Chapter 7—
“Putting the Human Machine Right”:
Moral Choice in The
Magician’s Nephew
Literature as a whole, according to the archetypal
critics, makes up a single story with a cyclical structure. This composite of
all individual works of literature, or monomyth, is circular in shape and has
four phases, which correspond to familiar cycles in human experience and to the
most important narrative patterns. It might be diagrammed as follows:1
The monomyth unifies literature as a whole, by
establishing an outline into which individual stories and poems can be placed,
and provides a structure which associates literature with human life,
individually and totally.
The final two books of the Chronicles of Narnia relate
closely to the structure of the monomyth. Lewis, surely, did not begin with
these categories or this diagram in mind and design stories to fit them. But as
he thought out accounts of the beginning and ending of Narnia and tried to see
unity in the cycle of that world’s history, Lewis, with his great knowledge of
literature and archetypes, almost inevitably was led to use the pattern
fundamental to nature and literature as the most appropriate for his purposes.
Using in each story the dichotomies, or opposites, into which archetypes always
fall, Lewis intertwines the accounts of two endings and two beginnings. Thus The Magician’s Nephew moves from tragedy
to comedy and reflects the archetypes of autumn and spring. And The Last Battle moves from antiromance
to romance, through the archetypes of winter and summer. Approaching the two
books through the four phases of the monomyth illuminates the artistry and
themes of the stories, clarifies their deeper significance, stresses their
unity, and indicates the importance of that unity.
The Magician’s
Nephew is best known for its account of the beginning of Narnia (a story of
spring); but it begins with an account of the ending of another world (a story
of autumn). The two children who are present at the creation of Narnia, Polly
Plummer and Digory Kirke, go first to Charn and are present at its demise. The Magician’s Nephew is a story of
exploration. Polly and Digory go exploring first through an attic, which brings
them unexpectedly into Uncle Andrew’s study (Chapter 1), then, after a chapter
of exposition, through the Wood between the Worlds, which brings them just as
unexpectedly into the kingdom of Charn (Chapters 3-5) and later, again [ß p. 98] unexpectedly, into
the world that becomes Narnia (Chapters 9-15). Such exploration in the plot
prefigures a more significant kind, the exploration—central to the book’s
theme—of moral rules the characters must accept or reject and moral choices
they must make.
It is in Charn they encounter an autumn’s tale of decline
or a Fall. Northrop Frye characterizes the story of autumn as follows: “The
sunset . . . phase. Myths of fall, . . . of violent death and sacrifice and of
the isolation of the hero. . . . The archetype of tragedy and elegy” (Fables of Identity, p. 16). The images
used in describing Charn echo these terms closely. The children are struck, as
they arrive in Charn, by its age and silence:
It was obviously very old. Many of the flat
stones that paved the courtyard had cracks across them. None of them fitted
closely together and the sharp corners were all worn off. One of the arched
doorways was half filled up with rubble. . . . This place was at least as quiet
as the quiet Wood between the Worlds. But it was a different type of quietness.
. . . This was a dead, cold, empty silence. (pp. 42-43)
Later, when the children see the sun over Charn, it
gives a sense of sunset: “Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun,
far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours:
a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world” (pp.
58-59). Charn itself, “a vast city in which there was a no living thing to be
seen” (p. 59), was a victim of violence and cruelty. “I have stood here,” Jadis
the queen says, “(but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up
from every street and the river of Charn ran red” (p. 59). And the story is one
of isolation—not, in this case, of the hero, but of the villainess: “Then I
spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath
the sun” (p. 61).
The
account of the last days of Charn is a tragic story, [ß p. 99] not in its tone—for a
children’s story can never be fully tragic—but in its movement, the downward
movement of the wheel of fortune from a high point to catastrophe. The account
given by Jadis is of a nation which at one time was great and good, but which,
in the ceaseless turning of fortune’s wheel, fell as “all in one moment one
woman blotted it out” (p. 60). The story, true to the nature of tragedy, carries
a moral and confronts characters with moral choices. Moral rules, Lewis writes
in the section of Mere Christianity on
“Christian Behaviour,” are “directions for running the human machine” and are
concerned with three things: “Firstly, with fair play and harmony between
individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the
things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life
as a whole: what man was made for” (pp. 69, 71). As the story describes the
behavior of Uncle Andrew and Jadis, of Digory, and of Charn and Narnia, it is
unified by its emphasis on the choices each must make between following and
breaking those moral rules.
