Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Read Free Book Online Page B

made me aware of nature — not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.” Gardens are man-made concentrations of the natural world, places where nature is trained to seem more itself than it is when left to its own devices. In a way, the artificiality of gardens is like the artificiality of stories, which take the components of life and arrange them into forms that intensify and order them, saturating them with meaning.
    In
The Magician’s Nephew,
the Chronicles’ Creation story, Aslan sends the boy Digory on a quest to a walled garden in the mountains far to the west of the newly made land of Narnia. Digory has been given the task of bringing back a single apple from a tree that grows there, and although Aslan hasn’t told him not to taste the apples himself, an inscription on the gate admonishes all visitors to “Take of my fruit for others” only. There are, of course, the obviously biblical connotations to this walled garden at the beginning of the world, with its semiforbidden fruit. But Digory is no Adam; he has committed his transgression
before
he arrives at the garden’s gate. He has already unwittingly introduced an evil into Narnia — the sorceress Jadis, who will one day become the White Witch in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Aslan sets him the task of fetching the apple as a form of expiation.
    Digory’s friend Polly has come along for most of the journey, and the two children travel on the back of Fledge, a talking winged horse. Polly and Fledge are stalwart companions, but at the entrance to the garden they instinctively hang back. “You never saw a place which was so obviously private,” the narrator explains. “You could see at a glance that it belonged to someone else.” It’s all right for Digory to go inside, but not the others. Like all of the most magical places in the Narnia books, the garden is very quiet; even the fountain at its center makes “only the faintest sound.” Jadis, however, has snuck in before Digory, and he spots her there, gorging herself on plundered apples. (I never forgot the “horrid stain” their juice leaves around her mouth, and sometimes I wonder if that’s why my most vivid recollection of Madame Bovary is of her mouth stained by the poison she swallows at the end of the novel.)
    Jadis does try to tempt Digory to steal one of these magical, life-giving apples for his gravely ill mother, but unlike Satan she botches the job. This scene touches on the central tragedy of Lewis’s childhood, the death of his own mother from cancer when he was not much older than Digory. The witch invokes Digory’s grief and fear not because she sympathizes (having killed her own sister in an imperial power struggle, presumably she’s immune to such feelings), but because she knows that his love for his mother is his greatest weakness. Digory hesitates to follow her suggestion for a few reasons: because he instinctively trusts Aslan, because he does not want to break his promise, and because he believes that his mother herself wouldn’t approve of him stealing and then lying about it.
    Jadis marshals persuasive counterarguments against all of these reservations, but what trips her up is her underestimation of Digory’s affection for Polly, of the power of friendship, a type of love Lewis considered underrated. Thinking that Digory is worried about getting caught, she tells him that he can easily cover his tracks by ditching Polly up in the mountains. In the pinch, Digory rebuffs her, not out of simple obedience to Aslan’s orders, but out of disgust at the “meanness” of the witch’s suggestion that he abandon his friend. Suddenly he perceives everything she’s said as “false and hollow.” The selfish, vainglorious evil she represents advocates more than just rebellion against God — she has subscribed to a radical disconnection from humanity. Symbolically, she has already demonstrated her disregard for