It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? The syllables line up politely and bounce off the tongue in twos and threes. Besides, a little bit of alliteration is always a nice touch. I do find myself wondering, however, why C.S. Lewis picked these three pieces of plot to feature in the title. Was it just for the sake of sound or was he trying to suggest something about the nature of the story, as opposed to the plot?
It is a captivating story and one I would gladly fall into given the chance. Have you ever had that feeling about a book? It happens to me occasionally. Something about a story -- could be the characters, could be the setting, could be anything -- fills me with the most desperate longing to fall into the pages and live the fantasy. That was how I felt while reading this book. What I wouldn't give to be able to press my hand against the wood of that wardrobe door, with the surly English rain pounding away outside. The coats, I'm sure, are the softest you can imagine. Most of all, though, I want to feel the snow. I dearly want to experience that moment of realization when the wardrobe is no longer a wardrobe, when there's suddenly snow beneath my feet and a lamppost shining in the distance.
Believe it or not, walking through the back of a wardrobe is a decidedly Celtic way of beginning things. The are plenty of stories from the British Isles in which the hero crosses some barely tangible boundary and ends up walking into an otherworld. It's not a piece of furniture in the old stories (at least that I've read); they usually walk into a fog or a forest, or take a new turn at a crossroads. The point is, what was an ordinary place becomes magical for the right person at the right time. It's not surprising, given that Lewis was a British-born scholar. I suppose it interests me because he was also one of the greatest Christian theologians in recent history.
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