The
issue of morality appears first in Uncle Andrew. Uncle Andrew is not interested
in fair play or harmony with other individuals. The self-interest and vanity
which led him to become a magician (p. 76) also lead to a total lack of concern
for others. His immoral nature is communicated at a level children can
understand readily by his cruelty to animals: “My earlier experiments were all
failures. I tried them on guinea-pigs. Some of them only died. Some exploded
like little bombs—“ (p. 21). Young readers, many of whom, like Digory, have
guinea pigs of their own, will understand. And they will see through the mean
thing he does to Polly and Digory by tricking Polly into taking a yellow ring,
which transports her into another world, and by forcing Digory to use a yellow
ring in order to bring her the green ring she will need to return. When Uncle
Andrew admits he had planned out the entire thing, [ß p. 100] Digory reiterates
the point for the readers: “You’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the
ones in the stories” (p. 24).
Uncle
Andrew is evil, but not unredeemably so. He is a dabbler in black magic, but
one who lacks “the Mark” (pp. 55, 69) of those who have sold their souls to the
art. Uncle Andrew’s evil, in one sense, is only a pale reflection of the
wickedness of Queen Jadis, to whom he is compared explicitly: both Uncle Andrew
and Jadis, for example, break promises (pp. 18 and 60-61), believing that they
are above conventional moral rules. And both end their claims to moral freedom
with the words, “Ours . . . is a high and lonely destiny” (pp. 18 and 62),
although, as Digory noticed, “they sounded much grander when Queen Jadis said
them” (p. 62). Both have an “eager, almost a greedy” (p. 13) or “hungry and
greedy” (p. 63) look on their faces, produced by their self-centeredness. As
Uncle Andrew asserts his freedom to do as he pleased with his guinea
pigs—“That’s what the creatures were there for. I’d bought them myself” (p.
21), so Jadis claims that the common people of Charn were hers to do with as
she pleased: “They were all my
people. What else were they there for but to do my will” (p. 61). And both
admit that they have “paid a terrible price” (pp. 61, 20) to attain the evil
knowledge and power they possess. Although Uncle Andrew may not be as wicked as
Queen Jadis, the parallels between them point out the continuity in evil. The
difference between slight evils and greater ones, between the “pantomime demon”
(p. 11) and the supremely evil temptress, is a matter of degree, not of kind.
Despite
the similarities between the temptation of Digory in the garden near the end of
the story and the temptation in the biblical Garden of Eden, Jadis is not
Satan. She is the White Witch of the first Chronicle and this book reveals more
clearly than the first one her character as a Circe figure, the archetypal
female temptress. In The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe Mr. Beaver traced her lineage [ß p. 101] to Lilith, the
legendary first wife of Adam, who refused to be subordinate to Adam and to
accept her roles as wife and mother. Jadis, in that tradition, opposes life and
growth. She thrives in a world of cruelty and death, the kind of world she
turned Charn into, but in the Wood between the Worlds, a womb-like area so full
of latent life that “you could almost feel the trees growing” (p. 29), she
loses her beauty and finds it hard to breathe, “as if the air of that place
stifled her” (p. 67). Thus, later, she calls Narnia “a terrible world” (p.
102). Narnia too is full of life, a warm, creative world, very different from
the cold, harsh worlds Jadis prefers: “This whole world was filled with a Magic
different from hers and stronger. She hated it” (p. 101). Hers is the nature of
a seductress, proud, cruel, destructive, oblivious to the need for fair play
and harmony between herself and other individuals.
