I have read through all the Chronicles of Narnia during two different phases of life: first as a child, and again as an adult. I thoroughly enjoyed them both times, but for very different reasons. As a child, I was drawn into the story, and imagined myself fighting the evil Witch, sailing to the edge of the world, or riding a talking horse across a vast steppe to a home that I cannot remember, but also cannot forget. As an adult, I am struck more deeply by the theological insights and editorial asides that slipped past my filter when I was younger. (For example, in Horse and His Boy, after an utterly exhausted Shasta is sent to run and warn the king of Archenland of an impending invasion, Lewis remarks “If you do one good deed, your reward is usually to be set to do another and harder and better one”–a theological redemption of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “No good deed goes unpunished.”) If George MacDonald was Lewis’ theological muse, Lewis himself is mine. Though I have read and loved almost all of his extant theological writings, it is in his ostensibly juvenile fiction that his theology shines through at its most vibrant and lucid.

However, my ability to suspend disbelief and lose myself in the narrative was substantially less than when I was younger. Why is this?

Contrasting the children’s books of CS Lewis with the works of his friend and fellow Inkling JRR Tolkien provides clearer perspective on what each was trying, and not trying, to do. The works of Tolkien and Lewis, in spite of their many obvious similarities (magical worlds, fantastical creatures, epic quests), are in some ways mirror images or even opposites of each other. Tolkien took a children’s genre — the fairy tale — and turned it into an adult masterpiece which sufficiently precocious children could also enjoy. Lewis took the greatest and weightiest truth — the Gospel — and turned it into a masterpiece of children’s literature which sufficiently humble adults could also enjoy and learn from. Tolkien set out to create a magical world that is utterly verisimilitudinous (fancy big word meaning “convincing because of the depth of its similarity to reality”). Tolkien’s world has its own geography, history, mythology, and languages. Each is so thoroughly developed that Tolkien nerds can (and do) learn them and discuss them in much the same way that they could the geography, history, mythology,  and languages of our own world.

By contrast, Lewis’s world is slapdash, with historical events and geography thrown together ad hoc, more to meet the immediate concerns of the narrative than out of any overarching thematic unity. It therefore does no good to ply this world with grown-up questions about history (“Why would the reign of four child-monarchs be remembered as a golden age for millennia afterwards? What exactly did they do that subsequent kings couldn’t? Are we really to expect that Rabadash the Ridiculous of the Calormen, who had 18 younger brothers all vying for his throne, would be allowed to accede to his father’s throne after he had very publicly been turned into a donkey?”), geography/physics (“How does gravity work in Narnia if the world is flat like a table? If the water is continually falling over the edge, how is it replenished?), or even language (most surprisingly of all, given Lewis’ penchant for language) : the only hint of a variation in dialect is that in the Horse and His Boy, the Narnians speak some variation of Ye Olde English (“You are naughty!” becomes “Thou art naught!” in the lips of Queen Susan). It all makes perfect sense in the moment of the narrative, but falls apart if you stop to think about it.

And yet, in Narnia as well as Middle Earth, there is verisimilitude, but it is a different kind. Appropriately for a man whose faith-journey started with George MacDonald’s “Phantastes”, Lewis’ writing exhibits the verisimilitude of a dream, not the waking world. In dreams, we know without questioning, and we feel more deeply than our tired adult minds allow us to. Dreams allow us to transcend the limits of our understanding; perhaps this is why everyone, from ancient shamans to modern psychotherapists, looks to dreams for a deeper understanding of reality than mere reason or intelligence will allow. For this reason, Narnia is able to capture our imaginations, not being mired in the cerebral coils of our rational processes. Tolkein provides a convincing portrait of how our world could be. Lewis provides a compelling picture of how the world is: what is really good, and true, and beautiful; what really matters; what we can hope for, even if we cannot see.