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‘The more doors you go out of, the farther you go in


In her book From Spare Oom to War Drobe, writer and lifelong Narnian Katherine Langrish explores all that she drew from C.S. Lewis’s books as a child, and reflects on the stories’ tapestries of allusions. In this extract, she discusses his fascination with old, rambling houses to: In this extract, she discusses how his fascination with old, rambling houses shapes the Narnia stories.


At the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan explains how he came to write the book. While engaged upon a different work about the spiritual life, Bunyan ‘fell into an allegory’ and saw how he could represent it as the physical journey of the Saints to Glory. Ideas began to multiply in his head ‘like sparks that from the coals of fire did fly’. In an essay on Bunyan, Lewis suggests that in this coalescence of adventurous quest and spiritual journey we can see Bunyan’s earnest Christianity coming together with his boyhood delight in old wives’ tales and chivalric romances: ‘The one fitted the other like a glove,’ he remarks. ‘Now, as never before, the whole man was engaged.’


Now, as never before, the whole man was engaged – Lewis might be talking about himself. The Narnia books are a fusion of his life-long love of literature, his Christian faith and the experiences of his own childhood: the latter most obviously in The Magician’s Nephew, where Digory’s wish to save his sick mother derives its poignancy from the death of Lewis’s own mother in his early boyhood. There is even more to it than this. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe the Professor’s big house, full of book-rooms and passages and unexpected places, sounds a lot like Lewis’s childhood home Leeborough House, or ‘Little Lea’, a big house on the outskirts of the city of Belfast to which his family moved in 1905 when he was only seven and before his mother fell ill. In Surprised By Joy he describes it with love:


The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.


The New House is a major character in Lewis’s stories. An imagery of labyrinthine houses, passages, secret rooms and doorways into Elsewhere recurs throughout the Narnia series. I will look at these in detail later, but here are some examples: the attics of The Magician’s Nephew, and the palace-city of Charn; the Professor’s house and the wardrobe itself in The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, which ‘contains’ the whole land of Narnia; there’s Aravis and her friend Lasaraleen losing themselves in the dangerous maze of the Old Palace of Tashbaan, and the Pevensie children exploring the ruins of Cair Paravel in Prince Caspian and discovering the treasure chamber; there’s Lucy tiptoing along the creepy, sunlit passages of the Magician’s House in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – the City Ruinous and the Dark Castle of Underland in The Silver Chair – and the stable in The Last Battle, arguably the last and greatest doorway of all.


Not coincidentally, I think the triumphal cry from the end of The Last Battle – ‘Farther up and farther in!’ – is consciously or unconsciously borrowed from George MacDonald’s adult fantasy novel Lilith (1895), another book set in a vast, rambling house with portals to other dimensions. In Chapter 3, the protagonist Mr Vane rushes after the figure of a mysterious Mr Raven, chasing him up many stairs into unfamiliar attic regions and a garret furnished only with a mirror. Vane stumbles through the frame into a wild, visionary landscape, and is told by Mr Raven that he has come into this strange land through a door.


‘I never saw any door,’ I persisted.


‘Little Lea’, Belfast. C.S. Lewis’s childhood home 18 Books for Keeps No.248 May 2021


‘Of course not!’ he returned; ‘all the doors you had yet seen – and you haven’t seen many – were doors in; here you came upon a door out. The strange thing to you,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘will be, that the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in.’





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