The Pevensies know all about jungle explorers and buccaneers and questing knights, and they can keep their heads in a crisis; they belong to a long tradition in British fiction of what the novelist and critic Colin Greenland calls “competent children.” I admired both their wherewithal and the delicacy of their scruples in a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which all four of the siblings have finally made it through the wardrobe and debate what to do next. They decide to put on the fur coats from the wardrobe before venturing on into the snowy woods, reasoning that because they’re not actually taking the coats out of the wardrobe, they won’t be stealing them.
The second Chronicle, Prince Caspian, of which a goodly portion is a wilderness adventure yarn, begins with the Pevensies magically yanked back into Narnia and stranded on a desert island. They are made castaways without the preliminary grief of a shipwreck, but as usual they’re not at a loss. I was especially impressed when Peter announced to his thirsty siblings, “If there are streams they’re bound to come down to the sea, and if we walk along the beach we’re bound to come to them.” I stowed that tip away for the future. As the oldest child in my own tribe of brothers and sisters, I thought this was exactly the sort of thing I ought to know in the event of an emergency — though how, exactly, we might be lucky enough to get shipwrecked together I didn’t consider. Likewise, Susan keeps the two younger children from abandoning their hot, heavy shoes after a wade in the surf because “we shall want them if we’re still here when night comes and it gets cold,” and Edmund suggests exploring the woods: “Hermits and Knights Errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest. They find roots and berries and things.”
Later in Prince Caspian, under the influence of the Narnian air, the Pevensies will begin to recall all of the skills — archery, sword fighting, the composition of a formal challenge to single combat — they acquired in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, during their time as kings and queens. At first, however, their points of reference are strictly literary. From Defoe and Stevenson, possibly Walter Scott, and any number of less exalted authors, they have acquired this idea of adventure, and they don’t consider themselves to be excluded from it simply because they’re children. Play has girded them for action, and initially Narnia itself has to be distinguished from a game of make-believe. “We can pretend we are Arctic explorers,” suggests Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the siblings set off through the woods. “This is going to be exciting enough without pretending,” Peter points out. Narnia is a place so thrilling that you can finally stop imagining you’re somewhere better. It is the place where adventures are transformed from something you read about in books to something you actually get to do.
Still, the Pevensies never stop reading adventure stories in our world just because they have experienced real, live adventures in Narnia. Practically speaking, reading the wrong books would leave them unprepared, making them the kind of children who wouldn’t know that you should kick off your shoes if you happen to fall into deep water with your clothes on, as Lucy does at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Chronicles are full of such advice, some of it very useful, even if in the first book Lewis archly parodied the mother-hen tone of other children’s authors by repeatedly warning of the dangers of shutting oneself up in a wardrobe. In The Silver Chair, we learn that midday is a better time to sneak out of a house than the night (you look less suspicious if you get caught) and that a good way to keep your companions from realizing you’re afraid is to say nothing at all; otherwise, your quavering voice will probably give you away.
The Chronicles, then, become the same kind of adventurers’ handbooks that stand their own characters in good stead. I can remember thinking that I’d gotten plenty of invaluable information from them, although strictly speaking most of it was only helpful if you also happened to be a character in an adventure story. Eustace Scrubb, in the early chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, manages to get himself turned into a dragon largely because the books he has read have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” Eustace’s prosaic taste in reading matter is of a piece with more serious personal failings, of course. His selfishness and sloth also lead him to the dragon’s lair, and only an ordeal will give him back his humanity.
For some adults, “Narnia” has become shorthand for an excessively, impossibly safe fantasyland. In the novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, a character out of the young heroine’s past telephones from a posh sanitarium she describes as “a Narnia kind of place,” by which she means an artificially sustained shelter that bears no resemblance to the real world. But however cozy the land of Narnia might look from the vantage of adulthood, now that memory has mingled it with nostalgia for childhood itself, it is not especially secure. The place seems to be under perpetual threat, and the course of action required to save it is invariably difficult, physically as well as psychically.
I, for one, didn’t experience the Chronicles as a retreat into an orderly playpen populated by sweet-talking animals and a kind, cuddly godhead. I was, of course, being sheltered by the traditional conventions of children’s stories, in which the good are rewarded, the evil defeated, and the ending is at least partially happy. But getting to that happy ending was no picnic; along with the child heroes, I vicariously slogged through trackless forests and snowy wastes, took up arms against monsters, and wrangled with menacing adults. I was stirred by how much was expected of the Pevensies. I wanted to be challenged in the same way. I wanted to be asked to give my all for a cause I could be sure was worthy. (And even at that tender age, I had an inkling that finding such a cause would be the hardest part of the quest.)
Not all of these sentiments are entirely admirable, but they do represent a mezzanine between the dependency of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood. They’re an imaginative projection, not (quite) a real wish, and Lewis takes some care to remind his readers of the distinction. As Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum enjoy a brief, easy stretch on the moors at the beginning of The Silver Chair, Jill announces that she might just enjoy adventures after all, to which Puddleglum responds, “We haven’t had any yet.” Later on, Jill will get the opportunity to observe that “when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it makes your fingers.” The sort of experience that makes for a good story is seldom a comfy one.
“Adventure,” then, is what might otherwise be called a hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis’s child characters have learned from reading “the right books.” This is surely the oldest of the many tasks that stories are called upon to perform. The honor that propels the warriors of The Iliad is bestowed in the form of stories, accounts of bravery first passed on by fellow soldiers and later recited by poets long after the hero himself is dead. When Shakespeare’s Henry V rallies his men before the Battle of Agincourt, he tells them that their courage on Saint Crispin’s Day will soon be legendary, offering them a kind of immortality: