1. In your book, you detail C. S. Lewis's long road to writing the Chronicles of Narnia. Was your road as long to write this book?

Peter Schakel: No, my road wasn't that long. Lewis's preparation to be a fantasy writer went back to his childhood. So many things that he did from then until he was fifty ended up contributing to his work on the Chronicles. On the other hand, I've been reading, teaching, and writing about the Chronicles for over thirty years. I first read them in the early '70s and began using them as reading material for my freshman comp courses at Hope College in 1974. My first essay on the Chronicles was published in The Church Herald in 1977 and my first book on the Chronicles, Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia, was published by Eerdmans in 1979. The Way into Narnia: A Reader's Guide is a new book, not a re-issue of Reading with the Heart. I've tried to pour into this new book as much as possible of what I've learned about the Chronicles in the past 30+ years, so in that sense maybe the road leading to the book has been a long one!

2. Just before his death, Lewis was planning to re-edit the books — what are some of the edits he hoped to make?

Peter Schakel: I'm not convinced he was actually planning to re-edit the books. He reportedly promised to re-edit the books, which isn't quite the same thing. Two days before Lewis's death in November 1963, Kaye Webb, the editor of Puffin Books, visited him and they talked about the Chronicles. At that point Puffin/Penguin had published paperback versions of three Chronicles (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1959, Prince Caspian in 1962, and The Magician's Nephew in 1963); The Last Battle was about to appear as a Puffin Book in January 1964. According to Webb, Lewis ‘promised to re-edit the books (connect the things that didn't tie up).’ When he talked to Webb, Lewis had been in poor health for several months and was able to do relatively little work: undertaking revisions of the Chronicles was beyond his powers at that point. But I doubt that revising the Chronicles was ever a high priority for him. There were ample opportunities to have done so while his health was still good. The logical time to revise would have been before they began to appear as Puffin Books, that is, in the late '50s, not after four of the Puffin Books were in print or being typeset. I think that once he finished work on the series, he left the Chronicles behind and moved on to other things, and was content to leave the books as they had first been published.

3. You are very passionate about the order in which the Chronicles should be read. What is the order and why is it important?

Peter Schakel: The key question is whether it is better to start with the book published first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or to start with the book that tells about the beginnings of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew. In a letter to a young boy, Lewis agreed with the boy that it might be better to begin with The Magician's Nephew, and the current edition of the Chronicles places it first in the series. If this had been really important to Lewis, he could have had the books renumbered in the Puffin edition, and in reprints of the clothbound editions; but he didn't do so — he left them in the order of original publication. I think that is the preferable order for reading them because it allows readers to respond to each book in the way Lewis conceived and constructed the stories. He built into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe careful, detailed introductions to his fantasy world and to characters in it; those introductions work best, imaginatively and emotionally, when that book is read first. He didn't include such introductions in The Magician's Nephew because he didn't need to; he conceived of and wrote it as a flashback to earlier events, and its imaginative constructions ‘work’ best when it is read after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The only reason to start with The Magician's Nephew is to encounter events in the order in which they happened, and as every storyteller knows that isn't necessarily the best way to relate a series of events.

4. J. R. R Tolkien, a friend of Lewis, wrote about the importance of fairy stories, like the Chronicles, that allow readers to escape real life for a time and regain perspective, yet why did he not care for the Chronicles?

Peter Schakel: Tolkien wrote in a letter about a year after Lewis's death, ‘It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C. S. L.'s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy.’ Perhaps two main reasons account for it. First, Lewis's fantasy work just didn't measure up to Tolkien's high standards of excellence. Tolkien was a painstakingly meticulous writer who went over his stories again and again, rethinking and revising, to get every detail perfect and consistent with every other detail. He took years to complete The Hobbit and a decade and a half to finish The Lord of the Rings, and he left a great deal of material unpublished when he died because it was not sufficiently polished. Lewis, in contrast, spent only a few months on most of the Chronicles and sent off each volume to the publisher upon completion, thus being unable to gain anything close to the depth, overall unity, and consistency of Tolkien's work. Second, the Chronicles were too eclectic for Tolkien's taste. Tolkien believed the Secondary World in a fantasy should be separate from the Primary World (our world), self-sufficient, and internally coherent. His own fantasy world illustrates this beautifully: he didn't mix sources or alter them to suit his purposes. Lewis's Narnia, in contrast, is not self-sufficient: it carries over things from our world (like British afternoon tea and Christmas). The Chronicles draw upon a variety of mythical sources — Greek, Roman, Norse, and Christian — and thus for Tolkien lack consistency. And Lewis freely adapted what he borrowed: fauns (or satyrs), for example, in classical mythology were fertility symbols, often portrayed with erect genitals and described as pursuing nymphs through the woods. Tolkien couldn't accept Lewis's readiness to include a faun in his story, but stripped of all its traditional traits and associations.

