I picked up a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to read to my daughter a couple of years back. It blew me away. I immediately bought the rest of the set.

I knew little about CS Lewis at the time, although I was aware that he’d written books about his Christian faith.

I didn’t need to know anything about him. The Chronicles of Narnia are ideal children’s literature. Partly because they are so well-written. But mostly because the children are the heroes, yet not one-dimensionally: these aren’t saccharine characters. They become heroes by wrestling with conflicting impulses (some noble, some base) and by experiencing first-hand that one’s choices have consequences in the greater world.

Somewhere (I thought it was here but offhand can’t find the exact reference right now) I read that Lewis conceived of Narnia by asking a question something like this: what if the Christ myth had embodied itself in a different land, a fantasy land?

I know some people dismiss the Chronicles for that very reason; they fancy the books are “only” Christian allegory.

But they aren’t. They are myth, in the highest sense of the word.

What any writer wants is to create (or would that be “tap into?”) myth; what any decent writer understands is that true myth is felt.

The Narnia books give us a felt myth.

Movie version works, too.