land. And because Digory resisted evil, he gets his heart's desire anyway, in a better way than the witch offered. Even with the threat of evil, there are happy endings all around. Narnia will fall one day, but there is the promise of salvation--even when evil wins, it's never more than temporary.

It's this joy, this wonder, this ultimate triumph of goodness, that makes The Magician's Nephew my other favorite of the series. Sometimes it's good to see the reality of daily life, but other times, it's good to see the fairy tale behind it all, the broad strokes big picture of what reality is really like behind the familiar veil of existence. This book is joyful, it's hopeful, it's most of all fun, and a glimpse, however faint, of the joy that awaits us when we can one day travel to another world ourselves.

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