5. Many Christians today read the Chronicles as allegory. Was this Lewis's intent?

Peter Schakel: Lewis says it was not. In a letter to a fifth-grade class in Maryland he wrote, ‘You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books 'represents' something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress but I'm not writing in that way. I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’: I said, ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.’ The key phrase is ‘‘represents’ something in this world.’ Lewis believed, like Tolkien, that a fantasy world should be self-contained and self-sufficient; he just wasn't as purist, or skilled, as Tolkien in achieving such an independent world. To read the books as an allegory, one must repeatedly leave the Secondary World in order to identify parallels in the Primary World. In that case the Secondary World would not be separate and self-sufficient, but dependent upon our world for its full meaning. That, Lewis said, was not his intent. He was writing fairy tales that would cast a spell over their readers. But the spell lasts only while one remains in the fairy-tale world. Attempts to find biblical equivalents or explain events in terms of Christian theology break the spell and undermine the effect Lewis was seeking to achieve.

6. Did Lewis have a series in mind from the start or did it evolve into a series over time?

Peter Schakel: He says explicitly that he did not start out intending to write a series, but set out to write one book and others followed. In a letter to a young reader he said, ‘When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong.’

7. Do you think Lewis had any idea of the popularity and effect of the Chronicles through the years?

Peter Schakel: I think he was surprised at how well-received they were and how popular the books became during his lifetime. Since his death their popularity has increased enormously. I think he would have been amazed by the number of copies the series has sold and the degree of anticipation and excitement that is evident about the forthcoming movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

8. Why do you think the Chronicles remain so popular after all these years?

Peter Schakel: There are several reasons, in my opinion. One is that Lewis was a good storyteller. Lewis loved stories, and he was effective in creating adventures conveying not just suspense and surprise, but the qualities of suspensefulness and surprisingness that enable readers to continue to enjoy the books on second, third, and even tenth or twentieth readings. Another is the atmosphere of the fantasy world he created, the feeling it evokes in readers through its mixture of familiar and unfamiliar, its use of talking animals and beings that are only mythical in our world, its beauty and its medieval aura. All of that makes readers long to be in Narnia, and to return to Narnia again and again by rereading the books. Perhaps most important is the sense of mystery (or Mystery) the books convey. They create an impression that something more, something deeper, lies below the surface of the stories. Some people respond to the mystery by reading allegorically, drawing parallels between details in the stories and in the Bible. But for me that eliminates the Mystery by making things clear, tidy, and simple. Aslan is not a tame lion — he can't be contained within an allegorical box. In some unique and perhaps indescribable way the Chronicles bring readers into touch with ultimate, spiritual realities, which are never ‘clear and thin like water’ (to use Lewis's language in Till We Have Faces), but are always partially cloaked in mysteriousness. Readers come to love the Chronicles by experiencing this Mystery in them, and then reread the books to re-experience the Mystery and thus come closer to ultimate realities than most experiences in this life permit.

9. Which is your favorite book from the Chronicles?

Peter Schakel: My favorite is The Silver Chair, for a variety of reasons. I've reread it more often than I have any of the other Chronicles. It is a tightly constructed book, with a perfectly symmetrical structure. It has suspense, irony, humor, well-developed characters, and thematic depth without inviting allegorical-type readings. And it is the most imaginative of the Chronicles, the only one with an invented species (the Marshwiggles) and the one with the most spectacular secondary world, Bism, though we get only a glimpse of it deep below Underland which lies deep below the land of Narnia. It contains what I consider one of the best scenes in the Chronicles. The description of the Great Snow Dance is original, imaginative, and vivid, easy to visualize and enter; and it is rich with meaning and implication, especially in the way it images the order, harmony, and cooperativeness that characterize the Narnian world at its best and show the way people anywhere should live in community with each other.