The
second aspect of morality is illustrated by Digory, from whose perspective most
of the story is told. Digory knows and accepts the traditional moral rules, as
Uncle Andrew recognizes: “Oh, I see. You mean that little boys ought to keep
their promises. Very true: most right and proper, I’m sure, and I’m very glad
you have been taught to do it” (p. 18). He shows his courage and a sense of
duty as he picks up a yellow ring and follows Polly on a journey into the
unknown: “He could not decently have
done anything else” (p. 27; italics added). But rules and decency are not
sufficient when Digory sees the golden bell and the little golden hammer in
Charn and reads the enchanted sign:
Make
your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike
the bell and bide the danger,
Or
wonder, till it drives you mad,
What
would have followed if you had. (p. 50)
He, like his uncle, is
tempted with forbidden knowledge and gives in to the temptation.2
Polly notices the similarity: [ß p. 102]
“You looked exactly like your Uncle when you said that” (p. 50). He strikes the
bell, which awakens the Witch, and he, with all Narnia, pays a terrible price.
He claims later he was “enchanted by the writing under the bell” (p. 135), but
Aslan corrects him: he was confronted with a moral decision and decided
unwisely. There is need, then, for some tidying up or harmonizing inside
Digory; his human machine needs to be put back in order, and the achievement of
that is a significant thread running through the rest of the story.
The third moral area, concerning the general purpose of
human life as a whole, is reflected in the total image of Charn. The rich and
majestic Hall of Images which Digory and Polly discover in Charn, with
magnificently clothed figures sitting on stone chairs along each side, depicts
the changing character of the people of Charn.
All
the faces they could see [as they entered] were certainly nice. Both the men
and the women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a handsome race.
But after the children had gone a few steps down the room they came to faces
that looked a little different. These were very solemn faces. You felt you
would have to mind your P’s and Q’s, if you ever met living people who looked
like that. When they had gone a little further, they found themselves among
faces they didn’t like: this was about the middle of the room. The faces here
looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little further
on they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still cruel but they no
longer looked happy. They were even despairing faces: as if the people they
belonged to had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things. (pp.
47-48)
That the room represents the
history of Charn is indicated by the empty chairs beyond the one Jadis was
seated in: “There were plenty of empty chairs beyond her, as if the room had
been intended for a much larger collection of images” (p. 48). Again the
actions of a Narnian story—in [ß p. 103]
this case the course of Christian history—relate closely to the imagery of Mere Christianity:
What
Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could
“be like gods”—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be
their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God,
apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we
call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes,
empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other
than God which will make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed
is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to
run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God
designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our
spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed
on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us
happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a
happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no
such thing.
That is the key to history. Terrific
energy is expended—civilisations are built up—excellent institutions devised;
but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish
and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In
fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards,
and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. (pp.
53-54)
Charn was intended to have a longer history, but Jadis
in her pride and selfishness cut it short; and Charn was intended to have a
happier history, but pride and selfishness, arising long before Jadis’s time,
distorted and spoiled it. The people of Charn at first were “kind and wise,” as
people were intended to be; but soon the selfish and cruel people came to the
top and everything began to slide back into misery and ruin. Such is not the
life people were made for: moral directions were needed to set the machine right.
The
tragedy of Charn, however, does not complete the [ß p. 104] story. The story of
autumn, of decline or falling action, midway through the book, turns into a
story of spring, a story of rising action, in which a happy ending grows out of
circumstances which threaten to be catastrophic. After the children
unintentionally take Jadis to London, occasioning the delightful account of her
madcap adventures in that staid, sedate city, they manage to get her—along with
Uncle Andrew, a cabby, and his horse—back to the Wood between the Worlds and
from there they explore another world, the as yet “empty world” (p. 96) of
Narnia. As they enter Narnia it is cold and dark, and the song the cabby begins
singing about crops being safely gathered in is not entirely unsuitable after
all (p. 97). Soon his autumn song is replaced by a song of spring, sung by a
voice “deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself” (p. 98). It is the
voice of Aslan, bringing into that world the light and warmth needed for life.
Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to
turn grey, . . . grew slowly and steadily paler, . . . [then] changed from
white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air
was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious
sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.
