Wardrobe Accessories
Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis's The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe
by Bruce Edwards
Broadman & Holman, 2005
(126 pages, $12.99, paperback)
Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe
by Devin Brown
Baker Books, 2005
(255 pages, $12.99, paperback)
A Reader's Guide Through the Wardrobe:
Exploring C. S. Lewis's Classic Story
by Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead
InterVarsity Press, 2005
(192 pages, $13.00, paperback)
reviewed by Donald T. Williams
With the release of a major movie version of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this past December, we are predictably being inundated with products designed to seize the opportunity provided by what promises to be a cultural phenomenon second only to Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings. These three books by Evangelical scholars rise above the sea of commercial mediocrity to be deserving of our attention; they would make worthwhile reading even if no movie were coming out.
None of them advances a new or original interpretation or has a particular thesis to argue. Rather, they are informal commentaries, distillations of some of the best scholarship on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which try to enhance the reading experience and understanding of normal readers, not scholars—while maintaining scholarly integrity. They differ not so much in their view of the work as in organization, emphasis, and focus.
Created Longing
Bruce Edwards, professor of English at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, offers the shortest, simplest, and most devotional treatment of the three. Short here does not mean insubstantial, nor does simple mean unintelligent, nor devotional shallow.
For example, Further Up and Further In has one of the best defenses (Ryken and Mead have another) of reading the Chronicles of Narnia in their original order of publication—as opposed to the more recent chronological reordering by a publisher that misapplied one of Lewis’s offhand comments—that I have seen since Peter Schakel’s “The ‘Correct’ Order for Reading the Chronicles of Narnia.”
Entering the story in medias res, Edwards argues, allows us to experience Narnia the way the Pevensy children do, and it preserves as surprises those events that were originally written as surprises. “The truth is, we do not really have reasons to care about the origins of Narnia (which are, indeed, revealed in The Magician’s Nephew) until we have first been there to discover for ourselves what has happened; and then we will find ourselves curious about how things got that way, hungry for history and, perhaps, chronology.”
One of the stumbling blocks to reading secondary work on Lewis is having to wade through the interminable, dreary summaries of things Lewis already said better. Edwards, however, has a rare knack for bringing his readers along with summaries of the story that they actually won’t mind reading, interspersed with commentary that focuses mostly on the spiritual and moral dimensions of the work, and often does so very profitably.
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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