The Magician's Nephew

The Magician’s Nephew Review

The Magician’s Nephew was written fifth in the Narnia series but is now published first, as a prequel that explains the origin of the wardrobe, the lamp-post, and the White Witch herself. Lewis wrote it knowing the world it preceded, and this gives it a particular density: everything we see is resonant with what we know comes after, and the book rewards readers who have already encountered the world being created.

The heart of the novel is the creation of Narnia itself. Digory, Polly, the Witch, and the cabby and his horse arrive in a void of absolute darkness and silence. Then Aslan begins to sing. The song creates light, then stars, then landscape; as the melody grows more complex, plants and animals begin to appear. It is Lewis’s most sustained piece of imaginative theology — creation as an act of musical form — and it is magnificent. The Witch, who cannot bear the creation and calls it mere magic, represents the mind that can encounter beauty only as a threat to be neutralised.

The Witch’s presence in Narnia is Digory’s fault. He rang a bell in the dying world of Charn, unable to resist the temptation of a riddle carved in stone, and woke the Witch from her sleep. Lewis’s point — that human curiosity, misdirected, introduces evil into worlds that would otherwise be safe from it — is a darker version of the Genesis narrative, made more uncomfortable by the fact that Digory is a sympathetic child with understandable motives.

The novel’s emotional centre is Digory’s dying mother and his temptation to steal an apple from Aslan’s garden to heal her. Lewis constructs the temptation carefully: the Witch offers him the apple, argues that Aslan does not love him, that his obedience is being exploited. Digory resists, brings the apple back as instructed, and receives another apple freely given for his mother’s healing. The distinction between what is taken and what is given turns out to matter entirely. It is Lewis at his most precise and his most moving.

Where It Belongs in the Series

The Magician’s Nephew occupies a peculiar position in the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis wrote it sixth of the seven books, publishing it in 1955, the year before the series concluded with The Last Battle. Yet because it narrates the creation of Narnia and the events that precede everything else, it is now placed first in most chronological orderings of the series. This produces one of the most enduring debates among Narnia readers: whether the books should be read in the order Lewis wrote them, or in the internal chronological order. The Magician’s Nephew is the test case, because it is the one prequel whose effect depends most on what the reader already knows. Read first, it is a creation myth that introduces an unfamiliar world; read sixth, it is a homecoming, every detail charged with recognition.

Origins Explained

The novel functions partly as an answer book, supplying the back-story for objects and figures that the original readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe encountered without explanation. The lamp-post that Lucy finds glowing in the snowy wood is shown growing here from a fragment of London ironwork the Witch tears loose and hurls in her rage, planted in the fertile soil of a world only minutes old. The wardrobe itself is revealed to be made from the wood of a tree grown from an apple core, a tree with a faint memory of Narnia in its sap. And Digory Kirke, the boy at the centre of this story, is revealed to be the old Professor in whose house the Pevensie children take shelter — the man who, alone among the adults, believes Lucy when she says she has been to another world, because he has been to one himself. These connections reward the attentive reader and give the prequel its particular density.

Charn and the Wood Between the Worlds

Two of Lewis’s most haunting inventions belong to this book. The first is the Wood Between the Worlds, a silent, drowsy forest dotted with pools, each pool a doorway to a different world. It is a place so peaceful that it nearly erases memory and purpose — Digory and Polly almost forget who they are while standing in it — and it functions as a kind of threshold between realities, neither here nor there. The second is Charn, the dead world the children visit by mistake: a vast, ruined, red-lit city under a dying sun, where Digory’s curiosity leads him to ring the bell that wakes the sleeping Queen Jadis, who will become the White Witch. Lewis’s image of a once-great civilisation reduced to silence and dust, destroyed by the Deplorable Word that Jadis spoke to win a war by annihilating every living thing but herself, is among the bleakest and most memorable things he wrote — a warning about power that does not flinch.

The Author Behind the World

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature who taught at Oxford and later held a chair at Cambridge. He belonged to the Inklings, the informal literary circle that met in Oxford pubs and college rooms and included his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien, whose encouragement was instrumental in Lewis’s return to Christian faith. Alongside the seven Narnia books, Lewis wrote works of Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity and the theological science fiction of his Space Trilogy. The Magician’s Nephew draws on all these strands — the medievalist’s love of cosmology, the apologist’s interest in creation and fall, the storyteller’s gift for the concrete image — and fuses them into what may be the most ambitious single book in the series.