Digory had never seen such a sun. The sun above the ruins
of Charn had looked older than ours: this looked younger. You could imagine
that it laughed for joy as it came up. . . . The earth [it shone on] was of
many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. (pp. 100-1)
Here indeed is the story of spring, of “dawn” and
“birth” and “creation,” as Frye characterizes it (Fables of Identity, p. 16). As the song continues, Narnia is
clothed with grass and flowers, decorated with shrubs and trees, and populated
with animals and insects. The creation reaches its climax when Aslan, having
selected two of many kinds of animals to be talking animals, says, in the
deepest wildest voice the children had ever heard, “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia,
awake” (p. 116). [ß p. 105]
Lewis’s
creation account is one which children can respond to more easily than the
biblical version, first because they identify with the two children who are
present at it and through whose eyes readers see what takes place, and, second,
because of Lewis’s use of detail: one can readily visualize the grass spreading
out from the lion like a pool and running up the sides of little hills like a
wave, or animals slowly, with some difficulty, emerging from the soil: “Can you
imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? For that is
really the best description of what was happening. In all directions it was
swelling into humps. . . . And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and
crumbled the earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an
animal” (p. 113). Vivid as the details, drawn from several ancient creation
stories,3 are, they are less important than the total effect of the
story. Parallel to the natural and deep-seated human need to know individual
origins (the identity theme discussed in the last chapter) is the need, equally
natural and deep-seated, to know the origin of the world. The desire is not so
much to know the methods and details as to know the meaning and purpose behind
it all. Lewis, therefore, is less concerned with the how than the who. The Son
of God, who was the creator of our world (John 1:3; Hebrews 1:2), in his
incarnation as Aslan is creator of Narnia. Aslan is the focal point of the
scene, always present, always at the center of the important events at the
moment. There is purposefulness, even an inexorability about his actions: “The
Lion came on. Its walk was neither slower nor faster than before; you could not
tell whether it even knew it had been hit” (p. 108). His impact on the scene
and on the children is suggested by the narrator’s comment about how exciting
and vivid the colors of Narnia were, “until you saw the Singer himself, and
then you forgot everything else” (p. 101). The character of the creator tells a
great deal about the purpose of his creation: “‘Creatures, [ß p. 106] I give you
yourselves,’ said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. ‘I give to you forever this
land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the
stars and I give you myself’” (p. 118). The purpose is to use and enjoy, to be
their own persons and Aslan’s.
Aslan’s
importance is brought home decisively when Polly concludes, with an unspeakable
thrill, “that all the things were coming (as she said) ‘out of the Lion’s
head’” (p. 107). Polly’s words are very close to words Lewis used in talking
about the Creation in Mere Christianity:
“Christianity . . . thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and
cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are
things that God ‘made up out of his head’ as a man makes up a story” (p. 45).4
The passage goes on to state that Christianity “also thinks that a great many
things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and
insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.” Those passages, linking
creation and moral choice so closely, clarify the structure and unity of The Magician’s Nephew. The dominant
quality of the book is the newness, vitality, and fecundity of the creation
scene: that sense of life and growth lingers on as the principal flavor of the
story. But one can never disassociate it completely from the sense of defeat
and death that preceded it, in the story of Charn. And Lewis’s point is that
the two can never be separated. Life leads, inevitably, to choice and choice,
just as inevitably, to wrong decisions. There is a tinge of death, then, mixed
in with the dominant theme of “life” in The
Magician’s Nephew, and Lewis’s combining of the archetypal stories of
autumn and spring captures that mixture nicely. At its birth corruption entered
Narnia: “Before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of
evil has already entered it” (p. 136). Even in spring, in the newness and
freshness of birth and growth, the seeds of autumn are planted. The tragic seed
cannot be rooted out; in the cycle of things, it [ß p. 107] will bear fruit; but
the cycle does allow time for a comic season before the inevitable harvest:
“Evil will come of that evil, but it is still a long way off, and I will see to
it that the worst falls upon myself. In the meantime, let us take such order
that for many hundred years yet this shall be a merry land in a merry world”
(p. 136). The language reflects the archetype: this is the essence of comedy,
as a potential catastrophe is averted (in this case temporarily) and a happy
ending results. Digory, who brought the evil from the wasteland of Charn, is
sent to a garden—the contrasting images are important—for the means to contain
that evil.
