Devin Brown took some time to answer some questions about the upcoming film, and his Chronicles of Narnia book. Take a look at at the introduction to the book!
Devin Brown is English Professor at Asbury College, where among other things, he teaches a class on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. A recent review has called his book Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Baker Books, Sept. 2005) an “indispensable reference” for those who want to learn more about Lewis’s classic story.
NarniaFans.com: How do you think the movie will impact Lewis’s legacy?
Devin Brown: Certainly the movie is going to generate a tidal wave of positive interest in C. S. Lewis and his writing. Some of this interest will be new, some will be renewed as it will come from an audience who read the Narnia stories when they were younger.
Lewis, whether in his books or now on screen, has an incredible ability to bring together very different kinds of people, which is a tremendous gift, one that we need now more than ever. The Chronicles of Narnia, perhaps more so than any other set of books, unite very diverse groups of people who join together in their appreciation of them: believers and non-believers, the old and the young, the literary and the non-academic, and even (gasp!) very different kinds of Christians. And this aspect, along with many others, makes The Chronicles of Narnia worth reading and the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe worth seeing.
By the way, though it will be almost negligible, I expect the movie to also bring out a small amount of anti-Lewis sentiment. It will come from certain elements on the far right who criticize the Narnia stories because of their use of magic, and from certain elements on the far left who criticize the Narnia stories, not because they are Christian, but more, it seems to me, because Lewis himself was a Christian, a very serious, committed Christian.
NF: Will the movie attract new fans to Lewis’s other works?
Devin Brown: While some movie goers who enjoy the film won’t be interested enough to want to read more, many of them will, and for these people their interest can take them as far as they like. Because of the film, there will be a large number of people who will go on to read or to re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some will read a second or a third book from the series (Prince Caspian would be a good choice); others will read the entire seven volumes.
Going beyond the Narnia stories will be a step that, I think, will be taken mainly by older fans. For them the next logical place to go after Narnia would be to read Lewis’s space trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet. The film is also going to generate interest in Lewis’s life, and for these people there are two really good biographies available, one written by Green and Hooper (just revised) and the other by George Sayer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a jump in sales of the movie Shadowlands, which tells the story of Lewis’s marriage late in life to Joy Gresham.
For people who would like to read more about Narnia, there are a number of good books for them to choose from depending on exactly what their interest is. My book, Inside Narnia, goes through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from beginning to end looking closely at the text and adding interesting insights and details from Lewis’s life and other works.
NF: What were Lewis’s intentions for writing the work?
Devin Brown: So many people get confused about this issue of what Lewis’s intentions were that a few years after the story was published, Lewis himself decided to set the record straight. In a letter written to a fifth-grade class in Maryland, Lewis explained that he did not begin by trying to represent Jesus as he is in our world by a lion in Narnia. He made it clear that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not an allegory where everything is supposed to ‘represent’ something in this world. (Lewis did write an allegory; it’s called The Pilgrim’s Regress.)
When Lewis set out to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he set out to write a story, one that would communicate truth in a way not possible with a non-fiction format. He set out to write in a mythic way, because Lewis believed myth was “a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.”
NF: Were the characters in the book based on people in Lewis’s life?
Devin Brown: Lewis was a professor during World War II, he did live (somewhat) in the country, and like Professor Kirke in the story, Lewis was a bachelor at the time and did have school children come stay with him when London was being bombed by the Germans. So you could argue that Lewis put some of himself into this character.
At the same time, Professor Kirke also resembles the tutor Lewis privately studied with instead of attending the last years of high school. William Kirkpatrick, besides bearing a similar name to Professor Kirke in the story, shared a number of other similarities. He also had white hair and shaggy white mutton chops and was noted for his rigorous logic, a passion which gets echoed in the Professor’s statement, “Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
There were several other elements from Lewis’s life which he adopted for his own story-telling purposes and made his own. For example the Professor’s house and the surrounding countryside could be seen to be loosely based on Lewis’s memories of Little Lea, his boyhood home in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Interestingly, there were actually two wardrobes, one in Little Lea and one which Lewis owned as an adult, which may (or may not) have been in the back of his mind when he was picturing the one at the Professor’s.
NF: How faithful is the movie going to be to the original writing?
Devin Brown: To fully know how close the movie is to the book, we are going to have to wait until December 9th when the final version of the film comes out. In interviews, director Andrew Adamson has always said it was his intention to be faithful to the original. Even when he has added more material to flesh out some of the lesser developed characters, he has claimed that anything he added was “all there in the book.”
