Date: 28 September 2025
Location: Annie’s Lake House
The September meeting of the Happy Bookers was held on the 28th at the lake place of Annie and Pete. This is a wonderful place for any kind of gathering. We had a pretty good turnout, with Bob and Linda, Joyce, Lynn, Pat and Carol, Jay and Gina, Conan and Jaina, Claudia, and Linda and I. After the usual socializing everyone gathered for the book discussion. Almost everyone had finished the book.
This was a historical fiction novel and a biography of C. S. Lewis. Many of the characters were real as were many of the locations. There were some fictional characters, used to enhance the story telling, and there was one character that was both fictional and real.
The main subject was a book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by Clive Staples Lewis, known since he was a boy as Jack. The primary fictional characters were Margaret Louise Devonshire, known as Megs, and her younger brother, at 9 years old, George Henry Devonshire. George is in poor health because of a heart condition, and he reads and rereads The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe and becomes obsessed with learning where Narnia came from. Megs is attending Somerville University, a part of the Oxford University complex and Jack Lewis is teaching at Magdalen, also a part of the Oxford University complex. George pesters his sister to make contact with Jack and ask where Narnia came from. The year is 1950.
Jack and his older brother, Warren, known as Warnie, live in a property known as Kilns, which is a few miles from Oxford. Jack walks back and forth between his home and classes. Megs went to his house several times but did not have the courage to knock on the door and ask the question. While she was sitting outside the fenced property, she is discovered by Warnie and, after the reason she is here gushes out, she is invited inside and has her first of many conversations with Jack and Warnie at Kilns.
The way Jack tells Megs where Narnia came from is not straight forward. He answers by telling Megs a series of stories and insists that she not take any notes while he is telling the story but write up the story after she leaves, based on what she remembers. There is method in his madness, which gets us to what I believe is the main theme of the book. Jack told Megs something that really stuck with her and is a succinct statement of this theme: “Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning”. However, there was little or no discussion of this in our meeting.
In the beginning of this story, Megs is a student of mathematics and physics and sees no value in a children’s book that has captured George’s imagination. Jack sees this and repeats to her what he said in the front of his book: “Maybe someday you’ll be old enough to read fairy tales again”. George knows this but Megs is a late comer to realize the importance of phantasy and imagination. Through Jack’s telling stories of his youth, the good and the bad, and Megs retelling them to George, she begins to see the relationship between real life and a parallel imaginary one. She also begins to put together where Narnia and the characters come from. When George is provided with a sketch book and colored pencils and he begins to draw images brought to him by the stories Megs is telling him, he shows that he is a talented artist.
There is a love interest in the book. Megs meets Padraig, who studies literature at Magdalen, where Jack teaches, and Jack is Padraig’s tutor. When she is with him, she begins to have feelings she is having trouble understanding and coping with.
George is convinced that Dunluce Castle, in Northern Ireland, was turned into Cair Paravel, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Megs feels that showing him the castle ruins may be the only solid thing that she can give him, before he dies. Padraig is from Northern Ireland, knows the ruins, knows how to get there, and by happenstance, has his father’s car. They decide to make the leap and, with her parents not at home, leaves a note telling them of the plan and that they will be safe with Padraig’s relatives.
Other statements in the book about logic and imagination and why we need them both:
“It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”
“You can’t measure everything. And there is more than one way to understand our lives.”
“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is.”
About that person that was both fictional and real, Megs was the one who wrote the book … or did she?
I enjoyed the book.
— Reynolds
“Sometimes fairy stories may say best what needs to be said.”