The Chronicles of Narnia Review: Wonder, Faith, and the Doors That Still Open

Where it came from

Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 and finished the seven-book cycle with The Last Battle in 1956. He was, at the time, an Oxford and Cambridge medievalist better known for Christian apologetics and for his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien: the two belonged to the Inklings, the informal Oxford writing circle where The Lord of the Rings was also read aloud. Tolkien, famously, disliked Narnia. He thought it a slapdash jumble: fauns and Father Christmas and talking beavers thrown into the same pot with no coherent mythology behind them. He wasn’t wrong about the jumble. He was wrong that it mattered.

Because the jumble is the charm. Narnia isn’t built like Middle-earth, with invented languages and thousands of years of backstory holding it up. It’s built like a child’s imagination: grab whatever’s delightful, put it in. A lamppost burning in a wood with no town around it. A witch who makes it always winter and never Christmas. Lewis wrote fast and wrote to be read aloud, and the books move like bedtime, not like world-building.

The allegory question

You cannot review Narnia honestly without addressing the lion in the room. Aslan is a Christ figure. This is not subtext, it is the load-bearing beam of the whole series, most nakedly in the death-and-resurrection at the Stone Table. Lewis always insisted it wasn’t strict allegory but “supposal”: suppose there were another world, how might the same God show up there? The distinction is real but fine. For religious readers, this is the point and the payoff. For secular readers, it lands on a spectrum from “a resonant myth I can take or leave” to “I feel I’m being catechized.” Both reactions are legitimate. The good news is that a seven-year-old typically experiences Aslan simply as an enormous, terrifying, comforting lion: the theology arrives later, on the reread, if it arrives at all.

The genius of Narnia isn’t the world on the other side of the wardrobe. It’s the wardrobe itself: the promise that the boring back of an ordinary closet might be the one place worth checking.

What’s great, and what’s dated

What’s great: the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are close to perfect. Lucy’s first walk in the snow, the meeting with Mr. Tumnus, the sheer wrongness of a lamppost in a forest: Lewis conjures wonder in a handful of pages. The Magician’s Nephew contains the creation of Narnia sung into being, one of the most beautiful set-pieces in children’s literature. And The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, an episodic sea quest, is the most purely adventurous and, to my mind, the best-written of the lot.

What’s dated is harder to wave away. The books carry mid-century English assumptions like a coat they never take off. There’s the matter of Susan, dismissed in The Last Battle for growing interested in “nylons and lipstick and invitations”: a moment that has irritated readers from Philip Pullman to J.K. Rowling, and reads today like Lewis punishing a girl for becoming a young woman. The portrayal of the dark-skinned, turbaned Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy is, frankly, an Orientalist caricature. And Lewis’s narrator occasionally leans in to editorialize about what boys and girls are naturally like. None of this is fatal, but a parent reading aloud today may find themselves pausing to talk about a few passages rather than sailing straight through.

Which order, and does it matter

The eternal fan argument: publication order (starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) or chronological order (starting with The Magician’s Nephew, the prequel)? Modern boxed sets number it chronologically, but I’ll plant a flag: read it in publication order. The Magician’s Nephew is a better book after you already love Narnia, because half its pleasure is watching famous things click into place: where the lamppost came from, why there’s a wardrobe. Meeting a wonder for the first time as a footnote to its own origin story robs it of the wonder.

The reading experience

Fast. Short. Each book is a couple of evenings at most, and the whole series is lighter than a single doorstop epic. The prose is plain and warm, occasionally sentimental, and unafraid to speak directly to the reader. As an adult you’ll feel the seams (the sudden Father Christmas, the deus-ex-lion rescues) but you’ll also feel the pull that hooked you at nine. It is comfort reading of a very high order. Want to see how the whole set stacks up? Check the latest price on Amazon.

Who should read it, and what to read next

Read it if you’re introducing a child to fantasy and want something gentler and shorter than Tolkien or Rowling; if you loved it once and want to test whether it holds; or if you’re curious how so much modern portal fantasy traces back to one snowy wood. Skip it, or read it warily, if allegory grates on you or the dated attitudes will spoil the ride. If Narnia lands, graduate readers to Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea for a deeper, quieter magic, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: pointedly written as an anti-Narnia, and all the more interesting for it.