The Magician's Nephew

On January 4th, I realized that there were over two months of winter left. With the holidays behind me and heaps of cold, dreary weather to look forward to, I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. "Always winter, never Christmas" doesn't sound so bad, I thought to myself. And I immediately became curious if it were possible to ascribe a grief narrative to the White Witch. She is, after all, the last surviving person of her entire world.

Before I knew it, I had re-read the entirety of The Magician's Nephew. Which, no, isn't the first book in the series according to most. But it has Jadis' backstory, which is what I was interested in.

It turns out that there isn't a lot of nuance to Jadis, which isn't the most surprising thing in the world. Narnia is both a children's book and a religious allegory. Sympathetic, nuanced villains don't really fit. Jadis destroyed her world because she was evil. She killed her own sister with the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb and everyone else was just collateral damage. There's no looking back, only forward to the next world to conquer.

But I enjoyed my re-read. It's been years, probably decades, since I actually read the Narnia books. And in that time I've read far more words about Narnia than were ever penned by CS Lewis. So I'm planning to keep going. And then I might just roll straight in to The Magicians, which I'm sure will read differently now that I'm farther away from my early twenties. But reading them back to back feels like an interesting project, and one that I'll actually have the wherewithal to tackle this year.

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