The
journey to the garden for the silver apple which can protect Narnia completes
the morality themes introduced in the first half of the book. Digory’s journey
is the archetypal journey of testing and growth. He first is tempted to take an
apple for himself: “Could it be wrong to taste one?” (p. 158). He resists the
temptation in part through his early moral training and in part through the
glance of a Phoenix who was roosting in a tree above him. The Phoenix is traditionally
a symbol of resurrection and here it seems (like the albatross in The Voyage of
the “Dawn Treader”) to be an
embodiment of Aslan. Digory then is tempted with the kind of power Uncle Andrew
and Jadis craved early in the story: “Eat it, Boy, eat it; and you and I will
both live forever and be king and queen of this whole world” (p. 161). This
temptation Digory shrugs off easily, for he has no desire for power and glory.
Finally, he is tempted to substitute his own, personal desire—bringing health
to his mother, who has been near death throughout the story—for the broader
purpose Aslan had in mind, of making Narnia “the kindly land I mean it to be”
(p. 175). The Witch urges him, “Use your Magic and go back to your own world. A
minute later you can be at your Mother’s bedside, giving her the fruit. . . .
Soon she will be quite well again. All will be well again” (pp. 161-62). This [ß p. 108] temptation, with its
mixture of unselfishness, is the great test. The language used in describing
Digory’s dilemma reminds one of the “terrible price” Uncle Andrew and Jadis
paid to gain their ends: “He now knew that the most terrible choice lay before
him” (p. 162). He is able to resist the temptation, however, when Jadis
suggests to him the kind of measures she and Uncle Andrew had used, the
breaking of his promise to Aslan (p. 162) and the nasty trick of leaving Polly
behind: “The meanness of the suggestion . . . suddenly made all the other
things the Witch had been saying to him sound false and hollow” (p. 163). Through
his adventure, Digory has grown in strength and spirit: he has achieved an
inner harmony that allows him to face and resist the most powerful of
temptations to evil.
Lewis
uses the episode in the garden to make an important point about the theme of morality,
the traditional point that one’s choices determine what one is. Early in the
book Digory challenges Uncle Andrew, “You’re simply a wicked, cruel magician
like the ones in the stories. Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of
that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you
right” (p. 24). The stories Digory had read may well have been reflecting an
old moral principle which Lewis sums up in Mere
Christianity:
People often think of
Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot
of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not
think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every
time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you
that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And
taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life
long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature
or into a hellish creature. (p. 86)
This is reaffirmed in the
lines written on the gates of the garden near the end of the book: “For those
who steal or [ß p. 109]
those who climb my wall / Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair” (p.
157). Jadis, who has always sought power and been willing to pay any price for
it, climbs the walls, steals an apple, and finds both her desire and despair:
“She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days
like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery
and already she begins to know it. All get what they want: they do not always
like it” (p. 174). The last sentence applies equally well to Uncle Andrew. He
got the magical powers he wanted, but in doing so he cut himself off from
nature as well as from other human beings. Aslan’s line, as he gives Uncle
Andrew the only comfort he can, echoes the line on the garden gate: “Sleep and
be separated for some few hours from all the torments you have desired for
yourself” (p. 171). On the other hand, Digory’s choices, after the unfortunate
one in the Hall of Images in Charn, steadily strengthen his character and earn
him, upon his return to Aslan with the apple, the accolade “Well done” (p.
166). He is a good and faithful servant, preparing himself to enter into the
joys of his Lord.
