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In this book, Michael Ward makes the rather astonishing claim that he has discovered the "hidden inner meaning" of C. S. Lewis' famous seven-volume sequence, the Chronicles of Narnia. It is reassuring to the reader that Ward sees and states at once the obvious skeptical responses to such a claim. If the "Narniad" has had a hundred million readers, as by now it probably has, what are the odds on the hundred-million-and-first suddenly stumbling on the truth? And if scores of millions of readers have taken delight in the books already—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was rated by British readers among the ten most popular novels of all time, and that was before the movie came out—would finding its "secret imaginative key" make any difference? Does it need one? And why did Lewis hide it? He has no reputation as a secretive person, or as a poor communicator.
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Ward considers all these objections in the course of an argument which is at once subtle and sensible, a combination not often found in modern academic writing. As regards secretiveness, he points out that in spite of Lewis' deliberate front of frank openness, exemplified in his downmarket nickname "Jack," he was quite capable of concealing matters personally important to him: one of his close friends remarked jokingly that his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, would have been more aptly titled Suppressed by Jack. In any case, the "hidden key" to the "Narniad" is extremely prominent in Lewis' works, both academic and fictional. It is perfectly clear that from an early age he was fascinated by what would be called, in the title of one of his posthumously published works, "the discarded image": the old geocentric universe, with the Earth encircled by Sun, Moon, and the five planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. These seven heavenly bodies still determine our days of the week (though some unknown mind long ago converted four of them, in the Germanic world, to their counterparts in his own mythology), and Lewis considered them and their traditional attributes with great care on many occasions. A good guide to his thinking is his 1935 poem, "The Planets," written in the old native English alliterative meter. In his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet, the hero, Ransom, kidnapped and taken on a spaceship to Mars, and so very clearly not in the old geocentric universe, nevertheless finds the experience of "space" so different from what he had been taught to expect that "he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology." Seven years later, in That Hideous Strength, Lewis has the presiding demiurges of the five planets come down to Earth to destroy the schemes of the devil-worshippers: Earth is "the silent planet" because it alone does not join in the heavenly "music of the spheres," and its presiding demiurge, princeps huius mundi, the prince of this world, is Satan.
In the old view, carefully and concisely expressed in "The Planets," each of the heavenly bodies, with the quasi-deity for whom it is named, had its own set of characteristics, including a particular metal: silver for the Moon, gold for the Sun, copper for Venus (whose traditional home was Cyprus, the copper-isle), iron for Mars, lead for Saturn, mercury, obviously, for Mercury, and—to modern minds rather disappointingly—tin for Jupiter or Jove. Ward's belief, very concisely expressed, is that each of the seven volumes of the "Narniad" belongs to a particular planet/deity, and that these determine its atmosphere, its individuality, even its Christological significance. It is a fair test of the theory to see how many readers, given this hint, can assign the seven books correctly, and readers who wish to make the test should, for the moment, read no further. (If one remembers what is said above about metals, one of them declares itself in the title.)
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