C. S. Lewis: A Biography. A. Wilson N.

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       –PREFACE– THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

      A child pushed open the door of the wardrobe so as to hide in it. It was, however, no ordinary wardrobe. It was hung with fur coats. The child pressed on further through the dark recesses of the cupboard, pushing aside the soft folds of fur and discovering beyond them a new world. What crunched beneath the feet was not mothballs but snow. Lucy had discovered Narnia.

      Millions of readers throughout the world have been thrilled by this moment in C. S. Lewis’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and have gone on to read the six other stories which he wrote about that other world behind the wardrobe, the world of Narnia. The powerfulness of the stories derives in part from the immediacy of Lewis’s rough-hewn style, but more, surely, from the fact that this image touches something so very deep in so many people.

      ‘If everything on earth were rational,’ someone remarks in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, ‘nothing would happen.’ Nothing much would appear to have happened in the life of C. S. Lewis, who for his entire adult life was a scholar and teacher at Oxford and Cambridge in England. He did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people. His days were filled with writing and reading and domestic chores. And yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.

      This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed. The world has changed more radically in the last hundred years than in any previous era of history. Old values and certainties have been destroyed; religions have collapsed. In such a world, a voice which appears to come from the old world and to speak with the old sureness will have an obvious appeal. Lewis’s attempts to justify an old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy have made him an internationally celebrated and reassuring figure to those believers who have felt betrayed by the compromises of the mainline Christian churches. Lewis, to the amazement of those who knew him in his lifetime, has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers.