La Muselivre

     "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," published in 1950, was the first of the Narnia books. It now comes second in the order established by HarperCollins, Lewis's publisher, but it remains the most famous and is also the most essential volume in the series. It tells the story of the four Pevensie children - Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - who have been sent by their parents to stay with an elderly professor in the country as the blitz rages in wartime London. While exploring the professor's house, Lucy, the youngest, comes upon an old wardrobe in an empty room and, pushing aside some fur coats there and groping to the back, finds herself in a snowy wood at nighttime. This is Narnia, it turns out - a more or less medieval version of Paradise, populated by dwarfs, fauns and talking beasts, that is now under the wintry spell of an evil queen (the witch of the title), whose hold over the place is broken only by the arrival of a supersize lion named Aslan.
       Aslan is fierce but beautiful, stern but loving; his breath is perfumed like incense; and the mere sight of him is enough to set most creatures tingling. He is, in fact, nothing less than the Son of God, who dies and then comes back to life and through the seven volumes repeatedly tests but ultimately saves the children and leads them to eternal safety - all except Susan, that is, who will become too interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations."
        If the series is read in what is now the canonical order, Volumes I and VII, "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Last Battle," which are, respectively, a Creation story and a version of Armageddon, unmistakably spell out the theological dimensions of the story, but if you're not forewarned, it is perfectly possible to read most of the other volumes without a clue that anything more is going on than meets the eye. Actually, the books are better when read without the subtext. Aslan, for example, is much more thrilling and mysterious if you think of him as a superhero lion, not as Jesus in a Bert Lahr suit. And though central to the Narnia books, Aslan is not the real draw. Narnia itself is - or, rather, that wardrobe door opening onto a parallel universe, a magical place to which only children have access. This is what captivated my children about the story.