The importance of choice also enters the moral area which
was introduced by the story of Charn in the first half of the book and which is
extended through the story of Narnia to our world. Charn, though its actual
life had ended long before through violence and cruelty, reached the time of
its dissolution late in the book: “That world is ended, as if it had never
been” (p. 178). Narnia had, and continues to have, the potential to become
“another strong and cruel empire like Charn” (p. 175) if its people themselves
become cruel and selfish. But that danger is even greater for our world, and
Aslan cites Charn as a lesson to us:
“Let
the race of Adam and Eve take warning.”
“Yes, Aslan,” said both the
children. But Polly added, “But we’re not quite as bad as that world, are we,
Aslan?” [ß p. 110]
“Not yet, Daughter of Eve,” he said.
“Not yet. But you are growing more like it. It is not certain that some wicked
one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and
use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are an old
man and an old woman, great nations in your world will be ruled by tyrants who
care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your
world beware.” (p. 178)
Surely those who see a
contemporary social comment in the passage are correct. According to the
“Outline of Narnian history so far as it is known,”5 Digory and
Polly were born in 1888 and 1889, respectively, and were carried into Narnia by
the rings in 1900. Well before they were old, their world had seen a Hitler and
a Stalin and had learned to live with the fear of an evil secret, the atomic
bomb. But the impact of the passage goes deeper as well: the fate of our world,
too, will be determined by its choices. The people of our world must decide if,
by becoming selfish and cruel, they will draw tyranny upon themselves, or if
they will resist the temptations of power and possessions and will live instead
in the joy and justice, mercy and peace that were intended for them.
The contrasting possibilities of oppression and joy are
reflected in the book’s images of country and city, which traditionally have
been used to symbolize good and evil, the idyllic and the undesirable,
respectively. Although Charn is, of course, the prime example of evil
associated with a city, it is not the only one. There is also the
oppressiveness of London, noted first in the opening chapter: Digory tells
Polly she would cry too, “if you’d lived all your life in the country and had a
pony, and a river at the bottom of the garden, and then been brought to live in
a beastly Hole like this” (p. 3). Later, the horse Strawberry complains about
London: “It was a hard, cruel country. . . . There was no grass. All hard
stones.” And the cabby’s reply makes the city-country contrast come out
explicitly: [ß p. 111]
“Too true, mate, too true. . . . A ‘ard world it was. I always did say those
paving-stones weren’t fair on any ‘oss. That’s Lunn’on, that is. I didn’t like
it no more than what you did. You were a country ‘oss, and I was a country man.
Used to sing in the choir, I did, down at ‘ome. But there wasn’t a living for
me there” (p. 123). Narnia, on the other hand is the emblem of country, where a
king is expected to be able to “use a spade and a plough and raise food out of
the earth” (p. 139), and its goodness is manifest in the effect it has on those
who have been corrupted by the city, especially the cabby—his voice becomes “more
like the country voice he must have had as a boy and less like the sharp, quick
voice of a cockney” (p. 139), and his behavior too becomes more gentle: “All
the sharpness and cunning and quarrelsomeness which he had picked up as a
London cabby seemed to have been washed away, and the courage and kindness
which he had always had were easier to see” (p. 167). It is almost inevitable,
then, that the story should end with Digory and his family moving to a “great
big house in the country” where things will “go on getting better and better”
for them all (p. 183).
The tragic story of Charn has turned, at least for now,
into the comic story of Narnia, and the book ends with a symbolically happy
ending. Digory’s mother, who has been seriously ill from the beginning of the
story, is restored to health—it was “like a miracle” (p. 182); his father
receives a large inheritance and can retire and come home from India for ever
and ever; Polly comes to visit Digory in the country nearly every holiday and
learns “to ride and swim and milk and bake and climb” (p. 184). In Narnia “the
Beasts lived in great peace and joy and neither the Witch nor any other enemy
came to trouble that pleasant land for many hundred years” (p. 184). It is
indeed an ending that could lead one to think “they were all going to live
happily ever after” (pp. 183-84). But the happy ending is not assured yet, for
this is only the beginning of the story [ß p. 112]
of Narnia. Much hardship, sorrow, and pain must occur before the truly happy
ending is reached, some twenty-five-hundred years later, at the conclusion of The Last Battle.6 [ß p. 113]