Giant notwithstanding, Shotover Hill, full of picnicking families and strolling couples, is no vast and lonely moor like the one at Narnia’s northern frontier, and however pretty the celandines of Magdalen may be, they cannot persuade you that you are in a forest instead of the grounds of a stately institution. The little wood behind the Kilns (it has, with the addition of a parcel of land from a neighbor, been turned into the tiny C. S. Lewis Nature Reserve), is one of the few places I saw in Oxford that looks almost entirely Narnian. At its exact center, under a canopy of ash and lime trees, you can blot out the impression of the suburbs that lie all around and imagine you are in Narnia’s Lantern Waste, but take one step closer to the park’s edge, and that illusion will soon evaporate.
Much of Oxfordshire matches one storybook image of the English countryside: velvety green fields trimmed with a fat braid of hedgerow and the occasional puff of trees. The hills are low, easy, upholstered. Nothing could be gentler or more curvaceous. Near the Thames River footpath, the route Lewis and his friends would take from Oxford to a riverside pub called the Trout, cows and canal boats move drowsily. The land is flat and prosperous. Although I can see a certain resemblance to Tolkien’s Shire, this region is nothing like Narnia, since Narnia, as any reader of the Chronicles can attest, is wild.
Everyone imagines that Narnia looks like England, but England lost its forests hundreds of years ago, and when Lucy, Peter, and Susan first arrive at Aslan’s How in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they find themselves on a hill looking out over “a forest spreading as far as one could see in every direction.” This, I realized only after reading it for what must have been the thirtieth time, was a fact I had never entirely absorbed before. When I conjure up a mental picture of Narnia, I see something like a park, rolling turf broken by a few rocks and pleasantly scattered trees. Neither farmland nor woods, my Narnia falls somewhere in between — not cultivated, exactly, but not the forest primeval, either.
During my travels in England, the closest approximation to this mental image I found wasn’t in Oxford at all. It was a view of the park at Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where I had stopped off to visit Susanna Clarke and her partner, Colin Greenland, on my way to Ireland. Susanna had also loved Narnia as a girl, and I wanted to talk with her about how it might have influenced her own work, particularly her witty, opulent fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, set in early nineteenth-century England.
Driving back from the train station, Colin and Susanna suggested a stop at Chatsworth. We’d already begun talking eagerly about the Chronicles, and as we stood just behind the enormous seventeenth-century mansion and looked out over the grounds, I was startled to find that here, at last, the right balance between nature and culture had been struck. I asked Susanna if she agreed that Chatsworth’s park resembled Narnia.
“Yes, I think it does,” she replied. “In the same way that Narnia was an idealized view of the English countryside, this is, too. Of course, it’s man-made, you know.”
“What do you mean, man-made?”
“Well, for one thing, originally, you could see the village of Edensor from here.” She pointed to a notch between two slopes in the near distance. “One of the dukes had the entire village moved in the 1800s. To ‘improve the view.’ There was a famous eighteenth-century landscape architect called Capability Brown who had the river straightened and changed a lot of other things. Back then, they had an ideal landscape in mind. They got it from French landscape painters who were painting their idea of a Greek landscape, but of course they had that all wrong.”
“Actually, the word that springs to mind when I look at it is ‘Arcadia,’ and that was supposedly in ancient Greece, wasn’t it? But having been to Greece, I know now that it never could have been as lush as this. It’s much too dry there.”
“Right, it doesn’t look like this at all! With the eighteenth- century English ideal, what you want is a series of very gentle green hills with occasional stands of trees. Of course, Capability Brown would have rather that it be deer under the trees instead of those cows over there.”
“So, right now, we’re admiring a landscape that’s been overhauled to look like paintings from another country that were meant to depict still another country that doesn’t remotely resemble them. And what you and I are both reminded of by all this is a fictional country. But, tell me, do you remember that Lewis describes Narnia as almost entirely forested?”
“Does he? That’s not how I imagined it.”
“I didn’t either, but it’s true. Chatsworth might look like Narnia to us, but it doesn’t match the descriptions in the books, so add that to the general confusion.”
Eventually, Susanna and I determined that our picture of Narnia had come as much from Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of all seven Chronicles, as it had from Lewis. It is Baynes’s Narnia we saw in Chatsworth, the low hills carpeted with green grass and studded with oaks and pine, laid out under the hooves of Fledge, the winged horse on the cover of The Magician’s Nephew. Lewis’s landscape descriptions bewitched me as a child, but I grew up in a desert, and for images of much that he describes — snow, heather, even a genuine spring — I had to rely on Baynes. Her illustrations showed me how Narnia looked, and it looked like no place I’d ever been to myself.
As a child, it would never have occurred to me that the illustrations for any book could be at odds with the text. To me, the words and pictures were inextricable, each as true in its own way as the other, so I never noticed the discrepancies between Baynes’s Narnia and Lewis’s. In my mind, I suspect, the pictures almost always won out. (Susanna, however, maintains that from an early age she had serious reservations about Caspian’s “stupid-looking” haircut in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: proof, for her at least, that Baynes’s illustrations were not infallible.)
Baynes’s style, with its flattened perspective and fine decorative patterns of branches, vines, flowers, and leaves, is meant to recall medieval illuminated manuscripts and tapestries. Plants get as much of her attention as animals and people. In the little exterior spot illustrations in particular, she defines the edges of the drawing using lines (often tree trunks or vines) curving outward like parentheses, balanced by figures that stand in exaggerated contrapposto, so that everything in the picture appears to be dancing or swaying in place. The characters are almost always drawn in full figure, often from a distance and placed so as to set off the landscape, as when the Pevensies appear as little details in the corner of a drawing of the island at the beginning of Prince Caspian. Baynes’s illustrations are merry, delicate, fluid, and droll, but also, like Narnia itself, a little elusive. We seldom feel as if we’re inside them.
Before working on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Baynes had done the drawings for a short book of Tolkien’s called Farmer Giles of Ham, much to that author’s delight. Lewis, however, claimed that he’d first discovered her work not through his friend, but by walking into an Oxford bookstore and asking the clerk to recommend someone who could produce good pictures of children and animals. As it turned out, he was rarely satisfied with her renderings of either. Baynes had yet to turn thirty when she began illustrating the Chronicles, and although she always spoke respectfully of Lewis, she was more tactful than honest when she described him as offering “no remarks or criticism” except when prompted.