Not long after this conversation, it occurred to me that I could apply the same principle to reading. I’d always assumed that I could never recapture the old enchantment I once found in books, especially the complete and total belief that I’d felt while reading the Chronicles. I know too much now: about Lewis’s personality and intentions, about literary sources he’d raided, about his careless reflections of the world’s injustices. But what if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive “somewhere at the back” and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side.
Part Three
Songs of Experience
Chapter Sixteen
Castlereagh Hills
From the top of Slieve Ban, one of the peaks of the Mourne Mountains on the southern border of Northern Ireland, you can lie back in the grass and watch the blue shadows of clouds drift across the glinting surface of the Carlingford Lough while bees buzz nearby in the heather. It is otherwise utterly quiet, and the side of the slieve is so steep it seems to plunge directly down before your feet, as if a pebble you accidentally kicked over the side would land on the back of a cow grazing peaceably in a field by the shore, hundreds of feet below.
Across the lough, on Ireland’s storied Cooley Peninsula, is Carlingford Mountain, which — I was told almost as soon as I arrived in the village of Rostrevor — is also said to be the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (or Finn McCool) in profile. He’s lying down for a nap, and the fog that rolls over the top of the mountain and sometimes refuses to burn off even on fine days is his coverlet. The Cooley Peninsula is where the hero Cúchulainn fought the rapacious Queen Medb over the brown bull of Cooley, a magnificent animal she wanted for her own, in the Old Irish epic “The Cattle Raid of Cooley.”
Behind Slieve Ban, the long chain of granite mountains extends up along the eastern coast of county Down, beginning with Slieve Martin and the thickly wooded slopes of Rostrevor Forest. The trees on the higher ground are firs, their pointed tops like the spear tips of a mighty army. The trees are packed so densely it would be difficult to walk among them. No sunlight can get through, so nothing grows below, and beneath the top layer of silvery green needles there’s a dim, silent, monochromatic realm of copper-colored trunks rising from a blanket of copper-colored needles. Lower down the mountain, you can walk through an older and more hospitable oak forest dating back to the eighteenth century, and at the very top of the mountains are heaths, open grass- and heather-covered uplands, soggy and riddled with pools of water stained as dark as tea.
This is the landscape that C. S. Lewis said reminded him most of Narnia. Or, rather, it might be, since that bit of information comes to us thirdhand, from Walter Hooper, who apparently had it from Warren Lewis sometime before he died in 1973. And if Lewis did, as reported, think of Narnia while walking with his brother through the hills around Rostrevor, I can’t be entirely sure that the hills looked then — in the 1950s — as they do now. Those forbidding firs, so evocative of the “dark and seemingly endless pine forest” that Caspian rides through while fleeing his uncle’s castle in search of the Old Narnia, are neither wild nor ancient. They were first planted in 1930, and to judge by appearances — from a distance you can see that the trees are laid out in unnaturally uniform patches of all the same height — they’re occasionally harvested, as well. This place is steeper and more rugged than my own vision of Narnia. During my travels through England and Ireland I’ve seen fragments of my Narnia here and there; the whole thing, never.
For me, the Chronicles were first and foremost about a place. More than I wanted to meet Lucy or to romp with Aslan, I wanted to go to Narnia. In this, I was not alone. “The only problem I’ve ever had with Narnia is that I never got to go there,” Tiffany Brown told me. Neil Gaiman said that as much as he liked Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, he never really wanted to visit that world, or to have the adventures Tolkien described, either. But Narnia was different: “Narnia, you felt, was just an infinite number of stories waiting to happen. If you went there, you would have adventures that were different but equally as cool. You would go to places that he hadn’t mentioned on the map.” As of this writing, there are more than seven thousand images on Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site, tagged “narnia”; most are shots of landscapes that reminded the photographers of a place that doesn’t actually — or even approximately — exist.
Lewis’s invented land, though far less sturdily elaborate than Tolkien’s, felt every bit as real to these readers, just as it did for me. Rife with logical improbabilities in everything from its economics to its history to its agriculture, Narnia nevertheless remains palpable, a place you can almost see, almost smell, almost hear. Its reality is rooted in the sensual richness of the natural world, described by Lewis with ardor, care, and simple grace. Here, at length, is one of the best of these passages, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the part in which Edmund trudges through the woods as a captive of the White Witch and her dwarf henchman:
Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.
Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers — celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing….
Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree — gold and purple and white…. Close behind the path they were following a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of the tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds’ music, and wherever Edmund’s eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks….
There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed across their path. “This is no thaw,” said the dwarf, suddenly stopping. “This is Spring.”