Comments from two other heavyweights add further support. In an interview Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson and one of the film’s co-producers, claimed, “Of course, the story is adhered to, so it is going to be terrific.” Michael Flaherty of Walden Media put it this way: “The film is the book, pure and simple. So any themes in the book are there in the film.”
Lewis fans, in addition to loving Narnia, also love the internet. Within 24 hours after the movie trailer was released, I read in a chat room that one viewer was “outraged” because the wardrobe in the movie has a dustcover on it. I doubt this is the kind of detail most people think about when the question of faithfulness comes up. Having said this, I think having Lucy pull this cover off actually improves on Lewis’s original scene from the book (gasp again!).
Sixteen-year-old Anna Popplewell, who plays Susan, has put a slightly different twist on the fidelity question. When asked about the way she interpreted her character, Popplewell said, “Not that it’s very different from C. S. Lewis’s Susan, but the way in which C. S. Lewis wrote the books means that the characters are open to a certain amount of interpretation, because he writes with this wonderful style and tone that encourages you to use your imagination and create characters for yourself slightly.”
A final difference worth noting is that fact that Lucy and Susan play a somewhat larger role in the fighting in the film than in the original. This may or may not be something that lovers of the books find bothersome. In a later story, The Horse and his Boy, Lewis has Lucy going off to war armed with a bow and a quiver full of arrows, dressed in a mail shirt and a helmet.
NF: How was Lewis’s writing able to be so powerful and memorable yet so simple?
Devin Brown: There are lots of ways that you could answer this question. Let me offer four.
First, Lewis spent many years writing poetry, a genre where every word, every comma, every line break is given great importance. A second reason Lewis was such a successful writer was because he was so widely read, one of the most widely read scholars of his day. Young writers today sometimes want to skip over this step. Thirdly, during the years when Lewis was turning out one great book after another, he was part of a writing group called the Inklings, a group which included his best friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a group which was a very important source of both encouragement and criticism. Finally, Lewis simply wrote a lot, a whole lot. And as he wrote, he revised. This is another step that young writers today sometimes want to skip over.
Of course, I could also mention Lewis’s sheer genius, his incredible imagination, or his nearly photographic memory. I could also mention his wonderful blend of making the imaginary world of Narnia seem familiar but not too familiar, strange but not too strange.
NF: How will Inside Narnia help readers and moviegoers better understand The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
Devin Brown: Perhaps the best way to describe my book is to use an analogy. Every July, my wife and I watch the Wimbledon tennis tournament on TV. Now I suppose if you searched hard enough, you could find someone who liked to watch the matches with the sound turned off, but most people find that the commentary provided by the experts adds to their understanding and enjoyment of what’s going on.
I hope that Inside Narnia provides that same kind of helpful observation and insight.
NF: How does Inside Narnia illuminate the rich meaning in the text?
Devin Brown: Let me reply to this with a sample passage from my book which shows the kind of thing I try to do. In chapter four, “Turkish Delight” I wrote this:
Lewis’s point here with the Turkish Delight is not that enjoying sweets is bad; in fact, his position is quite the contrary. Enjoyment of life’s pleasures in all their variety and plentitude will be an essential quality of proper Narnian life, as has been seen already in the tea that Mr. Tumnus provided for Lucy which included “a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake” (15). In both his fiction and non-fiction, Lewis suggests over and over that “to be fully human involves a certain stance toward the things of creation” (Meilaender 1998, 8), one of enjoyment but not slavish adoration.
NF: And finally, why is a literary analysis of this work so important?
Devin Brown: By way of response, here is another paragraph from my book, this one from the Preface:
My claim is this: although The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe can be simply read and enjoyed by children, it also can be read seriously by adults because it is a work rich with meaning. Some of this meaning will be discovered just by spending time with the text and paying close attention to what Lewis has written. Further meaning will be seen by drawing connections – connections not only to other passages within the novel but also to other works by Lewis, to the events of Lewis’s life, and to the work of other writers who influenced Lewis. The most significant of these other writers is J. R. R. Tolkien, who not only greatly influenced Lewis but also was greatly influenced by him. I contend that this twofold approach – first, a careful reading and then second, adding these kinds of connections – will result in greater enjoyment of an already enjoyable book.
–Devin Brown, author of Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Baker Books, Sept. 2005)
