#Narniathon21: Tales of Narnia

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By way of extending our Narniathon for those who felt bereft after The Last Battle I suggested readers seek out Katherine Langrish‘s excellent study From Spare Oom to War Drobe, subtitled ‘Travels in Narnia with my Nine Year-Old Self.’

As you might guess, this then is “a personal reading of the Seven Chronicles, blending literary criticism with memories of childhood passion for the world of Narnia.” It discusses each of the instalments in chronological order and compares responses in childhood with those we might have as an adult.

As before I give readers the option – should they so choose, Mission: Impossible style – of answering three questions in the comments below, but feel free to add your thoughts on aspects you’d rather talk about.

All in the cards

The Cartomancer.
by Anne Spillard.
Pan Books 1989 (1987).

It’s odd how, re-reading this twenty-five years later, I find that I recall neither characters nor plot from that first reading other than that the narrator tells people’s fortunes from an ordinary deck of cards.

That and the fact that there are a few obscure Arthurian references thrown in.

This second rather more careful reading reveals there is a little more subtlety than at first appears from a cursory perusal, making it more satisfactory yet, curiously, curiouser.

St Anne in the Wood, Bristol

Saint Anna. Wood engraving by Dalziel (1853) after W O Will Wellcome. St Anne spins while the Virgin Mary is visited by Gabriel.

Preliminary notes on a medieval shrine and holy well [1986]

Who these days, when ancient pilgrimages to Canterbury and Walsingham retain their renown, remembers St Anne in the Wood? And yet, even in the 19th century, ‘this spot is but little known even to many long resident in the neighbouring city’.¹ The ‘neighbouring city’ is Bristol which, by the 20th century, has swallowed up the village of Brislington in which lay this once famous medieval chapel and well.

The site is in a bend of the River Avon, bounded to the south by the Bristol-to-Bath railway planned by Brunel, and until 1957 travellers from North of the river crossed over by ferry. A stream has carved itself a rocky valley in what is now known as St Anne’s Park before emptying itself into the Avon.

Nowadays [1986] the situation is rather sad. The railings around the park are dilapidated, the stone steps down the sides of the valley overgrown. Dutch elm disease has ravaged 800 trees in what is marked on maps as ‘Nature’s Garden’, and bikes have mashed up the ground in St Anne’s Wood. In late summer 1985 some of the once grassy banks had been re-seeded but rubbish littered the stream.

Riches to Rags

A Little Princess:
Being the whole story of Sara Crewe.
by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Vintage Classics, 2012 (1905).

Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they might do at night, an odd-looking girl sat in a cab with her father, and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

Chapter 1, ‘Sara’

With this atmospheric opening paragraph Frances Hodgson Burnett set her take on the Cinderella story in  the grimy capital of England’s capital, far away from India climes where the ‘odd-looking’ girl had spent her first seven years.

True to the story’s fairytale roots the author will introduce figures equivalent to the wicked stepmother, the ugly sisters and the fairy godmother, though the last will morph into a faint echo of the male lead in Beauty and the Beast.

But A Little Princess isn’t just a rags-to-riches story – even if for a while it appears to be mostly riches-to-rags – for Burnett clothed the skeleton plot with gorgeous details and imbued the ancient archetype with psychological insights. In so doing she created a classic that has scarcely dated, despite being more than a century old.

Susan of Narnia: #Narniathon21

Illustration by Pauline Baynes

“Oh, Susan! She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

“Grown-up, indeed. I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

Jill and Polly ¹

In successive books of the Narniad Susan Pevensie, Queen of Narnia, also known as Susan the Gentle and Susan of the Horn, slides from grace to such a degree that she is no longer considered a “friend of Narnia”. The consequence of this is that in The Last Battle she is not in the fatal train crash that ensures her siblings go “further up and further in” to enter the “true” Narnia.

In many ways this seems dreadfully unfair on the poor girl – not only is she not to know the joy of entering Aslan’s Country with the others, but she is to be left without a family. And this for many readers feels like a betrayal.

What is the reason Lewis denies Susan her reward at this stage, the culmination of his grand design? Do the persistent rumours, that he planned to write a further volume entitled Susan of Narnia, have any foundation in fact? Or is there a practical reason why she’s not on the roll call of the Friends of Narnia?

A necessary commodity

© C A Lovegrove

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Preface by Hermione Lee,
introduction by David Nicholls, 2013.
4th Estate 2018 (1978).

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

John Milton, ‘Areopagitica’

It is 1959, and Florence Green is minded to open a bookshop in Hardborough, a town on the Suffolk coast. She finds vacant premises for sale, a building of some antiquity but unloved and neglected, and proceeds to buy it with financial assistance from the bank.

