I think this installment in the Chronicles of Narnia is the funnest to read of all the books.
It’s a prequel to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. Polly Plummer lives in a row house in London when Digory Kirke comes to live next door. Soon they are exploring the attic and a passageway that lets them drop into the upper floor of any of the houses in their row. And they do, except not into the house they expect. Rather than an empty one several doors down, they accidentally drop into the forbidden study of Digory’s uncle Andrew Ketterley, with whom Digory stays. Rather than let them go, the pathetically maniacal Uncle Andrew forces a ring onto Polly and she promptly disappears. It’s all part of his experiments in magic, and he doesn’t want to experiment on himself. Rather than strand Polly in another world, Digory puts return rings into his pocket and grabs another ring to take him out of the world himself.
The two children find themselves in an in between place. They are in a forest with pools of water spaces around them. Some experimenting and they figure out if they put on a yellow ring and jump into a pool, it takes them to a world. A green ring returns them up from the pool back to the in between place. Rather than return right away, they decide to see what kind of worlds they can explore. The first is eerily quiet. There’s a large deserted palace. Until Digory rings a bell that is. After that a statue-like Queen comes to life. Rather than submit to an uprising of the people, the Queen uttered a magical word that killed everyone and destroyed the world, then put herself into a frozen state until someone released her. That person being Digory. She’s not very nice. The children try to escape, but by grabbing Polly’s hair, the witch manages to tag along to the in between place when the children grab the green rings.
Various and sundry adventures later, the children along with many other tag-alongs show up in the world that will become Narnia as Aslan is bringing it to life.
Unlike a couple other of the Narnia books, this one doesn’t have quite the overbearing moralizing. It’s pretty much a ripoff of the Christian creation story, even to the point of having an apple tree that gives eternal youth and infinite knowledge. No serpent though. It’s fun because it’s got a madcap zaniness that isn’t really present in the other books. All of the series have the fish out of water element, but in this case he really explores the concept. In particular, the Witch Queen of Charn gets to spend some time in Earth as we might have known it at the turn of the century, and Uncle Andrew gets to meet the newly formed world of Narnia. Both with hilarious results. Plus there are other bits of fun like watching a lantern grow in the forest when a metal bar is dropped in the ground. With the magic of a new young world, pretty much anything placed in the ground can grow.
Title: The magician’s nephew
Author: C. S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis)
Cover artist: Roger Hane
Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series: The chronicles of Narnia ; 6
Imprint / publisher: Collier / Macmillan
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 186 p.
Publication date: 1970
ISBN-10: 0-02-044230-0
