Little Things Matter

 

I recently read a historical novel by a writer I’ve always enjoyed, but I was only a few pages in before I discovered an error. The story takes place during World War II, and one of the characters was remembering the books she read as a child. “Her friends had been Anne of Green Gables and Alice in Wonderland, her adventures in Narnia and the Secret Garden.” The problem? C.S. Lewis didn’t publish his first Narnia book (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) until 1950, a decade after the historical novel took place.

When I first read the sentence, I was pretty sure it was wrong, but I didn’t check it out right away. Then I watched Jeopardy on April 1 and saw this Final Jeopardy answer. (If there is anybody out there who doesn’t know how Jeopardy works, the questions are really the answers, and vice versa.) In other words, this was the information the contestants were given to respond to:

A girl in a 1950 novel walks into this & “got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them.”

I knew the question (what the contestants have to guess) right away. The question was “What is a wardrobe?” and the girl was Lucy from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The category was “Novel Title Objects,” so it should have been easy for anyone who has read the Narnia books, but only one of the contestants got it right. The point here, though, is it confirmed my belief that the first Narnia book wasn’t published until after World War II (and I have since verified it from other sources).

I’m not going to call out the writer of the historical novel, however, because unfortunately it is easy to make an error about those very minor details in a historical novel. In one of my early middle-grade stories, I had a character using a ball-point pen before they were invented. I don’t remember what brought it to my attention, but I caught it in time. Since then I have tried to meticulously research even the most minor details. Even so, I can’t guarantee that no errors have slipped in.

Fortunately, fictional details don’t have to be perfect.

But I try.

2-4-5-6-3-1-7

The other day I was talking to a woman who is reading C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series with her daughter. If I remember the conversation correctly, they started with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because that is the one everyone talks about, but the woman wasn’t sure she was doing it right since those events aren’t the first in the Narnia chronology.

So she planned to read the rest in chronological order. She and her daughter had already started reading The Magician’s Nephew, but I hope I talked her out of continuing that way.

Among Narnia fans, the big debate is whether the books should be read in chronological order or by publication date.

Chronological order puts them this way:

1.     The Magician’s Nephew

2.     The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

3.     The Horse and His Boy

4.     Prince Caspian

5.     The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

6.     The Silver Chair

7.     The Last Battle

If you read them by original publication date, however, they go like this:

·       The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

·       Prince Caspian (1951)

·       The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

·       The Silver Chair (1953)

·       The Horse and His Boy (1954)

·       The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

·       The Last Battle (1956)

Chronologically, that’s 2-4-5-6-3-1-7.

So why does it matter which way you read them? First, certain events create a sense of wonder if—but only if—you have read a previously published book that comes later in Narnia’s timeline. At the end of The Magician’s Nephew, for example, we learn how the lamp-post in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came to be there and where the magic wardrobe came from, but those particulars mean nothing at the time unless you have already read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Then there is the matter of character continuity. There is a character from our world who appears in both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, but you don’t make the connection until the very end of The Magician’s Nephew and probably wouldn’t make it even then if that was the first book you read.

If you read them in publication order, however, the four children who entered Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reappear in Prince Caspian. The youngest two show up again in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and this time a cousin tags along unwillingly. That cousin and a friend are the protagonists in The Silver Chair. The Horse and His Boy doesn’t have the same character thread, but by then you are so interested in Narnia that it doesn’t matter. (The original four children do show up in The Horse and His Boy, but they are secondary characters there.) As I mentioned above, we have already met the protagonist from The Magician’s Nephew in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Then all of the characters from our world except one show up in The Last Battle.

C.S. Lewis didn’t object to reading the series in chorological order, and even endorsed it, as you can see in this quote replying to a boy who was having the argument with his mother. (The boy thought he should read them chronologically but his mother disagreed.)

I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother’s. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote [The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe], I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote [Prince Caspian] as a sequel and still didn’t think there would be any more, and when I had done [The Voyage of the Dawn Treader] I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published. I never kept notes of that sort of thing and never remember dates.¹

I don’t normally question an author’s take on his or her own works, but I believe C.S. Lewis is wrong. The reader’s wonder and the continuity from one story to the next are stronger if the books are read in publication order.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

__________

¹ C.S. Lewis Letters to Children, Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Editors, pgs. 68-69.