Finding Narnia
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Young Warnie and Jack at home in Little Lea in Jessica Lanan’s beautiful, evocative artwork for Finding Narnia
Did you know that CS Lewis had a brother? If you’ve only casually read the Chronicles of Narnia, or even dipped into his other fiction or his apologetics or even his academic work, you may not have known. But pick up any biography of Lewis and the importance of his big brother, Warren “Warnie” Lewis, becomes clear immediately. Just a few weeks ago I was reading Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming CS Lewis, which examines young Jack Lewis’s relationship with Warnie in great detail, and, coincidentally, I discovered a lovely new picture book called Finding Narnia: The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother.
The book begins in Jack and Warnie’s home, Little Lea, outside Belfast. This house, which features so prominently in the adult Jack’s memoir Surprised by Joy, shelters the boys and nurtures their imaginations, providing them with books and stories and a caring family. Jack, the younger of the two, loves high adventure and the dragon-slaying heroes of Norse myth. Warnie, who we see gazing out the window at the cargo ships in the harbor, loves trains and ships and other machinery. They create their own worlds—a land of talking animals for Jack, an elaborately imagined version of colonial India complete with railroads and timetables for Warnie—and together they imagine Boxen, their own fantasy playworld that combines the best parts of both.
Darkness intrudes when their mother dies and the boys leave for school, a section of Jack and Warnie’s story that the author, Caroline McAlister, mostly elides—understandably, I think. We see Jack and Warnie separated by schooling and by war, with both serving in France during the First World War in one of the book’s most melancholy but touching illustrations, and after the war by their professions, which keep Jack in his college at Oxford and Warnie in the army, manning his typewriter in colonial outposts as far from the British Isles as China.
But even here, their love for each other and their childhood collaborations return. In another striking and evocative image, the adult Jack, now a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, his shoulders hunched against the cold and his arms loaded with papers and books, glances into the quad to see, in the snow, a faun beside a lamppost.
The brothers reunite and their work together returns. We see Jack at his desk, writing longhand, and Warnie at his, typing, hunt-and-peck, to turn his brother’s scrawls into legible typescripts. From this teamwork we see elements from the earlier parts of their lives grow and interweave—the wardrobe from their childhood attic, the children hosted at Lewis’s home during the Second World War, the rainy day in which a child must explore or grow bored—and in the book’s final pages, thanks to Warnie’s friendship and partnership, we follow Jack’s imagination through the wardrobe and into Narnia.
When I discovered Finding Narnia (at a nice new bookstore on St Simons Island), I was struck by how much it reminded me of another wonderful picture book I reviewed here when this blog was young—John Ronald’s Dragons, about the childhood and youth of JRR Tolkien. There’s a good reason for that, one I could have known if I had bothered looking at the dust jacket flaps: the books are by the same author, and the care and gentleness with which McAlister tells both stories are complemented by the pictures, which are carefully researched and beautifully imagined. Finding Narnia’s pictures are by Jessica Lanan, and they’re marvelous.
My one very minor complaint about the book is the title—Finding Narnia, as a title, is kind of generic, and easily confused with a few other books with similar titles. It doesn’t grab you or given any indication of what its story is about the way John Ronald’s Dragons does. It’s up to the subtitle—The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother—to carry that weight, and I just wish there were a more direct way to bring the focus of the story into the title (and maybe Warnie’s name, too). But, again, that’s a minor complaint, and if you’ve read this far I hope you already know what a good book this is.
Through clear, simple text and lovely pictures, Finding Narnia presents the story of Jack and Warnie as two brothers who, though quite different, with different talents and interests that led them into dramatically different careers, enjoyed a lifelong loyalty and friendship that complemented and enriched them both. In a word, Finding Narnia is about brotherhood, and this is a story I hope a lot of young brothers will enjoy and learn from.
