Happy eleventy-first, CS Lewis | Books | guardian.co.uk

CS Lewis. Photograph: Hulton Getty

Clive Staples Lewis, whose 111th birthday would have been celebrated on Sunday 29 November, can lay claim to being one of the key English intellectual authors of the mid-20th century. His work on philosophy, theology and English literature – in particular his studies of Milton and the poetry of the 16th-century – would have ensured his legacy, even if the views he expresses are unfashionable nowadays. But it's his fiction on which his claim truly rests, despite its being marginalised in discussions that tend to celebrate "serious" work for adults over innovative and influential books for children.

It was Lewis's time with the Oxford literary group the Inklings in the late 1930s that led to the extraordinary flowering of his literary talent in the creation of Narnia. The group famously also included in their number JRR Tolkien (whose hobbit Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his 111th – "eleventy-first" – birthday in The Lord of the Rings). Like Tolkien, Lewis has since suffered from the widespread dismissal of genre fiction; it's ironic that both authors were themselves complicit in creating a model of culture in which certain elite writers (Edmund Spenser, Milton, the Beowulf poet) were lauded above all others. The marginalisation of children's fiction and work including fantasy of any kind has led to a lack of serious consideration of their work.

This is a shame, and a missed opportunity. Lewis is in many ways the heir to Milton and Spenser, making serious work about religious themes and attempting to comprehend the universe through theological eyes. The Narnia stories certainly have elements of Christian allegory – it's impossible to deny the links between Aslan's resurrection and Christ's in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the parallels with Revelation in that most problematic of books, The Last Battle – yet they also incorporate moments from epic poetry, from mythology, and from idealised national history. They draw on astrology, travel writing and Celtic myths, and demonstrate a nascent anti-modernist appeal to nature and ecology; in their courtliness and love of bucolic nature, they also echo Spenser, of whose work Lewis was an expert student. It would be remiss, then, only to see Christian allegory at the heart of the series.

My favourites are those that move away from the suffocating middle-class Pevensie family and veer to strange adventure and hardship – the suffering of Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (1954), the swash-buckling and adventure of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), and the ambiguities of The Silver Chair (1953). They haven't been well served by the recent film franchise, which has chosen to concentrate on set-piece battle scenes (it's anyone's guess how they'll deal with the complex and at times deeply problematic narrative in The Last Battle). Lewis's febrile imagination and creation of a challenging, thoughtful and wide-ranging series paved the way for, for instance, Philip Pullman's extraordinary apocalypses in The Amber Spyglass (2000). Sadly, like Pullman, he will ever be dismissed as a writer who "only" managed to entertain, provoke and inspire children through his writing.

via guardian.co.uk

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