You know that feeling when you're looking for something in the back of a closet and half-expect to feel cold air and pine needles? That's the C.S. Lewis effect. It’s been decades, but The Chronicles of Narnia book series still has this weirdly specific grip on our collective imagination. It’s not just about talking lions or tea-drinking fauns, though honestly, Mr. Tumnus is a vibe. It’s about how Lewis managed to bake deep, sometimes uncomfortable philosophy into a story that a seven-year-old can read under the covers with a flashlight.
Most people think they know Narnia. They’ve seen the movies. They know about the wardrobe. But if you actually go back and read the text, it’s much weirder and more complex than the "Disneyfied" version suggests.
The Reading Order Drama Everyone Fights About
If you want to start a fight in a room full of librarians, just ask whether you should read the books in chronological order or publication order. It's a whole thing.
Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first. It came out in 1950. But later, he wrote The Magician’s Nephew, which is a prequel explaining how the world started. HarperCollins switched the numbering in the 90s to reflect the internal timeline of the world. Bad move. Basically, starting with the prequel is like watching the Star Wars prequels before the original trilogy. You lose the mystery. You don't need to know where the lamppost came from until you’ve already been enchanted by it.
The publication order—starting with the Pevensies entering the wardrobe—allows the reader to discover the world alongside the characters. You're supposed to be confused. You're supposed to wonder who Aslan is. When you start with The Magician’s Nephew, you’re basically reading a manual before playing the game. It’s less magical.
More Than Just Sunday School Allegories
Look, we have to talk about the "Christian" thing.
Yes, Lewis was a famous Christian apologist. Yes, Aslan is a very thin veil for Jesus. But calling The Chronicles of Narnia book series just a Sunday school lesson is kinda lazy. Lewis himself called it a "supposal." He wasn't trying to write an allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress. He was asking, "Suppose there was a world like Narnia, and the Son of God became a Lion there—what would happen?"
💡 You might also like: Is Steven Weber Leaving Chicago Med? What Really Happened With Dean Archer
It’s actually a mashup of everything Lewis loved. You’ve got Father Christmas showing up in the same book as a Greek Dryad. You’ve got Norse mythology mixed with medieval cosmology. It shouldn't work. It’s a mess of influences that would make a modern "world-building" expert have a heart attack. But it works because the tone is consistent. It’s that "Old England" sensibility meeting something ancient and wild.
The Problem of Susan
This is the part that usually trips people up. In the final book, The Last Battle, Susan Pevensie is famously excluded from the "Heaven" version of Narnia because she’s "no longer a friend of Narnia."
The text says she’s interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations."
A lot of modern readers, including authors like J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have criticized this as Lewis being sexist or hating the idea of girls growing up. But if you look at Lewis’s letters, it’s a bit more nuanced. He didn’t say Susan was gone forever or in "hell." He just said she was at a stage where she wanted to be grown up so badly that she turned her back on her childhood imagination. It’s a warning about cynicism, not a rant against makeup. Still, it’s a bitter pill for many fans to swallow. It feels like a betrayal of a character we watched grow from a scared kid to a queen.
The Weirdness of The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy
Most casual fans stop after Prince Caspian or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. They’re missing the best stuff.
The Horse and His Boy is basically a Western set in the Narnian equivalent of the Middle East. It doesn't even feature the Pevensies as main characters; they're just background royalty. It’s a story about a talking horse and a runaway boy, and it explores themes of identity and "belonging" that are surprisingly heavy.
📖 Related: Is Heroes and Villains Legit? What You Need to Know Before Buying
Then there’s The Silver Chair. No Pevensies at all. Instead, we get Eustace Scrubb (the bratty cousin who had a great redemption arc in Dawn Treader) and Jill Pole. They’re joined by Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle. Puddleglum is the best character Lewis ever wrote. He’s a professional pessimist. He’s the guy who thinks the sun is too bright and that we’re all probably going to get a cold. But when things get dark—literally, they're trapped underground by a witch—he’s the one who stays loyal.
"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
That quote is basically the core of Lewis's philosophy. It’s about choosing a "noble" path even when the world tells you it's an illusion.
Why the Books Outshine the Movies
The Walden Media movies from the 2000s were fine. They had great music and Tilda Swinton was terrifying. But they tried too hard to be Lord of the Rings.
Narnia isn't an epic war saga. Not really. It’s a series of fairytales. The books are short. You can finish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a couple of hours. Lewis’s prose is conversational and direct. He breaks the "fourth wall" all the time to talk to the reader. He’ll say things like, "And now I won't describe the feast, because there's nothing more boring than reading about what other people ate."
You can’t put that on screen easily. The movies added massive battle scenes that were barely a paragraph in the books. When you inflate Narnia to be a "blockbuster," you lose the intimacy. The books feel like a secret shared between you and the narrator. The movies feel like a product.
👉 See also: Jack Blocker American Idol Journey: What Most People Get Wrong
The Cultural Shadow of Narnia
It's impossible to count how many writers were shaped by this series.
- Lev Grossman wrote The Magicians as a direct, dark response to Narnia.
- Neil Gaiman has constantly referenced Lewis’s influence on his work.
- Katherine Paterson (who wrote Bridge to Terabithia) used Narnia as the escapist world for her characters.
Even the concept of a "portal fantasy"—where kids from our world fall into another—wasn't invented by Lewis, but he perfected the mechanics of it. He understood that the portal needs to be mundane. A wardrobe. A painting. A back door of a school. It makes you look at your own boring surroundings and wonder if there’s a seam in the wallpaper.
How to Approach the Series Today
If you’re coming back to The Chronicles of Narnia book series as an adult, or introducing it to a kid, here’s how to do it right.
Don't ignore the problematic parts. The depiction of the Calormenes in The Last Battle is definitely tinted by 1950s British prejudices. It’s okay to acknowledge that while still loving the world. Lewis was a man of his time, but his imagination often leaped ahead of his biases.
Steps for a better Narnia experience:
- Read in publication order. Seriously. Start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Save The Magician’s Nephew for sixth.
- Pay attention to the sensory details. Lewis was obsessed with food and weather. The "hot buttered toast" and the "smell of crisp snow" are what make the world feel real.
- Look for the "Shadowlands" theme. One of Lewis’s big ideas was that our world is just a "shadow" of the real thing. It pops up in every book.
- Don't skip the "boring" ones. The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy are often the ones people skip, but they contain the most interesting character growth.
Narnia isn't a perfect series. It's inconsistent, sometimes preachy, and occasionally confusing. But it has a soul. There is a reason we still talk about Aslan’s breath and the White Witch’s Turkish Delight. It captures the feeling of being a child and realizing for the first time that the world is much bigger, and much more dangerous, than you thought.
If you want to dive deeper, check out Lewis’s non-fiction like The Abolition of Man. You’ll start to see where the "laws" of Narnia actually came from. Or, just grab a copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and get lost at sea. Sometimes the simplest way into a world is just to start reading.
The real magic of the series isn't that the kids become kings and queens. It’s that they eventually have to come back to the "real" world and figure out how to be good people without the crowns. That’s the part we’re all still working on.