Free Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

to save it is invariably difficult, physically as well as psychically.
    I, for one, didn’t experience the Chronicles as a retreat into an orderly playpen populated by sweet-talking animals and a kind, cuddly godhead. I was, of course, being sheltered by the traditional conventions of children’s stories, in which the good are rewarded, the evil defeated, and the ending is at least partially happy. But getting to that happy ending was no picnic; along with the child heroes, I vicariously slogged through trackless forests and snowy wastes, took up arms against monsters, and wrangled with menacing adults. I was stirred by how much was expected of the Pevensies. I wanted to be challenged in the same way. I wanted to be asked to give my all for a cause I could be sure was worthy. (And even at that tender age, I had an inkling that finding such a cause would be the hardest part of the quest.)
    Not all of these sentiments are entirely admirable, but they do represent a mezzanine between the dependency of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood. They’re an imaginative projection, not (quite) a real wish, and Lewis takes some care to remind his readers of the distinction. As Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum enjoy a brief, easy stretch on the moors at the beginning of
The Silver Chair,
Jill announces that she might just enjoy adventures after all, to which Puddleglum responds, “We haven’t had any yet.” Later on, Jill will get the opportunity to observe that “when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it makes your fingers.” The sort of experience that makes for a good story is seldom a comfy one.
    “Adventure,” then, is what might otherwise be called a hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis’s child characters have learned from reading “the right books.” This is surely the oldest of the many tasks that stories are called upon to perform. The honor that propels the warriors of
The Iliad
is bestowed in the form of stories, accounts of bravery first passed on by fellow soldiers and later recited by poets long after the hero himself is dead. When Shakespeare’s Henry V rallies his men before the Battle of Agincourt, he tells them that their courage on Saint Crispin’s Day will soon be legendary, offering them a kind of immortality:
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered.
    “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about,” was what Lewis himself thought one afternoon in November 1917 at the beginning of his only encounter with real, life-and-death adventure in France. A bullet had just whined past him, and even then, his mind turned toward books. Afterward, he would write even less about the war than he did about his mother’s death. In
Surprised by Joy,
he explains that the period is “too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant.” This remark comes just after a sentence that describes, with excruciating vividness, the horrors of the trenches: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [human excrement], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet.”
    Passing references made in the years that followed suggest that the war stuck with Lewis more than he let on. He was lucky enough to sustain a minor wound fairly early in his stint (the shrapnel remained in his shoulder for the rest of his days), and that probably saved his life. The following year, he makes