In The Beginning

Continuing with our Chronicles of Narnia series I have finished The Magician's Nephew.  I want to say this is one of my favorites...but I think I have said that about all of the books in this series up to this point.  This book tells us how Narnia was created and how the comings and goings between Narnia and our world all began.  Here is how the story goes.

Once upon a time there were two children living in pre-WWI London.  These children were named Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer and they were both stuck in London for the summer holidays.  Digory is staying with his Aunt Letty and Uncle Andrew while his father is in India because his mother is very sick and probably dying.  To amuse themselves they discovered a bit of a passageway in the attics that ran the whole length of the row houses that the children lived in.  One day while exploring this passage they stumbled into the attic of Digory's slightly mad Uncle Andrew.  Uncle Andrew had spent his life pursuing the study of magic and is now ready for some human experimentation.  There is a tray of rings in this mad man's attic study, each set a pair of rings, one with a yellow stone and one with a green stone.  Uncle Andrew tells Polly to 

take a yellow ring as a gift, but the moment she takes it, she vanishes.  Digory is understandably upset and starts to freak out a bit, but Uncle Andrew tells him there may be a way to get her back.  He tells Digory if he takes a green ring with him he can use the yellow ring to go wherever Polly is (Uncle Andrew does not know much about wherever it is he sends the children) and bring himself and Polly home.  Digory uses the yellow ring and finds himself in a vast, quiet, rich, living wood that he dubs The Wood Between Worlds (this may have contributed to my tree obsession).  The other feature of this place is the endless small pools scattered between the trees.  Polly and Digory discover that each of the pools is a different world and that the yellow ring brings them to the woods and the wearing the green ring while jumping into a pool will take you to another world. Digory and Polly decide to explore another pool and end up on the desolate world of Charn.  While in this world Digory awakens a powerful sorceress queen by the name of Jadis and inadvertently brings her back to London.  The queen wreaks havoc on London and is eventually taken back to the woods and then to another world by the children using the rings.  Along with the children and the queen, Uncle Andrew, a cabbie and his horse also get drawn into this other place.  At first they seem to have landed in an empty world, but they soon notice a huge lion singing.  As he sings a fresh new world comes into being.  Mountains and oceans form, animals appear, trees and grass grow, it is all pretty awesome.  The queen however is not enjoying herself very much and tries to hurt the lion by throwing the iron crossbar of a lamppost from London at the beast.  She does not succeed in slowing the lion down, but a living lamppost grows from the bar (the same one we see later in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)  The lion of course turns out to be Aslan and he has created Narnia and the surrounding 

countries, giving the gift of speech to certain animals and populating the world with creatures such as dryads and fauns and such.  Because Digory brought the queen to Narnia it is his job to fetch the means of protecting it.  Aslan turns the cabbie's horse into a winged horse and he flies the children to a far away garden which contains a tree of life.  While in the garden Digory encounters the queen who has eaten an apple and therefore now has eternal life.  She tries to tempt Digory to first eat an apple for himself, or at least bring one back to heal his dying mother.  As much as Digory wants to save his mother, he knows he has to keep his promise and bring the apple back to Aslan.  Aslan commands Digory to plant the apple.  In the meantime Uncle Andrew has had a rough time of it, not being able to accept what he is seeing, he is perpetually frightened.  Aslan has him sleep while he crowns the cabbie and his wife (who has been brought to Narnia by Aslan) the first King and Queen of Narnia.  These kind people rule the country justly and kindly and their children become the King's and Queens of the surrounding countries as well.  Aslan gives an apple to Digory and sends the children and Uncle Andrew back to London with the command to dispose of the rings that allowed them to travel between worlds.  Digory's mother recovers fully and they all move to the big house that again comes into play in LWW.  Digory plants the apple core and buries all the rings around the resulting tree.  Eventually the tree is blown over by a storm and is used by Digory to build a wardrobe.  Digory becomes Professor Kirke, and he and his family and Narnia live happily ever for the most part.

Another book in the series I absolutely love (are we sensing a pattern here).  I love a good prequel and this one is well thought out, tying it back to the other books in the series.  I think my favorite part is the Wood Between the Worlds, I love the endless possibilities it presents and love that even though they are not all explored in this story, that they are there for me to imagine.  I like that Narnia is not the only other acknowledged world in the universe, and that the stories and travel possibilities are potentially endless.  I enjoyed that no matter how epic the scope of this story gets (endless universes, world creating, words that can destroy all life), at the heart it is still about the simple relationships between everyday people.  The back and forth between the worlds is cool, I like that in this book (which is echoed a bit in LWW) a person has a bit of control over their comings and goings.  This book for me represents all the different ways a person can travel, learn, see, experience, and imagine, it is a story of possibilities, of variety, and of beginnings and endings.  This is one of those books that sets my own imagination turning, giving me a base on which to try and think on all the different varietions of worlds you could get to.  Obviously I love this book :-)  I am now going to go gaze into pools and see if I can find the Wood Between the Worlds