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My health broke down in the end
I don't know when The Magician's Nephew (1955) became my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia. I suspect it's because as unassilable as some of the other books are in their characters and imagery, this is the one that's stranger each time I re-read it. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a solstice ritual, to simplify drastically. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is an odyssey. The Silver Chair is a northern quest. The Magician's Nephew is a weird tale detoured into a creation myth—it begins with a mad scientist in the attic1 reverse-engineering interdimensional travel from the dust of Atlantis, moves swiftly through classic science fiction like dying earths and post-apocalypse and time that runs differently in different worlds (and the place between worlds where there is no time at all) before zigzagging back for a comic interlude in Edwardian London, and then we are into the heart of myth: singing the sun up, the animals out of the earth; the boy who let death in. The first words of the story belong to metafiction, the last to self-delusion, as though to remind the reader never to take narrators for granted.2 And yet we're told of beautiful and terrible things, the dead sun of Charn and the growing silence of the Wood between the Worlds, the song of the stars, the phoenix in the garden, the silver apples of youth and the Witch's salt-white face, eternal life stained like blood around her mouth. Children who rescue their parents, a smuggler's cave in the rafters. Polly Plummer is working on a story. It's not a perfect book; I'm not sure any of the Chronicles are. But it's like nothing except itself, if only because it's such a chimera, and that has always worked very well for me.
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fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.
1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
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It is a wonderful book; has some of the best moments in it--and caused me my first sincere anxiety for the world. "We don't really have something like the Deplorable Word, do we?" I asked my mother. And then she broke it to me that yes, in fact, we did.
And
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All right, I can go on about this book for pages; what are your favorites?
--and caused me my first sincere anxiety for the world. "We don't really have something like the Deplorable Word, do we?" I asked my mother. And then she broke it to me that yes, in fact, we did.
Yes. I knew about nuclear holocaust by the time I read the book; it doesn't make Jadis' story less chilling. "A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun."
And timesygn may have wise instincts. Take care of yourself.
Thank you. I am working on it.
I will show you the house that I thought was like Professor Kirk's.
I would love to know which one that is.
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Well as for my favorites, you picked out some of them: the attic between houses, where Polly was writing her stories, the wood between the worlds and figuring out how to work the rings, Digory's false claim to be being driven mad as an excuse for hitting the bell (and his confession of same, later), the humor of Jadis in London, the glorious song of creation, with the different qualities of music for the different things sung into being (and the contrast between the old, dying sun of Charn and the young, joyful sun of Narnia), the transformation of Strawberry, the scene in the Garden with Jadis, the scene with Aslan afterward --man, I can't think of that without crying. I don't think I've ever read truer sacrifice than Digory's giving up what he believes to be the only hope for his mother, and then when Aslan weeps for him, and it says that he had the impression that Aslan knew his sorrow better than he did himself... wow.
My mother's mother died of cancer when my mother was eight, and I had a strong sense of empathy and imagination as a kid, so I felt really strongly for Digory in those scenes.
And then, when the apple does heal his mother...
And the cabby being the first king of England--that was wonderful. Talk about seeing the basic dignity and goodness in a person.
And the resonance between the tree in England--the future wardrobe--and the tree in Narnia. Nice.
You know, I once saw The Magician's Nephew performed as a ballet, by a ballet school in Amherst. It's a work that inspires, it really is.
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I can't imagine, except that it must have been terrifying. The monsters around the edges of maps aren't supposed to be real.
And the resonance between the tree in England--the future wardrobe--and the tree in Narnia. Nice.
Yes. That's another image that eddies on the boundaries between science and fantasy—sympathy, quantum entanglement; either way, it's lovely.
You know, I once saw The Magician's Nephew performed as a ballet, by a ballet school in Amherst.
. . . Whoa. Just the creation of Narnia? Or the entire book?
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ballet
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"In 2000 the Company presented its first full length story ballet conceived by artistic director Catherine Fair, based on the C.S. Lewis book THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW from The Chronicles of Narnia. A cast of 86 with 112 costumes brought this story alive to audiences of 2500 children and families in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall at the University of Massachusetts."
Now I'm going to be sorry I didn't see that!
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