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Testing the market
Weighing in on contemporary debates about revising the English prayer book, Lewis opined that until the Church of England had a poet with the skill of Thomas Cranmer, it ought to leave well enough alone—and no poet like Cranmer, he continued, had presented himself. Perhaps we'd do well to wait until a writer the likes of Lewis emerges to think about making new Narnia tales.

But I decided to give Oram the benefit of the doubt. Last night, in front of a crackling (but not enchanted) fire, I read The Giant Surprise to my five-year-old friend Susie. Susie seemed a little bored, and who can blame her? Too young to have read the Chronicles, she has no acquaintance with the real Puddleglum—and the Puddleglum we meet in The Giant Surprise is pretty bland. Susie liked the bumbling giants best of all. She said they reminded her of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. And she liked the picture of niece Lally turning cartwheels in an effort to distract the giants. Indeed, Tudor Humphries's illustrations carry the book. They are more faithful to the spirit of Pauline Baynes's original Narnia illustrations than the text is to the spirit of Lewis's invented world.

Is the problem with The Giant Surprise that it isn't especially Christian? Well, maybe, maybe not. For Lewis never intended the Narnia chronicles to be taken as thinly veiled apologetics. He said that Narnia began with images: a faun, a lion. The story, with its echoes of the biblical story, came second. On the other hand, Lewis also said that Narnia is something of a "supposal"—suppose there were a place like Narnia, and suppose God became incarnate there, what would happen? In this way Lewis said, "The whole Narnian story is about Christ." So perhaps a Narnia picture book with no hint of the stakes—no hint of creation, fall redemption, magic and deeper magic, death running backward—is a contradiction in terms.

Since we're supposing, I suppose that what would bother Lewis (and what should bother us) is not that the book isn't "Christian," but that it isn't any good. It's flat, predictable, and utterly undistinguished. It is hard to imagine that a story this lifeless would have been published had there been no Narnia hook.

Lewis always insisted that his Narnia tales weren't children's stories per se. "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story," he wrote. "[I]t certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. … I put in [my children's stories] what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my 50s."

In other words, good children's stories—like The Wind in the Willows, which Lewis himself applauded, and the Narnia chronicles—are multi-layered and can be appreciated by adults. By these lights, The Giant Surprise fails doubly. Its shallowness guarantees it no audience with adults. And, frankly, it would be a giant surprise if it were enjoyed by many children.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. You can find her on-line at www.laurenwinner.net.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Collections of articles about C.S. Lewis and the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe are available from Christianity Today and Christianity Today Movies.

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December (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49