However, as the adage goes, though you can lead a horse to water you can’t make it drink, and Hardborough proves resistant to her well-meant plans. In particular Mrs Gamart, who reigns among the town’s upper echelons, decides she wants the premises for an arts centre.

Florence, a war widow who wants to give people the benefit of the doubt, at first seems amenable to giving up ownership; but when she realises Mrs Gamart is trying to preempt what is Florence’s own decision she digs her heels in and sets up shop. Has she misjudged Mrs Gamart’s steely determination, along with where the town’s sympathies may lie?

In a bind

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com

Madame Maigret’s Friend
by Georges Simenon.
L’amie de Mme Maigret
translated by Howard Curtis.
Penguin Classics, 2016 (1950).

An anonymous message informs the Paris police that a certain Flemish bookbinder has been burning a corpse in his stove, and the accused man’s lawyer seems to have a vendetta against Inspector Maigret.

Meanwhile, the dinner Mme Maigret has prepared for her husband is burning to a crisp when a woman literally leaves her holding the baby – or rather toddler – in a park. Who is this friend of Mme Maigret, and what possible connection, if there is one, has this strange unexplained incident with Maigret’s case?

As ever the inspector’s investigations, with his team based at the Palais de Justice on the Quai des Orfèvres, take him all over Paris north of the Seine. For a while Maigret appears to be in a bind, but his steady piecing together of hints and clues from interviews and observations may yet yield solutions.

Illusory questing beast

Albrecht Durer

Codex
by Lev Grossman.
Arrow 2005 (2004).

‘Codex’ is the name applied to a medieval book, one which was composed of sheets stitched together, in contradistinction to ancient scrolls or wax tablets on which texts were written in the classical period.

The novel Codex is about just such a tome, one which appears to be both unique and therefore much sought after.

Around this book Grossman weaves a modern thriller which, given that the times move on apace, may not be as modern as Grossman might have hoped it to be.

The hurtle of hell

St Paul’s Cathedral on the night of VE Day, 8th May 1945 (Daily Herald)

The Girls of Slender Means
by Muriel Spark.
Penguin 2013 (1963).

“The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?”

—Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘

With flashbacks to 1945, specifically the period between VE Day and VJ Day, Muriel Spark’s novella has one character – JaneWright, who’s now a news columnist – responding to news of the fate of another by contacting some of her former acquaintances for their reactions.

What starts off as a mildly askant look at a group of mostly young things in a women’s hostel slowly assumes a bleaker hue as we start to get their measure, but we never lose sight of Spark’s razor-sharp asides which, while encouraging us to sympathise with the principal actors, allow those of us dissimilar in age to these girls to view them with a degree of detached compassion.

One might ask how Spark achieves a sense of detachment. It’s essentially to do with the term ‘slender means’ referring here not just to their relative impecunity – this was a time of general rationing, after all – but also (another reflection of the times) to their limited horizons, goals, and even imaginations.

Twilight: #Narniathon21

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For many readers The Last Battle in C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is either a triumph or a letdown. I’ve already given some of my thoughts on its successes and failures in a review, and intend later to look at Lewis’s vision of the world of Narnia as depicted in the previous six chronicles, before going on to that final Narnia which is further up and further in.

Lewis as usual draws his imagery and his themes from several sources: the Bible – of course – but also from myth and medieval cosmology, from history and archaeology, and from his favourite reading in childhood as well as academia.

In this post I intend discussing the aspects that naturally interest me, leaving those points that interest readers with a theological bent for them to expound on. In a future post, along with the several Narnias I’d like to examine the issue of the Pevensie child who never returned to Narnia and hopefully come to some conclusions regarding Susan; but now I want to consider Puzzle, Tash, and the end of Narnia.

The hunter and the hunted

Libreria Marciana, Venice CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia Commons

Those Who Walk Away
by Patricia Highsmith,
introduction by Joan Schenkar.
Virago Modern Classics, 2014 (1967).

His room was simple and clean and had a view through its tall windows of Giudecca across the water and, directly below, of the small canal that went along one side of the pensione.

Chapter 2

In the late 1990s we stayed a night in Venice at the Pensione Seguso, possibly where Patricia Highsmith may have stayed late in 1966 while researching this novel. So it was with the shock of recognition that the view the fictional Ray Garrett has from his room in the very same pensione is almost precisely that which we had some thirty years later.

And why is Ray staying here? He is trying to meet up with his father-in-law, Ed Coleman, to explain how he feels about the suicide in Mallorca of his wife Peggy, Ed’s daughter, for which the older man blames Ray with an intense resentment that borders on and then tips over into psychopathy.

The problem is that Ed has already made an attempt on Ray’s life when they’d met in Rome: what will Ray’s reception be like in Venice when he turns up alive and physically unharmed?