Preface The Lion's World

Preface

The Lion’s World

I came late to Narnia; despite an obsessively bookish childhood in a Christian household, Lewis’s books somehow did not cross the radar until I had discovered his works of apologetic as a teenager. I had read The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Great Divorce, even Letters to Malcolm, before I knew much more of the Narnia books than their covers. As a sixth former, I discovered the Preface to Paradise Lost and the first published volume of selected letters, a treasury for several years to come. My initial reaction to Narnia was in fact lukewarm, not helped by a rather lacklustre television version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1967, which somehow made the theological message feel crudely obvious. Discovering the books over again as a student, I realized that what I had not registered was the wit of the actual writing and the sheer psychological penetration of so much of the character drawing. Above all, I found in them what I had found here and there in Screwtape, in the astonishing achievement of Till We Have Faces, in A Grief Observed – a doorway into a simple intensity of feeling about God that was able both to register all the range of ambiguous and confused human feeling and still evoke an almost unbearable longing for that fullness of joy which Lewis points to so consistently in his best writing. 1...